by Jerry eBooks
They mumbled thank-yous and hurried down off the porch. Before they reached the next house, they’d flipped their masks up and were cramming the rich, chocolatey brownies into their mouths.
* * * *
She went up and lay next to her sleeping husband. There would be no sleep for her.
She listened to the laughter and the sheer joyful shouting of the littlest ones as they went door to door. Nothing was more innocent than the sound of a child laughing.
She thought of Danielle and started to cry.
* * * *
The ambulance—shrill siren, raucous red lights—raced into the neighbourhood twenty-three minutes later.
Ronnie Haskins was the first to die. He did not even make it to the hospital. At the hospital, Bob Nolan got the full treatment. They pumped his stomach and gave him an intravenous injection of sodium nitrite and sodium thiosulfate. But it did no good. He died nineteen minutes after reaching the hospital.
* * * *
Elly did not answer any of the ringings of the bell or knockings on the door. Two were enough. Two settled the score.
But later there was a knock that sounded different—not a trick-or- treat knock—and she slipped away from her sleeping husband and went to the window and looked down.
A police car stood at the curb.
She thought of waking David, of telling him what she’d done. But, no, he deserved his sleep.
There would be plenty of time to tell him when he had to call the family lawyer and when the press came around to covet her with its cameras and put her—weepy and crazed-looking—on the six-o’clock news.
When Miles Camden awoke to find himself, not in his bed as he’d expected, but rather sequestered in a pine box, his first reaction was not panic, or terror, but amusement. In truth, he had wondered somewhat idly over the past few months when his enemies would finally gather up the courage to make their move against him, and when they did, just how they would go about it. He had, however, anticipated something less dramatic. Poison, perhaps, or a pillow over his slumbering face, or a well-placed hand between the shoulder blades that would send his wheelchair-bound form tumbling down the winding marble staircase of his estate.
So, to wake in a coffin, while certainly an unpleasant and inconvenient development, certainly came as no surprise, no more than living under heavy gray clouds for a year only to wake to find it raining. But it was also somewhat disappointing. Whoever his enemy might be, they had chosen to imprison him rather than kill him outright, and not only did this speak to their cowardice and slow-mindedness, it testified to their complete lack of understanding of Camden’s character. For he had already been imprisoned for years in his own fortress, either in the plush vault of his chambers—the heart of the mansion’s opulent body—or in his mobile chair, limited to tired exploration of familiar rooms. He had grown accustomed to his comfort being tenuous by virtue of its dependence on others, his movements facilitated by sour-looking servants, his survival reliant on the whims of strangers.
And while he applauded his captor for being kind enough to provide him with a source of illumination, to Camden, it was a further sign of weakness, a gap in the kind of armor essential for any man to appear without mercy. If Camden put himself in the captor’s—no doubt cheap—shoes (for he had already assumed the motive to be monetary), he would have ensured his captive awake in disorienting darkness. Then again, he had to concede that the lantern, placed in the far left corner of the box by his foot, provided complications of its own. For one, the paraffin produced threads of oily smoke that had already filled the coffin, making it difficult to draw a breath that didn’t taste like a coal-miner’s sleeve. In addition to polluting the air, it would also be using it to stay alight, and without knowing whether or not the coffin had been buried, Camden couldn’t predict the volume of oxygen he had to share. If he had indeed been interred (which would suggest a smidge more nerve than his captor’s yellow disposition had heretofore suggested), then Camden was glad that the lantern was enclosed at the top, for its flame might have burned through the lid of the coffin, and the old man was not confident that his ninety pound frame could withstand the sudden introduction of hundreds of pounds of clay into the pine enclosure.
Then, as if to put to rest the question of burial, an involuntary rattling cough was answered by a groan from the lid above him and he heard, rather than saw or felt, a trickle of earth between his bare feet.
He gave a small shake of his head. Brazen. And something tickled his cheek. His confinement allowed little more than a shrug of recoil, and he quickly turned his head to the right, expecting to see a spider previously only glimpsed on the covers of pulp horror magazines, an arachnid black as night and the size of a man’s fist, raised forelegs presaging attack and a slow, painful death.
What Camden saw was not a spider, or any such terrible beast, but a cord, a mere string still shuddering with the vibrations of his own fear, and he allowed himself a grin, both at his own foolishness—exacerbated by his circumstances and the fact that when last he had seen his house, it had been festooned with ghoulish decorations appropriate for the Halloween season—and at what he deemed yet another faux pas on the part of his captor.
If this century was to be known by anything other than its fair share of atrocities and diseases, then surely the gullibility of the weak-minded would qualify as a footnote. Inflamed by the cholera epidemic, and Camden supposed, aided in no small part by Poe and his miserable, hysterical and depressing tales of premature burial, the idea of “safety boxes” had crept into the frail, common consciousness like a burglar into a shoddily built house. Fear of disease had been subverted and exacerbated by a fear, not of death, but of the preposterous notion of a kind of un-death, which left you wide awake and clawing at your coffin lid long after your mourners had departed the graveyard. To pacify such fears, coffin-makers had begun to include their boxes with cords that led up through the earth to a little brass bell, so that one could, upon awakening to find oneself a product of erroneous interment, yank on the cord, and alert the graveyard watchmen to the problem. That his captor had included such an inane device and put him in the ground on Hallow’s Eve, told him that his enemy was equally trapped by superstition. That they had buried him in such a cheap coffin, ill-befitting a man of his reputation, spoke to their bitterness.
Camden chuckled. The lamplight fluttered, causing ghoulish shadows to spring at him in the impermanent gloom. More dirt trickled into the box from the unseen fissure somewhere near the bottom. Camden coughed and lowered his hands, turned them palms down by his sides in imitation of repose. He sighed and watched the caul of smoke whip itself away from him. His eyes were beginning to sting. He closed them, content to pass a few moments pondering his captivity and those responsible.
Envy and enmity were directly proportional to the amount of wealth he had accrued in his four decades as a textile magnate. Interest earned was another enemy gained. Some of these enemies he knew as competitors, political opponents, or even former friends with whom he had severed ties on the eve of the realization that the return on their friendship did not equal the investment. He was not given to charity, particularly for those whose need stemmed from an unwillingness, rather than any inherent inability, to help themselves. Such people better suited the classification of the mythical un-dead, forever ringing a bell in the hope of being saved, when above ground they had seldom tried to save themselves. These people repulsed him, and deserved their fate, whereas Camden believed his current predicament was merely yet another in a long line of unfair side-effects of his having worked obsessively to safeguard his own.
It was not easy to select the most likely culprit from the list of them. A lifetime of success, of ruthless double-dealings, buyouts and layoffs, had made him distinctly unpopular among those with whom he’d dealt. His peers, on the other hand, those similarly well-versed in the methodology of good, unsentimental business, considered him a threat to their own empires, though in truth he had never kept
more than a half-eye on them, and this mainly so he could be sure they kept to their own domains.
He withdrew the lighthouse beam of his focus to closer shores. When he considered it, he realized there wasn’t one among the staff at Camden House that he could credit with enough brass or ingenuity to propagate such a stunt. Even though he had a policy which required them to taste in his presence the food they served him, it was a medieval ritual intended more to remind them that they did not, and never would, have his trust, than out of any real fear of mutiny. They were loyal, he knew, and even if they did not care for him or enjoy working for him, the compensation they received for doing so was more than fair, and better than they would get elsewhere given their qualifications. And if they left, as a few had done before, Camden’s name was well enough known that they would have to travel far to find a house that would employ his hand-me-downs without worrying that it would cause offense. Which of course, it would not, but such fears were what kept employees where they were, and spared Camden the chore of having to replace them.
With the staff dismissed from consideration—the irony being that if it should resolve that someone in his employ had indeed possessed the salt to engineer such a bold action against him, they would undoubtedly have earned his respect—and with all of his kin deceased, he turned his mind to romantic associations. And here, the list was a short one. Of the three women he had married and subsequently rejected, primarily because love for success seldom left ample room for love of any other kind, at least in the eyes of his brides, a contention he had never debated due to insufficient evidence to the contrary, only one was still alive. He still felt affection for Rebecca, and only Rebecca, not least because their dissolution had been the least combative and ugly, but because, although he wasn’t sure he was capable of love, at least not in the doe-eyed, illogical and deranged way dictated by those fool romantics, he felt he had come closest with her. Initially, he had courted her purely as a way to undermine a business rival—her father, but quickly and unexpectedly, he had developed a fondness for her. Unlike his other wives, Veronica and Bronwyn, whose hearts had been won only by the dual suitors of financial security and societal prestige, Rebecca had invested her love in him, believing that somewhere behind the callous armor, Camden was a good and loving man. She contended that he had worn this suit for so long that it had grown rusty and familiar, had fused itself to his skin. She was confident that she could find a way to penetrate that armor. A decade of trying wore her down, but my God, how he had loved to watch her try. How he had enjoyed listening to her speak, and sing, and read aloud from Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Auden and Austen in a library that seemed only to exist because she had breathed something of herself into the room. How he had struggled to suppress a smile at the sight of her frustration when she vied for command of the kitchen with the dour old cook and the resulting meal was unsatisfactory.
In the end, showing every line and wrinkle of her ten years of trying to reach him, she had touched his face and told him that she was leaving. “You’re a candle with the potential to outshine all others,” she’d said. “But your wick is made of wire. No matter how close I bring the match, it refuses to accept the fire.” When Camden asked her from which of her favorite poets she had taken this quote, she had simply smiled at him and brought his hand to her breast to hear the origin of the verse for himself. The she was gone, with a promise that she would not be looking to him for support of any kind, which she had kept, and promises to stay in touch, which she had not. And he missed her.
He opened his eyes, and told himself that the single stray tear that trickled down his cheek was due to the smoke, which had grown thicker and more noxious.
Such cruelty, as his captor would undoubtedly consider their amateurish attempt at extortion, was so far beneath Rebecca that he chastised himself for even thinking it, however fleetingly. Of the other ill-advised unions, both the result of promises made on nights in which his mind had been clouded by brandy, opiates, and the attention of women whose sexual prowess would have humbled him into acquiescence no matter what their demands, he considered only one a viable candidate for such unpleasantness: Bronwyn. Veronica had simply lacked the intelligence necessary to engineer such a loathsome revenge.
At the thought of Bronwyn, he felt his shoulders tense, the wood beneath him chafing the skin of his clenched fists. Bronwyn Connors, or as he had learned to refer to her when forced to refer to her at all: “That Welsh-Irish Mongrel Whore”. He had met her in a tavern in London, England while on vacation with his first wife Veronica. While his wife had been laid up in their hotel room, sickened by what she referred to as a “putrid sewer-stench fog”, he had let himself be seduced by Bronwyn, even though it was never far from his mind that in all likelihood she would expect payment for any time they spent together. As it turned out, she was not a prostitute at all, at least not in any official sense, and after their passionate and somewhat perverse night in her cheap, rented room, he had drunkenly confessed to her not only his dissatisfaction with his current wife, who with each passing day seemed to be abandoning the traits that had initially drawn him to her (traits closer to Bronwyn’s at the time, if he was honest) in favor of affectations that neither suited nor complimented her, but also his address. And she had followed him back to Nottingham, renting herself another cheap room above a bar in which she had found work, not twenty miles from his home. Camden had a devil of a time hiding her correspondence from Veronica, an easier time excusing his frequent trips to San Francisco to perpetuate the illicit affair.
As the affair graduated from exotic to routine, the demands began, and Camden suddenly found himself struggling to balance a shrewish, depressed wife, who began to resent his absences, and a calculating, occasionally violent mistress, who wanted him to marry her, and threatened to expose him as a philanderer if he refused. So he agreed, ousting Veronica on the grounds that she had ceased to interest him. For her part, she seemed relieved to be freed of him, even more so when her terms of alimony were accepted.
Bronwyn moved in two weeks after Veronica’s departure, and immediately Camden knew he had made a mistake, not in forcing Veronica out, but in letting Bronwyn in. For as boring as he had grown to find his first wife, she had at least kept to herself and her only outbursts seemed to originate from her desire to have the life he’d given her but with someone else in his place. Bronwyn, on the other hand, was moody almost incessantly and frequently lashed out at him for violations both real and imagined. Despite the facts surrounding her usurpation of Veronica’s position in Camden House, she constantly questioned his comings and goings, and went through his correspondence with all the diligence of Sherlock Holmes. And when she found confirmation of her suspicions, as she was eventually bound to, her reaction was not with a sharp tongue, but a loaded gun, and her response to his admission of guilt was to lodge a bullet in his spine, robbing him of the use of his legs.
Bronwyn’s arrest and subsequent imprisonment, however, meant the situation in which he now found himself could not be her doing, unless she had agents abroad who were committed to doing her bidding. And he found it hard to believe she could inspire loyalty in anyone from behind bars.
In the weeks after the news broke, Veronica had resurfaced, offering to take care of his every need, if he’d only take her back. He had refused, and when next he heard from her, it was a letter announcing her intent to take her own life if she didn’t hear from him within the month. That was on April 8th. Preoccupied with his own suffering, and unwilling to let it coerce him into repeating past mistakes, he ignored the letter.
On March 1st, Veronica was found hanging naked by her neck from the rafters of a bedroom she’d shared with a known criminal and opium addict, Gerald Higgins. Higgins was never heard from again, but reliable word said he had fled and was now somewhere in Canada, fixing shoes for a living.
Which left him with no one, for none of the women had borne him any children who might have grown into ill-fitting shoes of vengeance, no
r had he wished for them.
The air was getting thin. Camden raised a hand and scratched his fingernails against the lid of the coffin. He was not yet afraid, for he didn’t fear death, nor did he believe that was the motive behind his internment. A murderer does not leave a bell with which to signal the watchmen or the lantern to enable detection of the rope. This was a message, the first stage of a plan that would end in a demand for exorbitant sums of money unless he wanted to be buried for good.
Another scratch against the wood, and Camden froze.
He looked at his fingers, hovering just beneath the coffin lid. He had been in the process of lowering his hand when he’d heard the sound.
On the other side of the wood, on the outside, something scratched again.
A small rain of dirt hissed through the fissure above his feet.
For a moment he considered that the sound might possibly be that of a shovel cleaving through the dirt as his antagonist dug him up. Which would mean Camden’s refusal to ring the bell provided for him had had the desired effect. They had buried him, given him the lamp and the rope, and hoped he would awaken in panic. They would have expected the bell to start clang-clanging away moments after he regained consciousness. His silence would have confused them, and doubt would have followed. After all, there was any number of ways he could die down here: suffocation or intoxication by the lantern smoke; he could be burned alive if the lantern tipped over; or, if he suffered from claustrophobia, he might wake up only to die of fright, his heart exploding from the panic. And if they wanted his money, they couldn’t take that chance.
Another scratch, and the image of the shovel evaporated. The sound was too quick, too furtive to be that of anything but a scavenger, this one motivated by no riches other than the succulent bounty lying hidden beyond the walls of the human body.
A rat.