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

by Chet Williamson

  Every hour or so, Joshua unhorsed himself from the Honda and trekked up the slight incline to Sara Windsor’s house to play voyeur. Missus Windsor was quite a good-looking woman. For the most part she had spent the evening puttering around the house in a robe. The first time Joshua had spotted her wearing the robe, he had experienced a sudden lack of maneuvering room inside his jockey shorts. She logged a lot of time in a comfy chair by the fireplace, making notes. This was a woman who brought her work home with her. She seemed a bit antsy whenever she got near the phone. She was waiting for a call. Joshua did not feel the need—yet —to attach his lineman’s handset and tap in. He had it in a case on the backseat if he changed his mind or something drastic went down.

  In the glove compartment of the Accord was a nine-millimeter Smith & Wesson automatic. The clip was in. Joshua carried a permit for the gun. In his entire career as a private investigator, he had drawn the gun once and fired it never. So much for romantic notions of Bogartry.

  The blue neon digits of the dash clock told him he’d have to do a spot check before he could help himself to more Kahlüa. At dawn he’d call in Mickey Rounds, his partner. Mickey would park in the brush on the hillside, between the cemetery and Claremont Street, and use binoculars until Joshua told him to stop.

  He shrugged up his collar and ducked out into the rain, which had receded to a light, miserable drizzle. This leg of Claremont had a single streetlight planted in front of 7041, and most of the houses were dark. The street glistened. The only sound was the ambient hiss of moving air—like a stereo turned way up with nothing playing.

  Joshua’s chosen vantage was a crack in the curtains near the kitchen on the north side of the house. It was dark enough for him to pick his way through the shadows there with no fear of being spotted by chance from the neighboring house. His rubber boots squished in the saturated grass; the incline from the street to the front porch—about forty feet—made footing iffy, and he would skid if he wasn’t careful.

  It had been forty-five minutes since his last check, and the same lights were blazing in the house as before. Joshua assumed his half crouch at the window. There were steam beads on the obverse of the cold glass. Maybe she was bathing.

  The thought of catching a fast cut of Sara Windsor in the buff inspired him to tarry. His basic requirement was to note, each time, that she was alive and moving around and nothing overt had transpired.

  The curtains stirred. Air had moved inside. Joshua’s automatic thought was of a door opening and closing, shoving interior air around.

  Through the window, he heard the phone in the hallway ring. He could almost see the little phone table from his position. When Sara talked on the phone, she usually leaned against the opposite wall of the hallway —where he could see her just fine—or dragged the unit on its twenty-five-foot cord to another part of the house. Once, twice, three rings.

  A shadow blocked out the light from the kitchen. It was a man, a big man, clad in black. He had an M-16 with a large nightscope cradled against one arm. He wore black leather gloves.

  Sara stepped out into the hallway, totally naked but for the towel on her head. Joshua saw her from behind. He thought her ass was a touch on the large side, but nice and soft. She had good, long legs.

  He sighed. He was not being paid to intercede.

  As soon as the pair began to exchange words, Joshua humped down the hill to his car. If the guy had come to kill her, he would have wasted her in the hallway and left. They were going to spend some time talking—like the characters in mediocre private-eye fiction always did, explaining the plot to each other.

  The emergency call number was clipped to the visor next to Joshua’s spare business cards. Stannard’s very curt instructions had not included anything about gunplay, or violence, or maverick risk. Joshua did his job. He would not fire his gun tonight, either. He would do what he was being paid to do. He was good at his profession.

  Sertha Valich watched Stannard mutter monosyllables into the phone, his body english gradually torquing up. He punched the extension for Horus’ quarters, said, “Tell Cannibal we’re a go,” and hung up.

  The horrifying thing to her, in retrospect, was that during the whole sequence he did not look at her, not once.

  From the moment he had answered the call on the first ring—”Yeah?”—her mind began recording every feeling. Time would allow the moment to resonate, so she could interpret all of it later.

  Stannard’s mad little gig was on, and she was not a part of it. By design or oversight, he was excluding her. In an American movie, at least, this would be the scene in which she would reel off expositional dialogue, explaining for the dullards in the audience all the deadly reasons why Stannard should not embark. You can’t go!

  Instead, she thought of the term tactical fuck. She had learned it from Stannard. For him, it meant strategic gain via sexual favor.

  The single memory that stood out—not burning with pain, just there, like a clog in a pipe—was of a rotund and depthless man named Greg Seligman. He had been overweight by fifty pounds, not so much fat as puffy. His shirt buttons put up with a lot of stress. His clothing always appeared fully packed and two sizes shy of comfort. Any exertion, such as rising from his desk chair, caused him to exude sour sweat. To Serta the droplets always looked yellowish. He insisted on wearing dark plaid shirts that showcased a plague of saltgrain dandruff wildly out of control even though his hair was fluffy and looked as if he washed it once a day. She remembered how the heels of his Bass Weejuns were worn down on the insides because he walked with a slight pigeon-toed cant.

  She also remembered the time Greg Seligman had instructed her to sit on his green desk blotter and raise and spread her legs this way, pointing her toes. She recalled the clamminess of his grip on her hipbones as his undernourished peenie sniffed its way in. His bulk hampered penetration despite her buffet position. He bumped against her pelvis and squirted without making a noise, and the next day Sertha became a client of the Bache Agency. A week after that, she was posing for men’s cologne advertisements, and her snowball started rolling apace.

  Greg Seligman had made a big mistake. Thinking the reverse, he had given her power over him. Her air was superior the next time they crossed paths, and he had flushed crimson to the roots of his flaky hair in front of twenty people. There was no pain attendant to the memory, no psychological rent, no sense of rough trespass unavenged. As a localized memory it was as silly and insubstantial as Greg Seligman himself—an absurd, plump, tiny-minded man who once had something Sertha needed and whose sweat still stank of desperation. Sometimes even the most highborn must swab out their own toilets. At least when you are done the thing is clean again.

  This aligned with Stannard’s definition of a tactical fuck.

  The extra access permitted by the conditioned suppleness of Sertha’s leg muscles gave her pleasure beyond human speech when Stannard went to work on her. When she thought of making love with him, she always smiled. Now, watching him realizing that the time of madness and firearms was at hand, she saw the power she had given him over her.

  One part of her could appreciate the corner he was in. It was a career crisis—the kind sometimes solvable through tactical fucks. He was facing a showdown with his own public image. The rest of his professional life might depend on how he dealt with Lucas Ellington and how visibly brave he was when he did it. He really had no choice, if he wanted his fans and the media to keep treating him just so. The Rock Wrap incident was a pale hint of the nightmare to come if he did nothing and let “the authorities” take their meandering procedural courses. Running down Lucas Ellington like a cheetah was Stannard’s own form of tactical fuck.

  But Sertha had not been consulted, let alone asked.

  So instead of playing the movie scene, with its hyperadrenalated hysteria and bad speeches, she waited until he cradled the receiver and had to look up at her.

  The look in his eyes was defiant, committed. He expected her to protest.

 
What her eyes saw was different, and as ominous as a lump in the breast. She saw in his eyes the possibility that she might be used up completely to fuel his mad need for retaliation. He had been burning protein at an astonishing rate and dropping body weight to match. He seemed to exhaust whomever he spoke with. He was taking it anywhere he could get it… and he had not spared her. She extrapolated the sore and scarified condition of her body into the husk it would become if she tried to oppose him now.

  She backed off, lowering her eyes, hating herself for rolling into a surrender position so quickly. She had known physical power games for too long to permit herself anything but an instinctive survival response.

  He took that for an answer and stalked out of the bedroom. Wordlessly.

  Sertha felt weaker than ever. Her knees did not want to bend in the correct directions. A nasty, icepick headache made itself at home behind her left eye.

  She stared dully at the telephone. The light board was dead now, inactive.

  Enough time had passed that she would have to unearth her book and page up the number she knew she had to call.

  28

  No police awaited them at the Oildale airfield, but what eventually happened was not pretty.

  Stannard jumped from the Cessna before Horus wheeled it around to full stop. His blood sang with electricity as his white-gold hair flew in the backwash from the twin props. “No cops!” he shouted into the wind. “We caught ’em circle-jerkin!”

  Cannibal Rex refused to budge from the aircraft until it was stilled down to the engine vibrations. He climbed out with a large zippered nylon duffel slung over one shoulder. The finger-bone earring jogged spastically as he wrestled with the bag’s weight. When both boots were solid on runway tarmac, he scanned the night and the tiny airstrip from within his murky wraparound shades. So what.

  Before them were two dilapidated hangars of rusty corrugated steel. Fastened to the side of one like a moray on a whale was a battered, single-wide mobile home—a sixteen-footer whose traveling days were long past. Inside it Stannard found a middle-aged fellow tucked into a greasy jumpsuit, feet propped on an old army-issue desk, attention funneled into a dog eared copy of Penthouse that was two years shy of current.

  Above the man’s head was a mimeographed sign that read WE DON’T GIVE A DAMN HOW IT’S DONE IN LOS ANGELES.

  Stannard knew he should play it broad, firm, and definite. “Hi there.” He nailed the man with the intense, ice-blue gaze he kept powered up for the shutterbugs from Rolling Stone and thrust his open hand unavoidably forth. Hicks always thought you could take handshakes to the bank.

  George Kellander’s wife, Margie-Marie, had always told him that he tried to do too many things at once. Right now George needed to get his big engineer boots down from the desk, finish dislodging a stray piece of ham from between his two front teeth, put Stacey Butterick (August’s Penthouse Pet, a couple of birthdays removed) on hold, and deal with the stranger who’d barged into his little office. George was zipped inside of what Margie-Marie called his “overhaul overall.” An oval name tag sewn to the breast declared him to be Georgie O.—O for Oswald, his middle name—in embroidered red script.

  He draped the Penthouse over the desk edge to hold his place. August indeed. He had no idea why those crazy-as-a-shitfly New York publishers dated magazines so far in advance. Some computer bullshit, most likely. His visitor looked like one of those windblown Hollywood faggots. Crazy as shitflies, everybody in Hollywood and New York. They didn’t know squat about how the real world functioned. Probably because most of them were hustlers and queers and dope addicts, all hot for each other. You’d never see a sweet piece like Stacey Butterick walking the streets of Hollywood, no sir. The Penthouse copy said she was a small-town girl from Lebanon, Indiana, and why would they lie about something like that?

  Nevertheless, the stranger’s hand was out, and George took it. The force of Stannard’s grip reassured him a bit. George tried to be polite and surreptitiously wiped his hand on his overhaul overall. You never knew which one of these guys might be carrying AIDS around.

  The visitor’s white-blond hair was wound into a bunch of tight little curls, the way the coons over in Ruckerville favored their hair. His clothes were pure faggot—jeans too close at the crotch, yellow cowboy boots, some kind of fruitcake black deerskin shirt that laced up the front. He was wearing an earring. That was a sure sign. But George had forgotten which ear meant AC and which DC. The earring was a tiny double-bladed axe in pewter. It hung upside down. George couldn’t even guess what that might mean.

  But the guy obviously had muscles on his muscles. George knew that gayboys were into bodybuilding, and this guy was just too handsome. For somebody like this to come blowing in on the ass end of a storm might mean serious trouble, and a guy would have to be a little crazy to fly around in weather like this. Just what the hell did he want?

  Stannard cut loose a bright burst of smile and teeth. “Georgie, I got me a slight emergency here, and I think you might be able to help me out. I’m needing a car. I gotta get someplace in a hurry with no hasslements.”

  That was Horus’ entrance cue. The room seemed to shrink when it filled up with the big black man, and George’s eyes hastily digested a flood of new input.

  Stannard then brought into play the only other thing hicks swore by—hard cash on the deck. He drew out his wad and began thumbing up Franklin notes. “Now, you wouldn’t know where I maybe could rent transportation like that for, say, an hour or so?”

  George nervously considered the huge bald bodyguard with the ear studs, then the newly born fortune in Stannard’s hand. It helped him keep his gaze off Stannard’s bulging package—as George’s old navy buddies designated it during jump practice from the high board. He didn’t want this bend-over boy to get the idea he was interested or something else perverted.

  George forgot all about L.A. queers and perversion when Stannard slapped a thousand bucks down on the desk next to Stacey Butterick’s moment of glory.

  George only looked at the money once. He felt safer since this was a game he knew how to play. “Well now,” he said, stroking his chin, pretending to think. “Well now. I just might be able to give you boys a hand at that. An emergency, you say?”

  “I gotta get my pal here to the doctor real fast.”

  George glanced at Horus. He drew his clasp knife out and unhinged it to pick at his teeth, purely as an innocent gesture clarifying that there should be no funny business. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “He’s got a throat problem. Altitude makes him lose his voice. It’s happened once before. Might be serious.”

  Horus pointed to his neck, grimaced, and shrugged.

  “Well now. The only car I have here is my son’s car. It’s my only car on account of my truck is laid up with valve problems and won’t be ready till Thursday. Now, I don’t know if I could let you drive my boy’s car, even if I was inclined to… uh, rent you it. It’s his property, after all.”

  Stannard peeled away another five hundred bucks as though the dirtier bills in the stack offended him. “Like I said, we’re kind of in a hurry.” Another smile. Wham!

  George’s eyes were catching the light from the money more often. He narrowed them and tried for shrewdness. “You boys wouldn’t be robbers, or wanted by the police, or something like that, now, would you?”

  “I’ve never been arrested in my life,” said Stannard, giving George his press profile one more time. “Not even for jaywalking. And if we were bad guys… why, hell, we would have just coldcocked you and taken your son’s car, instead of leaving your son an extra chunk for his kindness. And yours.” He slid the wayward stack of bills closer to George, who suddenly needed to clear his throat.

  “Don’t look like it could do any harm, at that.” He was wrapped up in dreams of untaxable income that Margie-Marie would never have to know about, if he could get his boy Clyde on the phone quick enough. He could slide some cash to Clyde, and they could both prosper. The eveni
ng was beginning to look less rotten, despite the dog weather.

  On the other hand, if he said no, there might be guns and trouble and ugliness. George smacked his lips to clear away the taste of stale ham. “Er—could I have another one of them?” He indicated the stack of hundreds. “You know, for beer money?”

  “Sure thing, Georgie.” Stannard’s smile did not waver. “Keys first.”

  George produced Clyde’s keyring from a coverall pocket and tossed it. Stannard caught it one-handed and dropped an additional hundred-dollar bill onto the stack. “You’re a real prince, Georgie.”

  Then blondie and his nigger buddy were out the door.

  George resumed his chair with a twinge of excitement tickling his belly. Definitely Los Angeles, he thought. Probably one of those billionaire hippie kooks. Maybe bank robbers, with a hot haul. Either way, from this moment on the money before him did not exist. He folded the stack double and stuffed it into the same pocket from which he’d fished the keys. He knew Clyde’s personal stuff was gone from the glovebox—that was SOP when loaning your car to your old man.

  George picked Stacey Butterick up to tell her the good news.

  Cannibal Rex had been sharp enough to stay out of George Kellander’s sight. He might have queered the deal.

  Horus found Cannibal occupying himself with the American 180, removed from the black duffel bag. He had fitted in a stretch clip and waved the weapon around. In the time it had taken to procure the car, he had obviously paid a visit to his cocaine vial as well.

  Clyde’s wheels were parked—almost hidden—by the backside of the trailer. Stannard discovered he had rented a refurbished 1971 Dodge Charger with Hooker Headers, a paint job that was mostly gray primer, and road-grabbing mags. He jumped in and fired the engine.

  It was good.

  The ass of the Charger was radically jacked, and the powerhouse grumbled liquidly as Stannard twisted the padded-doughnut steering wheel and made it emerge, like a big cat slinking forth from a cave.