Conal rose on his spidery legs, larger than ever now—and fully recovered.
He skittered toward the cruiser and easily raised it over his head with his two forward legs.
Ysabella stopped. “Sisters! Now!”
Jill dropped her ersatz drum and helped the weakened Brinke back to the street to rejoin the formation.
Conal hurled the car. Brinke raised one hand as she called, “Faitu yor’na!”
The car fell straight down in front of the witches, less than a foot away.
With a croaking cry, Conal willed giant crab claws to grow from his forelimbs. He snapped them in a threatening display, then gripped the fringe tree planted in the median and hoisted it like a mere weed. Mud rained down on Hudson from the disconnected root system, yet the chief deputy lay dismayingly still.
Conal scrabbled forward with the tree aloft, snarling at the coven.
The witches took steps back, until Ysabella stopped them. “Do not retreat!” she called. “Stand strong!”
Ysabella swung her arms around in wide arcs and held out her fingers, as if to catch the wooden missile in her hands. She shouted, “Bhurashtu!” in a voice starting to show signs of wear.
The women gasped but did not fall back. The tree stopped to hang in midair just inches from Ysabella.
Conal clambered toward them, his pincers still growing out from his forelimbs, inches to the microsecond.
“Faitu nooma!” The tree rocketed a hundred feet up. “Brinke! The shiel—”
Brinke was already in motion, dashing to the crone’s side with hands clasped and wedged toward Conal. “Tru-ah Ka-nah!”
Hitting Brinke’s invisible wall, Conal slowed but did not stop. His massive pincers darted toward the witches, testing Brinke’s strength.
Ysabella dropped to one knee and brought her hands down with a snarl of her own.
The fringe tree crashed atop Conal, smashing him down to half his height.
He screeched like the damned—and pushed himself up, raising the tree.
“No, Conal.” Ysabella barely murmured the sentence.
Like automatons programmed in perfect sync, the sorceresses pointed at the monstrosity, shouting no particular words.
Lightning as bright and green as a sun-soaked grass field arced onto and into Conal from all directions. For the second time in less than a millennium, Conal had time to realize that his lust for power would go unfulfilled.
The sustained strikes pierced and pounded Conal O’Herlihy into a million sparking, flaming flying pieces that scattered for hundreds of yards.
Weeping, Stella lifted Candace into her arms, as if trying to regress her to girlhood from the hyper-speed maturation she had been forced to do.
Pedro covered his head as he ran to check on Hudson. He smacked the heavy clods of mud off his friend and turned him over. “Dude, you better n—”
“Don’t!” Hudson’s eyes popped open in terror as he grabbed Pedro’s jacket. “Don’t mouth-to-mouth me!”
* * * *
DeShaun and Stuart hit the Community Center doors together, knocking them open with a steely echo.
“Dad!” DeShaun cried, seeing his father on the ground and Pedro kneeling to hold him.
“He’s okay, dude!” Pedro said.
“Candace!?” Stuart strained to see into the center of the witches’ circle—and there, in Stella’s arms, was the girl with the familiar streak of white hair; it was flowing amid the wet and messy chestnut locks of his best and only girl.
Still loosely under the command of Pockets, DeShaun and Stuart’s army of pint-sized pumpkin smashers continued to patrol the corners for any ghoulish gourds that had escaped their wrath. For a wild, sugar-fueled mob, the children had been surprisingly thorough.
Unlike the previous year’s mushroom zombies, though, the killer squash did not smoke and melt away to black goo but remained as a litter of broken shell, scattered seed and, more disturbingly, teeth, eyes and brain matter.
The triumphant children essayed prolonged disgusted expressions of “eeeww” and the like, but they also seemed eager to play in the bloody mess like it was a fresh mudhole, daring glances at the grown-ups to see if they were going to be shushed or made to sit.
“It’s Halloween. Let them have their gross fun,” was the collective opinion.
McGlazer finally felt like he could see the light at the end of his pain tunnel.
He’d be in bed for a few weeks, maybe even need his cane again for a while. He would probably come to curse cold days. But he’d live.
Kerwin came to sit beside him, just being someone’s old friend for the first time in years. Maybe for the first time in his entire life.
McGlazer patted Kerwin on the shoulder and raised his weary head to smile—his blood freezing at the sight of a shadow writhing behind the sound system’s massive amplifier.
“Get back!” he cried, yanking Kerwin away. The speaker fell face forward with an echoing thud, as the last remaining pumpkin demon, a beachball-sized specimen with gleaming yellow eyes, crawled out into the open, and hiss-screeched at the two men.
In the dark, something about its shape seemed, even for a demon squash, wrong…
Pockets’s soldiers stomped toward it with shrill battle calls, raising their fitness-themed weapons.
The thing didn’t run from them, though, but toward the double doors. Just before a barrage of small weight plates could smash onto it, the thing leaped into the air and spread two gigantic leaves from its back.
Pushing off with its tendrils, it began flapping these bizarre wings furiously. All watched in horror as it gained height with unnatural speed.
“Stop that goddamn thing!” McGlazer heard himself say, as all his pains flared worse than ever from pure, sudden, hopeless stress.
The pumpkin-bat, seeing the witches below, veered east to avoid lightning spells.
Chapter 40
Where the Sky Ends
Dennis and Bernard, having made their way down the cemetery hill, stopped for a moment to examine the wreckage of the hearse and the gate.
“Metal as hell,” said Dennis.
But Bernard was frowning toward the sky. “What the…?”
Dennis followed his gaze to the odd black spot that crossed through and around patches of fog and smoke. “Moving fast, whatev—”
A jagged green bolt missed the thing by a few yards. Voices from Main Street were faint, but the context was clear. The witches were trying to bring it down.
“The rifle, bro!”
“Huh?” Bernard just held it out and stared at it.
Dennis pushed it up to his shoulder. “Shoot it down, man!”
Bernard peered through the scope—into utter blackness.
“Judas Effing Priest…” Dennis clicked a button on its side, and a green-black sky came into Bernard’s view, framing the flying object.
“Holy rock and rolly!” exclaimed Bernard. “It’s a—”
“Just shoot it before it gets out of range, dude!”
Bernard tracked it for a second or so, then pulled the trigger. Dennis winced at seeing the rifle barrel jump.
“It’s too small!”
“The wings are bigger,” Dennis said. “Just time their rise and fall.”
As Bernard followed the thing, it grew smaller and fainter behind the fog.
Dennis wanted to take the rifle away, yet knew he would never line up the shot in time.
Bernard fired, re-chambered and fired again, almost immediately.
Dennis felt a rush of relief—the tiny black shape abruptly began to fall.
Even at this distance, the satisfying sound of its thunk onto some hard roof reached their relieved ears.
“My hero!” Dennis hugged Bernard so hard it drew a squeak from the chemist.
* * * *
The television news was locked on the incoming reports from Ember Hollow, how the world was being forced to reconsider all notions of the supernatural, all because of three strange autumns in one sprawling farm town.
His name rose occasionally, in tones of admiration. But he wasn’t interested.
He switched it off and thought of all the strangeness of Ember Hollow and his life, gratified in a way that he had been a part of it, hoping with every fiber that he never would be again. He saw the Gideon Bible lying on the nightstand next to his bed and picked it up. Too zonked to try to read, he just held it and considered the tactile sensation of its weight, its smooth leather binding, its delicate pages.
A light knock, the nurse’s kind face. “Want some visitors, Reverend?”
McGlazer smiled.
He put the bible back on the nightstand as Stella entered, appearing as exhausted as he felt. “Can’t believe I get to be first.” She eased the door shut. “So many people are here to see you.”
“What about the family?”
“Candace is helping the witches with a cure ritual for Yoshida. Emera is with Wanda, sound asleep.”
“And Bernard?”
“He said…you might have something to tell me?”
McGlazer sat forward and immediately fell back. “Ouch.”
Stella held his hand. “You can say it perfectly fine lying flat on your back, Abe.”
“So I can.” He shot a glance at the bible. “I want you to take over the church.”
“As…minister?”
“If you want the job. You would be great.”
“What about you?”
“Mostly a mystery to be solved later, I think,” he told her. “Maybe I’ll be your assistant for a while, scheduling appointments and making coffee.”
She smiled, but her expression was a little bit sad.
“Maybe I can convince one of our fellow survivors to partner with me on a café and bookstore, or some such quaint idea.”
Stella pulled up a chair and leaned close. “I get the idea you were thinking about this before tonight.”
“This town needs Saint Saturn’s, and Saint Saturn’s needs you.”
She waited, knowing he would elaborate in his own time.
“I’m not…thinking about God right now. I realize that lack of faith doesn’t mean lack of character. I’m going to…keep searching—not necessarily for ‘God.’ Just for whatever might be behind the curtain.” He raised his gaze toward the ceiling. “If anything.”
The hospital’s lobby areas had quickly become crowded, as members of the press and the civil services learned of the latest chapter in the ongoing Ember Hollow horror show.
DeShaun and Stuart stayed in Hudson’s room and watched some of the news coverage with the volume low. When he’d been admitted, Hudson had insisted he didn’t need treatment; he wasn’t that banged up. Staff firmly placed him in a wheelchair and made him take a handful of acetaminophen. “You are suffering from exhaustion,” said the doctor. “You’re not going anywhere but one of our beds. No visitors for ten to twelve hours.”
Epilogue
Pedro hadn’t really known Maisie well enough to reasonably predict if they could form a lasting couple. If so, it would be the first in Pedro’s troubled life.
Certainly, he did not get to know her well enough to weep with such violence, to mourn her like a lifelong lover.
He wiped his tears with the Sex Pistols T-shirt she had somehow cleansed of bloodstains. He had washed it in a way that was ceremonial, in the sink of Hudson’s bathroom, with a white candle burning, hung it to dry and folded it as close to the way she had that he could remember.
He scooped out a small rectangle in the fresh reddish mound over her grave and placed the shirt there, then covered it over. “Hey, I’ll keep an eye out for it—and you—in the…whatever”—Pedro scanned the grave-dotted hills that surrounded Saint Saturn Unitarian Church, soon to be Saint Saturn Interdenominational Temple—“next place.”
He stood and stared at the mound, narrowing his eyes as though he could see the petite smiling beauty’s light beaming through the earth. Perhaps some part of him could. “I guess you ain’t got no choice but to have that picnic with me now, huh?”
He found himself strangely wishing for her delicate hand to burst through the earth and clutch his leg. “Jeez, what’s wrong with me?” he chuckled.
Nothing changed.
“Whatever it is, I get the feeling you’d be okay with it.”
Pedro kept himself from crying and walked back down to the street, where Dennis and Jill waited, both weeping on his behalf.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Michael and Maureen Crosby are inspiring to me for reasons no one, not even I, can fully understand. I can’t help but believe they’ve accrued fantastic karma.
Too many of the people who have, in their own way, inspired or encouraged me are no longer with us.
Joel Mullinax, my first school chum ever, fell to his own demons, leaving me with memories of his fierce sense of loyalty and acceptance.
Johnny Huskey, a superior martial artist and human being, was also a talented imaginer, something he kept mostly a secret. I was among the lucky few who were privy to that side of him.
Finally, my father Lewis W. Green, was a brilliant writer and journalist. In ways plain and strange, he was as fine a teacher as any student could want.
Don’t miss all the fun of the Haunted Hollow Chronicles!
In case you missed the beginning, keep reading to enjoy an excerpt from Book One, Red Harvest.
All the Haunted Hollow Chronicles novels are available from Lyrical Press, an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com.
Chapter 1
Ember Hollow, North Carolina
October 29
“Helen, a few weeks ago, the empty field you see behind me was home to roughly twenty-five thousand Autumn’s Pride pumpkins,” pronounced local reporter Kit Calloway. “They’re all gone now, on their way to markets and homes around the country. But a good many are staying right here in Ember Hollow, where they will be carved and decorated for the town’s annual Pumpkin Parade on Halloween night.”
Viewers were treated to stock footage of parades past, with costumed bystanders hooting and clapping while spooky floats crawled by with more elaborately costumed performers aboard.
“For, you see, come Halloween, Ember Hollow becomes Haunted Hollow, Halloween Capital of the World.” The handsome reporter gave a charming raise of his eyebrow. “And this year promises a little something extra, as the town’s very own homegrown rock band The Chalk Outlines takes the stage above The Grand Illusion cinemas to play a full set. Now the band has taken the local club scene by storm, but this year, with their performance at the theater, they hope to garner the attention of a special guest.”
“Kerwin Stuyvesant—Talent Manager” read the screen caption under a man in his fifties who wore a bright green suit and funny-looking little hexagonal spectacles. He smiled into the camera with huge teeth that made the tiny glasses seem like toys. “The kids have been rehearsing and hitting the gigs hard, and if I didn’t believe they had what it takes to make it to the top, I wouldn’t have signed on to manage ’em!”
A quick snip of the trio of Halloween-themed punk rockers, awash in strobe-lit fog at some dive club, flashed on the screen before a cut back to Calloway, who concluded the report with a graceful nod. “Helen, as always, I’ll be right here in Ember Hollow covering the parade and enjoying the company of these great citizens! Back to you!”
* * * *
Thirteen-year-old Stuart Barcroft woke to the sound of his mother’s low humming as she breezed past his door to the room of his older brother, De
nnis. He hopped from his bed and hurried into his clothes, eavesdropping on the conversation between mother and brother.
Ma—Elaine Barcroft to you and me—exclaimed, “Oh my word, Dennis! Is that going to wash out of my sheets?”
And he knew Dennis had blood on him again.
As Stuart headed toward Dennis’s room, he saw a sheet of sunlight spill onto the hallway floor from the doorway—Ma opening the curtains on his poor brother.
“That makeup is a mess,” she huffed, but was not really that sore about it.
At the doorway, Stuart looked his big brother over to make sure he was okay. Dennis, taking a long drink of water from the glass he kept at his bedside, was still in performance attire. His hair, already way too long on top, was disheveled and sticky. Surely exhausted, he hadn’t changed out of his stage attire of torn black denim pants and a hospital scrub top spritzed with the offending stage blood, over a black long-sleeve T-shirt with bones printed on the arms.
“Oh yeah, Ma. I checked the package. Washes right out.” Despite his exhaustion, he was as patient and respectful with his mother as always.
Spotting Stuart, Dennis raised the glass. “Hey, dude.”
“Why didn’t you clean it off?” groused their mother. “And you’re still dressed!”
When Dennis had moved back in (at the ripe old age of twenty-six) it was into a room his mother had kept essentially as he had left it when he moved out at eighteen. The walls remained plastered with punk posters: Misfits, Black Flag, The Addicts, Sex Pistols, Order of the Fly, Nekromantix, and, of course, Elvis.
“Our gig went over,” Dennis explained in a scratchy voice. “Had three encores.”
“You’re sure that’s all?” probed Ma.
“Ma!” Stuart called. When she spun with a quick squeal, Dennis and Stuart broke out laughing. Stuart was just trying to get her off Dennis’s case. Giving her a start was a bonus.
Ma was a good sport about it. “Just how many scares can I expect this Halloween?”
Dennis gave her a tight hug and a kiss on top of her head. “All of ’em.”
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