A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Chet Williamson

  “Four dead, two wounded. Five dead if you include Oldfield.”

  “How many hostages got out alive?” Don wasn’t sure why he was asking that. He just wanted to find out as much as he could, he supposed. You never knew what might turn out to be important.

  “Five,” Leibowitz replied. “I wasn’t there, but from what I hear they were in pretty bad shape mentally. One woman insisted she saw a … I don’t know what to call it—a monster, I guess. A thing with red eyes and big teeth. I’m not poking fun at her. If I’d spent eighteen hours in there with Oldfield, I would have been in never-never land too.”

  Don said anyone might be a little crazy after a thing like that. Leibowitz asked him why he was interested in Kesselring, and Don explained what had happened.

  Leibowitz said, “So Kesselring’s up there in Michigan now, looking for some guy killed some people in California. You think he’s a groupie, likes mass murderers?”

  “Maybe he’s a vigilante.”

  Leibowitz was quiet a moment, considering that. “Doesn’t make sense as far as what was happening here. I mean, we had the place surrounded, snipers on the rooftops, SWAT guys ready to storm the place if necessary. What could one guy do?”

  “If he somehow managed to get inside, he could have tried to take the guy out.”

  “Maybe. If that’s the case, then Kesselring’s only slightly less crazy than the people he’s after.”

  They talked for another few moments, but nothing they said shed any light on Kesselring’s apparent preoccupation with mass murderers. When Don hung up, he saw that Corrine was staring at him expectantly. He could understand her curiosity. Life on Ice Island was dull. Some stranger trying to disembowel himself with a kitchen knife was exciting. And when he turns out to be a mass murderer, it’s downright thrilling. You toss in Kesselring, and you’ve got enough to keep the island buzzing for months.

  When Don repeated what Leibowitz had told him, Corrine said, “This is really something.” She seemed awed.

  “Dwyer was crazy,” Don said. “He was running, and he came here.”

  “And killed himself,” Corrine reminded him.

  “Sometimes that’s what crazy people do. They kill themselves.”

  “Like … that?”

  “As I said, he was crazy.”

  “What about Kesselring?”

  “I don’t know why Kesselring’s here—although I know it’s not the reason he gave me.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Don stood up. “I’m going over to the Superior Motel and see if Kesselring’s checked in yet.” He got his jacket from the coat tree, slipped it on.

  “Don.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Be careful, okay? All this is just sort of weird. It makes me uncomfortable.”

  It made Don a little uncomfortable too, but he didn’t mention that to Corrine.

  2

  The Superior Motel was a collection of white cabins on the east edge of town. Coming in from the mainland, you drove north a short distance from the ferry landing (or the ice bridge), and then the road curved to the east, becoming Island Avenue. The motel was on your left, the first thing you came to.

  Don stopped at the office. Patsy Brock, who ran the place with her husband, Stan, told him Kesselring had checked in but she’d seen him go out. Don decided that there were only two places Kesselring could have gone, the Icicle Lounge or the Islander Cafe—no one ever said the people here had a lot of imagination when it came to picking names.

  The cafe was on the south side of Island Avenue, next to Ace Hardware. The island had two restaurants, the Islander and a more expensive place that catered to tourists. The Michigander Inn served walleye pike prepared in various ways, steak, lobster, and desserts made with local wild raspberries. It was open only during the warm weather, when the ferry was running. Local people ate at the Islander, which specialized in meals that could be served with instant mashed potatoes.

  The decor was as unpretentious as the menu. Booths with black vinyl seats, tables with speckled Formica tops. On the walls were paintings of local scenes—lighthouses, Lake Superior, snowscapes. Don stood just inside the door, looking over the handful of customers. Kesselring was not among them.

  “Hey, it’s the chief of police,” Nancy Nowaski said, stepping up beside Don. Nancy was the waitress. She was plump and middle-aged, and she wore her blonde hair in a mass of tight little curls.

  “I may be the chief,” Don said, “but I’m also the school crossing guard and the meter maid. Oh yeah, and I have to wash the police car too.”

  “Who you looking for?” Nancy asked.

  “Guy named Kesselring. Gray hair, looks like a retired drill sergeant.”

  “The guy who got stuck here when they declared the Split?”

  “That’s the one. You seen him?”

  “Yeah. He was here just a few minutes ago. Ate the special. Hamburger steak and mashed potatoes with carrots and peas.”

  “Where’d he go, do you know?”

  “Didn’t say, but he’s got to be staying over at the Superior Motel unless he knows somebody on the island.”

  Don nodded. “You talk to him?”

  “Yeah. And you know what he asked me? He wanted to know if anybody had been acting strangely. I asked him what he meant by strangely, and he said different, weird. I asked him in what way different or weird, and he said in any way at all.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “That if anybody had been acting weird I hadn’t noticed. Why was he asking me that?”

  “I wish I knew,” Don said.

  3

  Sensing the life around it, it moved past the wooden houses of Ice Island. It was invisible to those living in the houses, for their sensory abilities were limited to their own narrow plane of existence. It, on the other hand, could occupy many worlds, and it could be seen only when it was in a transitional state.

  It was very old, as old as the Earth itself. Maybe older. Maybe its kind had floated in space even before the universe was formed. It was unable to remember.

  It had many names, but they were all names invented by humans and thus of no significance. It had no name of its own, designated by its own kind.

  Ahead was a two-story house with green shutters. It felt drawn to that house, for someone within was ready, open, waiting. Waiting for it.

  And it would feed.

  4

  After leaving the Islander Cafe, Don drove to the Icicle Lounge, which was in the next block, on the other side of Island Avenue. It was a white clapboard building with a neon Special Export beer sign in the window. Kesselring was by himself in a corner booth, drinking a Budweiser. The long, narrow case he carried was by his feet. Don joined him.

  “Is there anything unique about this area?” Kesselring asked. “You know, a special local beer, a distinctive cuisine?”

  “We have a restaurant that serves wild raspberries and fiddlehead ferns, but it’s not open.”

  Kesselring nodded, didn’t say anything.

  “And there’s a place on the mainland makes pasties, sort of folded-over beef pot pies.”

  Again Kesselring just nodded.

  The Icicle Lounge could pass for a neighborhood bar in Milwaukee or Detroit or Cleveland. It was a place to drink, shoot the breeze, get away from the rest of the world for a while. It had no theme, no fake icicles hanging from the ceiling or anything like that. And it had no jukebox to rattle the walls with heavy metal music. The customers were mainly people middle-aged or older, and they’d probably take a sledge hammer to anything that spewed out the top forty. This was Lawrence Welk country. A wild tune was a polka.

  “You travel around a lot?” Don asked. “Sample a lot of local brew, local cooking?”

  “When you’re retired you get to travel,” Kesselring said.

  “Been to Florida?”

  “Sure.”

  “How about California?”

  “There too.”

  “Ever be
en to Blake?”

  “Yeah, I’ve been to Blake. It’s a farming community in the San Joaquin Valley.”

  Before Don could ask anything else, the cocktail waitress arrived. She was about fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair. Her name was Sally Wolfe. She and her husband owned the place.

  “How you doing, Don?” she asked. “Get you anything?”

  “How about a Special Export?”

  “We’re out. The truck didn’t arrive before the Split was declared.”

  “You have enough brew on hand to see you through?” Don asked.

  “We should. We’d already stocked up on most brands. Just the one distributor didn’t make it.”

  “Give me a Bud then.”

  “You got it.” She asked Kesselring whether he wanted another, and he said yes.

  “You used to be a police officer,” Don said after Sally Wolfe was gone, “A lieutenant in Pittsburgh.”

  “You’ve been checking.”

  “That’s what you do when you’re a cop. You stay skeptical, you check to make sure.”

  “That’s true,” Kesselring said.

  “Why’d you lie to me?”

  Kesselring sighed. “I’m sorry about that. Not much professional courtesy in lying to another officer. I did it because it was easier, that’s all.”

  “Easier than what?”

  “The truth.”

  Sally put their beer on the table, turned, and left.

  “What is the truth?” Don asked.

  “I was following Dwyer because someone had to do it.” He took a swallow of beer. “Look, I felt useless being retired. I hated it. I missed being a cop. To keep this short, let’s just say that eventually I figured out what I could do to be useful again. People commit a crime in one place and take off. It takes years sometimes before they’re caught—if they’re ever caught—because there’s no one to stay on a criminal’s tail, follow him across the country if necessary, stick with him until he’s apprehended. I decided to be that person.”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Listen, I know it sounds like some comic-book hero nonsense, but it’s not. Look at Dwyer. I followed him all the way from California, and I damn near got him. In a way, I guess you could say I did get him. At least I’d like to think so.”

  “The pressure you were putting on him caused him to commit suicide?”

  “It contributed anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “Because you’d see me as some kind of vigilante. You’d mistrust me.”

  “And you’re not a vigilante.”

  “No. I make a citizen’s arrest. I’m not a self-appointed executioner.”

  “How many of these citizen’s arrests have you made?”

  “A couple. Caught a guy in Arizona a few months ago.”

  “And you use your own money to do this.”

  Kesselring shrugged. “I guess you could say it’s my hobby.”

  “Expensive hobby.”

  “But very rewarding.”

  Kesselring took another swallow of beer.

  Don was unable to figure him out. The guy wasn’t mocking him, wasn’t acting superior, talking down to the small-town cop. And yet he was lying his ass off. A cop who loved it as much as Kesselring claimed to would never have taken early retirement; he’d have hung on until the last second of the last day before he reached maximum retirement age. If Don asked him for the name of the guy he’d arrested in Arizona, Kesselring would give him a name. Don would check it out, find out it was a lie, and then Kesselring would tell him another lie. What was going on? Why was Kesselring really here?

  “Why did you lie to the police in West Palm Beach?” Don asked.

  “About what?”

  “You said you knew the guy who was holding hostages in a burger place.”

  “I handled a similar situation in Pittsburgh,” the ex-cop said. “Hostages were being held in a grocery store. I thought I might be able to help because of that experience.”

  “So you lied. To enable you to help.”

  “Precisely.”

  For a long moment Don just looked at him, letting him know it wouldn’t wash. Finally he said, “What were you doing in Florida?”

  “I’d followed a suspect there.”

  “From where?”

  “North Carolina.”

  Again Don considered asking for the name of the suspect, then decided doing so would be pointless. Kesselring would make one up, Don would check it out, and Kesselring would tell him another lie. What was the point?

  Don said, “I understand you were asking some questions over at the cafe.”

  Kesselring looked at him as if to say, There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?

  “You were asking whether anyone had been acting strangely.”

  “I’m just curious. I’ve never been to a place where everyone gets stranded for a few weeks once each year.”

  “Twice. It happens when the ice starts to freeze, too.”

  “Of course,” Kesselring said. “You’d have a winter Split, too.”

  “Except that one’s called the Freeze. Anyway, you were wondering whether this isolation makes us act strangely.”

  “Exactly. That’s why I was asking. Just curiosity.”

  They looked at each other. Again Don tried to find something mocking in Kesselring’s eyes, and again he failed to find it. What he did see was a grimness, a powerful determination. And, though Kesselring tried to hide it, fear. What was he afraid of?

  Don wondered whether Kesselring was simply stuck here because of the Split or whether he had unfinished business on the island. An unexplained chill trickled down his back like a glob of melting slush. He didn’t like the idea that Kesselring might have unfinished business here.

  Four

  1

  Reverend Douglas Pfeil sat at the antique rolltop desk in his study. To his left, on its own small table, was an IBM Selectric II. The sheet of paper he’d rolled into it forty-five minutes ago was blank. His intention had been to type an outline for Sunday’s sermon, but no words of inspiration had come to him.

  He leaned back in the wooden chair, folded his hands in his lap. They were big hands, even bigger than was fitting for his six-foot three-inch frame. Farmer’s hands, blacksmith’s hands. Hands that could do big jobs, command obedience, inflict pain. And yet he was in the gentlest of professions, one in which his hands were supposed to comfort, guide, and inspire.

  Douglas Pfeil tried to recall how he’d become a Lutheran minister and found there was no precise point at which it had happened. In the past, when he’d tried to sort out how he’d come to be what he was, he usually begged the question, asserting that it was God’s will. Now that explanation seemed terribly inadequate.

  Tilting the chair forward again, he took in the room. The walls were lined with built-in bookshelves, all of them crammed full of volumes. The floor was polished hardwood, wide solid-looking planks. In the center of the room was one of those braided rag rugs that his wife, Carolyn, liked to make.

  Carolyn was into crafts. The painting over the desk was one of hers: a stream winding through a meadow. Similar scenes adorned the house’s other walls, along with her needlepoint samplers. She also made ornate candles, which she sold for outrageous prices at the annual church bazaar. Her other interest—other than crafts—was antiques, which was why the house was furnished with them.

  They’d been married for twenty years, Carolyn and Douglas. Like most young people, they’d been filled with youthful enthusiasm, which slowly faded as they aged. For some people, the verve of youth was replaced by a growing closeness, a deepening commitment, but for Carolyn and Douglas the passage of two decades had simply resulted in familiarity. And indifference. They had become like people who rode the subway together each morning. They recognized each other, smiled, talked, acted politely, but the relationship was shallow, without commitment.

  How could that happen to two people who’d lived together this long, raised a chil
d, owned cats and dogs, scraped to make the payments on a new car, made love countless times—and were still making it? How? The question hung there unanswered. He was forty-five years old, his life was probably more than half over, and all he’d managed to do was come up with more and more questions. He’d found very few answers.

  Again he turned his attention to the typewriter. He switched on the machine, thinking that if he typed something on the paper—anything—it would loosen the logjam in his brain, and ideas would start spilling out. His fingers rested on the keys. The motor hummed, the little ball ready to go into its dance as it printed letters on the page, letters that would become words, words of inspiration.

  But the page remained blank.

  Type something, he ordered his fingers. They seemed dead, a corpse’s fingers, stiff with rigor mortis.

  A droplet of sweat trickled down his face. Type something, damn you! a part of his mind shrieked. And his fingers finally moved, typed out a word: SERMON.

  Okay, it was a beginning. The next thing he needed was the title. What should the sermon be about? Finding salvation through faith? How Jesus’ death on the cross freed us of sin? Why you should love your neighbors? The evils of drugs? He shook his head. He was getting confused. More than two decades of sermons tumbled in his head like clothes in a dryer. A hopeless churning jumble. And yet he had to type, for if he didn’t, he’d have no sermon for Sunday. What would he do, stand up before the congregation, smile, say, Well, gosh, I just couldn’t think of anything, so instead of doing the sermon let’s sing another hymn—any requests?

  Type, his brain commanded, and his fingers reluctantly complied. Then he looked at the word he’d typed on the paper: shit.

  He yanked the sheet out of the machine, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the wastebasket. Closing his eyes, he tried to calm himself. Forcing it wouldn’t work; nothing would come until he relaxed.

  Once more he thought about his marriage. And about his profession. Nothing in his life had ever been planned. He’d drifted into studying theology, drifted into marriage. He’d been twenty-five when he married Carolyn. It had been time to get married, so he did. His father had been a minister, so Douglas became one too. He’d ridden along on the flow of life like a leaf in a stream, going where the currents and eddies took him, never exercising any control over his destiny.