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

by Chet Williamson

  “You nuts?” Al answered, giving him a funny look. “C’mon, we better run. Gettin’ late.”

  They ran, and made it to school on time. Mrs. Wrigley, the principal, told their class about Andy being killed, and added that any children who wanted to donate money toward a “floral memory” could leave it with their teacher. Some of the girls cried, and so did one or two of the boys, though they bit their lips and jammed their fists in their eyes to stop themselves. Scott Jones, who knew Andy better than most of them in fourth grade, snapped the pencil he was holding in two when he heard Mrs. Wrigley’s announcement, then looked at it stupidly as though wondering why he’d done it.

  The day went as slowly as any before, and Brad thought and thought about Andy, about his grandmother, about death. At home that night neither his mother nor his father mentioned the subject, although when his father tucked him in he asked if there was anything bothering Brad, anything he wanted to talk about. Brad told him there wasn’t, so his father said goodnight and left the boy alone.

  He lay there in his bed in the dark, listening to his parents’ footsteps as they went back downstairs, the low hum of their voices talking softly so that he could make out only the inflections, not the words themselves, then silence, broken in a minute by the muffled roar of the TV set, of dimly heard lines and the audience’s laughter.

  He lay there listening to himself breathing, putting his hand on his heart to feel the low but distinct pounding beneath his flesh and bone. Andy’s heart isn’t pounding, he thought. Andy’s heart isn’t doing anything.

  He put his hand at his side and stared up at the black ceiling, frighteningly aware of the rise and fall of his chest under the bedclothes, going up and down, up and down, unlike Andy’s chest that was now so still, and would never rise or fall again. And then thoughts came that had never come before—questions, concerns:

  What makes me breathe?

  What if I forget?

  What if I fall asleep and I forget to breathe? Would I wake up or would I just die in my sleep?

  What if my heart stops beating and I was asleep? How would I know to get it started again?

  He lay there, afraid to go to sleep, afraid to trust his heart and lungs to keep working without his conscious supervision. And as he lay wondering and worrying, he started to think about swallowing his tongue when he slept and choking on it, of turning his head in a dream so that his nose pressed against the pillow, smothering him, of half a dozen other ways that death could come upon him in the night, quietly, unexpectedly. He had never been afraid before tonight, had never asked for a nightlight or used the feeble excuses most children do to avoid being taken from their parents’ side and thrust into the Night, the Dark, where the shadows wait. But now he was afraid to sleep, afraid even to close his eyes.

  He lay there.

  He lay there listening to the cars pass outside, listening to the TV below, listening as his parents finally climbed the stairs, ran the water in the bathroom, walked down the short hall to their own room, clicked the light switch so that the bright crack under his door died, drowned in darkness. The whole house was dark now, and soon the house would be asleep.

  It was not until he heard his father snoring that he started to worry about his parents. They were older than he was, closer to Grandma’s age, and he remembered Mel Rickert’s dad dying last year of a heart attack in his sleep. He felt suddenly chilled, listening to his father’s rumbling snores. He should listen for him too—stay awake to make sure he was all right. And his mother as well.

  He slipped out of bed and opened his door, then stepped across the hall and went into his parents’ room. His father’s snores were louder now, but he could not hear his mother breathing. He tiptoed to her side and leaned down over her. It was too dark to see her covers rise and fall, but he heard a soft hissing and knew she was all right, she was alive.

  He knelt by her side then, and finally lay down next to the big double bed, his head against the thinning carpet. It was hard beneath him, and he was glad, because he knew the discomfort would keep him awake. So he lay listening to their breaths, listening for his own, until sleep finally claimed him just before midnight.

  His mother’s cry woke him the next morning. “Brad!” she said. “Honey? What are you doing?”

  “Whazzat?” His father’s voice, phlegmy and thick.

  Brad groaned as he moved, feeling as though all his muscles had been tied in knots. “I … uh … I got lonely.”

  “Lonely?” She giggled, not understanding.

  “F’pete’s sake,” his father said. “You been there all night?”

  Brad shrugged. “I dunno. I … I woke up … had a bad dream. I didn’t … I didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “Oh, boy.” His father sat on the side of the bed and stretched. “Well, you got another hour before you have to get up for school, so why not sleep in a bed, huh? Come on.”

  “I’ll make breakfast,” his mother said, and disappeared. Brad’s father ruffled his hair and walked him back to his room. “Whatcher pillow on the floor for?” he asked.

  “Guess I knocked it down while I was dreamin’.”

  “Rough dream?” He put the pillow back on the bed. Brad lay back against it.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Anything to do with … what happened the other day?”

  “Huh?”

  “With your friend Andy?”

  Brad looked away from his father’s face and down at the paisley pattern of his tentlike pajamas. “Yeah,” he whispered. Then he started to cry.

  “Hey, hey, what’s the matter?” His father held him against his thick chest.

  “I … I don’t wanta die, Dad!” He was barely able to get the words out.

  “Aw, aw, c’mon, sport,” said his father, holding him clumsily. ”Don’t cry now, you’re not gonna die … leastways not for a long, long time. C’mon, hey, don’t be a baby.”

  “I don’t wanta die at all. And I don’t want you to die neither. Or Mom.”

  “Everybody dies, Brad. But you won’t die for a long time. Not for years and years.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me neither.”

  “How d’ya know?” he wailed.

  “Hey, I just know, okay? Trust me. I’m not gonna die for a long time.”

  “Andy Koser didn’t think he was gonna die either. But he did!”

  His father frowned. “Sometimes things like that happen. But not often. Not often enough to worry about. So just forget it.”

  “I can’t!”

  “Look,” his father said, “nobody knows when they’re gonna die, so it don’t do you any good to worry about it. So just forget it.” He stood up. “I gotta get dressed, I’ll be late.” Leaning down, he patted Brad’s shoulder. “Don’t worry,” he said, and left.

  Brad had never felt more alone. He sat up in bed and waited for his alarm clock to go off. When it did, he dressed, ate breakfast silently, his mother puttering too busily around him, and went to school.

  He slept little the following few days, but when he discovered that a week had gone by without any deaths by suffocation, he gradually forgot his fears, and even became less careful on stairs until eventually he reverted back to his old self.

  Almost.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Andy Koser,” Brad whispered in awe.

  “What?” Christine’s voice was muffled by the bedclothes over her head. “What did you say?” She was near hysteria.

  “Come here,” he said. She didn’t move. “I said come here.”

  “No … Why?”

  “I want you to see something.” He crossed to the bed. “No …” She was crying when he pulled the covers off of her. “Please, Brad, please, don’t make me!”

  He dug a hand into her armpit and hauled her from the bed. She staggered, but remained erect, and he dragged her to the window.

  “No,” she blubbered, starting to thrash about in an effort to break his hold. “Nooo …”

  He
smacked her across the cheek with his open hand, his fingers stinging from the contact. “Shut up,” he said quietly, without malice. “I want you to see something.”

  “Why do I have to?” The fear was leaving her now. The blow that had reddened her cheek had brought anger in its place. “I don’t have to do what you say! I don’t”—she gasped for breath—”don’t wanta see out there!”

  He smiled a smile edged with promises, grim with threats. “I really want you to, Chris,” he said. “I want you to do this for me.”

  In the light of his tone, her anger slipped fearfully away, leaving only the red marks where his fingers had met flesh. Her lip quivered, and she looked at him like a beaten dog that would take the throat out of its master if it thought it could. “You … bastard,” she said weakly.

  “Will you do this for me, please?” His smile faded. “You will, won’t you.” There was no longer even the hint of a question.

  “You bastard,” she mouthed, but he could not hear the words.

  “Look down there.”

  She turned her head toward the window. Her face trembled as though made of jelly, and she clamped her eyes shut. “Look,” he said. “Open your goddamned eyes.”

  She did. Her head shook with the effort not to turn away, and he saw the veins in her neck press against the slightly chubby flesh above. Another few pounds, he thought, and she would have wattles. “You see that boy?” he asked her, unable to take his eyes off her face. “That’s Andy Koser. I knew him when I was a kid. He’s been dead twenty-five years.”

  She looked at him, disbelief in her glare. “Are you …” she began, then turned back to the window. Brad put his arm around her shoulders, and she shivered at his touch.

  “Recognize anybody?” he said. “Any familiar faces for you out there?”

  “What … are they, Brad?”

  He shook his head and gave a short barking laugh. “How do I know?”

  “Oh, G—” She brought a hand to her mouth.

  “What?”

  “There,” she breathed, pointing to a worn green bench that sat under a streetlight. There was something on the bench that had once been human. But now the body from the sternum down looked like raw, oozing meat. Trunk and legs were indistinguishable from one another. The head and face, however, were untouched, and gleamed, as did the lower chaos of mortality, with the same cold blue light the other figures radiated.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Brad, a plunging sadness in his tone. Tears welled up in his eyes, and his jaw tightened and trembled as he gritted his teeth, trying to force back the crying.

  “You know him?” Christine asked in awe.

  “Yeah,” he managed to get out. “Yeah. You do too. It’s Rorrie.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Aw fuck, B. J., you really like that shit?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, Rorrie, I think I’m gonna like it. I mean, it’s a nice campus, and I liked school, so what the hell.”

  “I thought you’da had enough of school.” Rorrie Weidman put his hands behind his head and sank lower onto the bright red bench. He took off his aviator sunglasses and let the warm rays bake his eyelids. “I’m ready to do something, you know?”

  Brad snorted. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” Rorrie shrugged. “Maybe Dad’s garage for a while, maybe I’ll just bum around the country, maybe—”

  “Maybe the Army.”

  “Huh?”

  “Man, are you nuts? You’ll be drafted for sure if you don’t go to school. Hell, Rorrie, you’re smart enough. You could get into State easy. They take kids with some really low boards—mine were shitty.”

  “Yeah, but I’d need a scholarship. I don’t have the bread.”

  “You could get one.”

  “Bullshit. I’m not an orphan or a nigger.”

  “Don’t say that, man.”

  “What, ‘orphan’?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “ ‘Nigger’? That bother you? Hey, lighten up, B. J. I’m just foolin’ around.”

  They sat for a while, watching the cars go by on Market Street, calling an occasional greeting to a friend, pulling in their legs when an adult walked past. Rorrie lit a cigarette. “What would you do,” Brad said, unwrapping a stick of gum, “if you did get drafted?”

  “I dunno. I guess I’d go. What about you?”

  Brad shook his head. “I don’t have anything against those people.”

  “That’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

  “It’s got a lot to do with it,” Brad answered.

  “Crap. You been listening to too much folk-rock. You think they asked our dads in World War Two whether or not they had anything against Germans? ‘Mr. Weidman, Mr. Meyers, you do hate Germans, don’t you?’ Hell, we are Germans. Our grandparents, great-grandparents anyway. I bet ninety percent of the people in Merridale got German blood.”

  “World War Two was different from Vietnam.”

  “My ass.” Rorrie spat into the street. “You’re dumb enough to get drafted, you go where they tell you and fight who they tell you to. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They’re not gonna draft me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I got a funny little toe on my left foot.”

  Brad laughed.

  “No shit! I do!”

  “Your little toe?” Brad was still chuckling.

  “Okay, laugh. You think it’s funny, go ahead and laugh. They don’t take you if your feet are fucked up, because you can’t march, dummy.” Rorrie pulled off his left sneaker and propped his foot yoga-style on his thigh. “Lookit that.”

  Brad looked. The smallest toe curled under the fourth one so that the toenail was only partially visible. “Didn’t keep you from playing football,” Brad said, realizing that he was actually jealous of Rorrie’s curly toe.

  “Doesn’t matter.” He slipped the sneaker back on. “You ever check your toes?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my toes.”

  “Too bad,” Rorrie said, grinding out his Marlboro on the sidewalk.

  As it turned out, there wasn’t enough wrong with Rorrie’s toes either. That August, while Brad was working at the A&P to make enough for his living expenses at Penn State, Rorrie Weidman was called for a pre-induction physical, which he easily passed. The examiners dismissed the turned-under toe, laughing gruffly and saying that Army boots would straighten it out. Rorrie was not even permitted to come home, but had to call his parents from Fort Indiantown Gap and tell them to bring the personal things he would need. He started basic training four days later. Through the remainder of August Brad always felt a twinge as he drove his Chevy past the bench by Western Auto and saw it empty, or occupied by kids other than Rorrie. That had been Rorrie’s bench for the past three summers. He’d sat on it when he’d finished the workday at his father’s garage during the week, wearing his greasy mechanic’s jumpsuit, in the evenings with a work shirt and cuffed jeans, on bright steaming Saturdays in a tank top and cutoffs. It was Rorrie’s bench, although he was more than willing to share it, especially with his friends and with older people, like Eddie Karl. Rorrie and Eddie would sit for hours on a Saturday afternoon or Friday night, talking, smoking, watching cars, Eddie telling Rorrie (and Brad, when he was there) about old days and old friends, none of whom had ever died in Eddie’s mind.

  But through the rest of August the bench, though often occupied, seemed strangely empty. Rorrie’s presence was gone.

  In September Brad went off to State. He found his freshman year difficult, not because of the course material but rather because of the hundred distractions he had never had to overcome when he lived at home. Loud roommates, Saturday night dances, football games (he tried out for the team with no luck), the letters he’d write every two or three days to Bonnie back in Merridale, the dates he had when he was able to forget about her—all these resulted in a 1.68 grade point average his first semester. Instead of trying to correct that semester’s flaws, his studies became even more secondary in the spring.
He joined the campus civil rights group, one of the two established (and feuding) antiwar organizations, and auditioned for and got a small speaking part in an off-campus production of Lysistrata. In June he learned his average had dropped another half point and found himself on probation for his sophomore year, even though he had not actually failed a course.

  During that freshman year he received two pieces of correspondence from Rorrie Weidman. The first was a postcard that his parents brought up to campus one Saturday afternoon in October. It was postmarked Fort Bragg, and was dated three weeks previously. It read:

  B. J.—Greetings from beautiful Fort Bragg. The Army food isn’t all that bad, and we get to hear a lot of rock. May be heading over to the big V in a month or two, so wish me luck. I’ll see you in two years (I hope). Give Bonnie a squeeze for me—not too many ladies here.

  Rorrie

  Brad hadn’t answered. He’d intended to, and had stuck the postcard to the wall above his desk with a piece of Plasti-Tak. The color photo of a row of recruits in front of green-gray barracks under an impossibly blue sky hung there for two months before he finally took it down when he went home for Christmas vacation. He intended to answer it over the holidays, but used it as a bookmark in a library book and so lost it.

  He received the letter in April. It had an APO postmark.