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

by Chet Williamson

  Reed had snickered with all the others at the time, although perhaps not as convincingly as the rest. Even then he knew there were lessons to be learned from most of what the old professor said.

  He’d thought a great deal about the professor of late, had imagined he could hear that mock-lecturing tone every morning as he took a walk around his neighborhood in old North Denver. Especially when the weather seemed in the process of changing like this. During his unusually romantic spells the professor used to talk about “the spirit of a place,” how it is so easy for us to anthropomorphize places because there did seem to be this animating persona that moved through and dwelled in all the realms of the earth. That was one reason why landscape painting has been popular at all times throughout history, he explained; the artists were compelled to capture some of that spirit in more tangible, permanent form.

  The spirit of a place…the hidden faces of places and people. Reed had grown obsessed with that of late. He’d been thinking about how this place was so different from the place he’d grown up, Simpson Creeks, Kentucky. The spirit of this place was still very much a mystery to him—too wide and changing to really get a handle on—whereas Simpson Creeks, and the Big Andy Mountain brooding behind it, had a very definite sense of spirit, one that even now he found painful to think about.

  What was going on with him? He was twenty-seven, but it sounded like a midlife crisis. So maybe he was having his midlife crisis early—that was all. His wife, Carol, was getting fed up with it, he knew. She didn’t think he was doing his fair share with the kids; he was too busy brooding all the time, daydreaming, not being truly there when she tried to talk to him. Michael, their adopted son, was almost a teenager now; he needed a father to get through all the crap that new teenagers have to go through. Their youngest, Alicia, at age four was still very dependent on him. He used to think it great that she thought of him as the most wonderful person in the world. That didn’t feel great anymore.

  Hidden faces. Reed was just beginning to realize he had lots of those. His wife, Carol, was realizing it too. That meant that he had to have more time to deal with them, but it was hard getting enough time to himself. Having a family seemed the most “real,” the most normal thing he had ever done with his life. But it demanded a great deal of time. Grownups didn’t always have a lot of time. Reed was thinking that perhaps he needed to be a young boy again.

  Early morning walks, before the rest of the family got up, seemed to help a little. And it calmed him, helped lower his blood pressure. That was another thing…his blood pressure. Abnormally high of late; it had him scared. He was too young to be thinking about dying. And although it wasn’t spoken, Carol was terrified over it too. She wasn’t up to raising a family by herself; in some ways she was as much a child as he was.

  He took a long walk, up around Sloan’s Lake—virtually deserted every year once the temperature began to drop. He and Carol had spent a great deal of time there when they were first dating. It was beautiful at night, the dark water rippling with melting lights and metallic colors. This morning there was a slight mist drifting off the water, catching on the docks like wet, fraying cotton. Any kind of fog was unusual here, unlike Simpson Creeks, where the thickest fog became an expected part of your mornings. He’d left there when he was fifteen, but he could still remember looking out of his bedroom window and seeing it creep across their front yard, drawing back occasionally for a brief moment, as if the fog had suddenly realized Reed was watching it.

  Every place possesses a hidden spirit…

  He walked across Sheridan Boulevard and wandered for a while in the neighborhoods on the other side. This part of the metropolitan area was known as Edgewater, a small incorporated town with its own mayor and police force, right in the middle of the city. Reed and Carol used to go to a place there called the Edgewater Inn every St. Patrick’s Day to drink green beer served by a slightly seedy leprechaun.

  On one of the side streets Reed sat down under a large elm tree. Even this far away he could smell Sloan’s Lake, the water vapor in the air, and that odd, slightly sour smell of wooden docks that have been sitting in the water for a long time.

  The smell of the water, the overpowering sense of a large body of water nearby, seemed to pull at his own liquids, his blood and cell fluids, with a frightening kind of sympathy. He rested back against the tree, closed his eyes, and tried to track down his disturbing sensations, the sense that he had forgotten something it was very important to try to remember. He felt himself falling asleep trying to track down the memory. On his face the sense of there being water in the air was disappearing, as the morning sun rose higher in the sky to burn it away.

  Carol was sitting in the green overstuffed chair by the front window when Reed walked in the door.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “Morning,” she said quietly. He glanced immediately at his watch. Eleven A.M. He’d been gone four hours. She was furious with him—he could tell. Her eyes were downcast over the newspaper, but she didn’t have the intense look about her face she had when she was actually reading. She was faking it, waiting for him to say something, to explain himself. Her lips were pressed out thinly in her efforts to hold her tongue. She obviously knew he was watching her, and ran her hand down her long, shiny brown hair to hide more of her face from him.

  He should say something—there was always pain in letting things hang with her. But he had come to avoid confrontations; they twisted his stomach, made him tighten up so that he felt he had no control over what he was saying. And he might say something he regretted. Besides, if he didn’t bring it up, he could always say later she should have confronted him at the time, and not waited until they’d both forgotten the exact details of what had happened. It was a damned dishonest tactic, but he thought it protected their relationship. And there was a great deal of truth in it—often by the time they got around to talking about a problem there were so many layers of ill feeling over it neither of them could even pretend to be objective.

  He’d love to be able to strip away those layers and get at the true difficulties, work on solving them. But he didn’t feel capable. In that way, most of all, he felt he was still a child.

  He walked out of the living room, through the kitchen, and up the short flight of steps to the office over the garage.

  They’d built this office together, Carol and he, the first month they were married. It was meant to be a place they’d occasionally share, but whose main purpose was as a place of refuge, a sanctuary for either of them to use when they’d had too much togetherness. But as their family had grown—first having Alicia and then adopting Michael—Carol had found herself using the office less and less, spending her spare time with the children, whereas Reed discovered he needed it more and more. Reed had a desk made out of an old barn door sloppily lacquered. Carol’s desk was a small, antique, oak rolltop; he bought it for her their first Christmas. She’d always loved the feel of sitting at an old writing desk; she said she could feel the presence of the woman, or man, who had used it a hundred years ago. It made writing letters a little special.

  Two stacks of year-old magazines filled the top of the writing desk. Reed pulled out the chair with the fading wine upholstery from his own desk and sat facing the west window. He could see the back of the house, the yard where his children played.

  Reed liked having a family. When he first met Carol, things had worked out so well, he’d been almost numb with the overwhelming “normalcy” of their relationship. He’d grown up in an unhappy family, a constant atmosphere of resentment and revenge. Even at the time he knew the situation was not usual, and yet had never been able to picture himself in any other kind of family.

  Then the two children had come along, and their addition had seemed to work very well, unusually well. The situation between Carol and himself had been rough of late, but not overwhelmingly so. There were always good, satisfying things about their relationship, nice times when they seemed to have an unspoken understandi
ng and caring for each other.

  That house, his family, was relatively solid. Perhaps the first solid thing he’d ever had in his constantly shifting life. But sometimes he couldn’t enjoy it.

  Sometimes he just had to sit back here and watch it, enjoy it from afar. Sometimes he would watch his children playing from that west window—watching Alicia talking animatedly to her dolls and Michael working on the bicycle Reed had bought for him, shiny and red like the one Reed had as a kid—and he’d be filled with such love for them his facial muscles would contract, trying to hold back the tears. Those were his kids. His wife. His house.

  But if he got up out of this chair and walked back to the house, if he left his sanctuary too soon, he’d find himself thrust into their arguments, their worries and concerns, and Carol’s almost electric expectations of what Reed should do about them. Sometimes he just couldn’t handle them. He wasn’t always adult enough. In so many ways he knew he hadn’t yet grown up. He wasn’t completely ready to be normal.

  There were footsteps of a certain weight on the staircase. He knew she’d feel compelled to come back here to the office, try to say something to him. She always did. He could have gone somewhere else where she couldn’t follow, but he never did. This way, she always knew where to find him.

  She paused at the top of the stairs and her fingers lingered on the dusty surfaces of the magazines covering her writing desk. She stared a moment at the wall. Without turning she said, “There’s really no point in my talking about it…but I really resent your leaving me here all morning to take care of the kids by myself.”

  “If there’s no point…why are you talking to me?” He grimaced, wishing he could take that back, at least soften it.

  “I tell you and tell you but you still do it. You still go away.” She was going to ignore what he had just said. He was relieved by that, and yet irritated.

  He held his breath, knowing he needed to say something then, but not knowing what to say. “I need the time…”

  “I need time, too! I’m stuck with the kids all day!”

  “Well, I guess we need to work out some sort of schedule.” He looked away from her.

  “You always say that, but it hasn’t changed, Reed.”

  “We haven’t really addressed the question of scheduling our time with the kids.”

  “Yes we have, Reed. We sure have.”

  His throat tightened. He didn’t know where to go from there. “I don’t know what to say; I don’t know how to talk about this.” He unclenched his hands and stretched out his fingers. He was aware of her staring at his hands, seeing how helpless he was in the face of an ordinary argument, an argument like everyone had. “I don’t know either…” she said, turning, walking back down the stairs. “I’m going out for a while. I’ll take the kids with me.” He waited ten minutes before going back into the house, checking to see if they’d actually left. The house was indeed empty, toys lying on the living room rug where the kids had abandoned them, Carol’s half-eaten sandwich on the counter, a full pot of soup turning cold on the stove. Maybe she was taking them out to lunch; she did that sometimes.

  Every time this happened Reed expected to get a phone call an hour later…her telling him that she and the kids would be spending the night at a friend’s house, that she couldn’t stand to be around him when he was like this. That would be hard to take. He’d always feared a phone call like that because he knew if she felt she had to do that, things would never be the same between them again. He didn’t know why that bothered him so much—maybe because it was what people who couldn’t talk anymore did to each other.

  Or maybe there’d be a phone call from the police. There’d been this accident.

  Stop it. Stop it…

  Sometimes if you didn’t think you deserved someone, you dreamed they died. Reed found that to be one of the more unattractive tricks the human mind could play.

  He sat out on the front porch for a while. Michael had been working out here; his tools were scattered everywhere. He appeared to be developing quite an interest in mechanical things. Bicycle parts, electric motors, old radios, parts of a phonograph, miscellaneous nuts, bolts, and unidentified apparatus filled one corner of the porch, made officially Michael’s corner to avoid arguing over it every day.

  Michael was a private, mysterious sort of kid; he had been since they got him. He kept most things to himself, and usually the only way you could tell something was bothering him was by looking at his forehead and cheeks. They’d flush ever so slightly when he was upset. Otherwise you couldn’t have paid him to tell. His background was just as mysterious: he’d been found abandoned at age four in a railroad switching yard. He could talk, but even then he wouldn’t tell the social workers anything, He wouldn’t tell them he couldn’t remember, he just wouldn’t tell them anything at all. He’d gone through quite a few foster homes because of that quality; people said you couldn’t get close to him.

  Maybe so, but Reed liked him. Always had. He recognized, and appreciated, the need for self-containment. It had been difficult for a long time—their mutual distancing had kept them away from each other. But in small ways—Michael volunteering to go with him to the store, inviting Reed to watch him tinker with some new piece of junk—there was a new closeness. There were still problems; that little progress, so significant to Reed, might go almost unnoticed by someone else. Carol still complained that Reed didn’t spend enough time with the boy.

  She was right. Reed recognized that the same thing that made Michael appealing to him was also a barrier. The boy was just too much like him for him to be that comfortable. And with his black hair, generally pale features, and intense eyes, he even looked like him.

  They were gone all day. Around seven o’clock Reed went upstairs to bed. After lying sleepless about an hour, he heard the front door open downstairs, Alicia laughing, Carol shushing her and telling her it was time for bed. Then, after a few minutes, the back door opening. He climbed out of bed and walked over to the window, waiting. The office light went on. He expected to find the magazines gone from her desktop the next morning.

  After Reed climbed back into bed he heard footsteps on the stairs. Too light for Carol’s. He raised up onto his elbows and squinted into the dim light. For a moment he thought he saw himself standing at the top of the stairs. He reached up and turned on the reading lamp.

  His son Michael stood there, not moving any closer. “Good night, Dad.”

  Reed stared at him. “Anything wrong…Michael?”

  “No. Just wanted to say good night.” Michael’s face was shadowed, his body still motionless.

  “Good night, Michael.”

  Michael’s body relaxed, turned, and seemed to drift back down the stairs, almost as if Reed’s words had released it from a spell. Reed turned out the light and lay on his back, staring up into the dark where the ceiling should be. Michael had never called him Dad before.

  The light from the office window lay stark against his darkened sheets. He thought about getting up to close the curtains, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He kept thinking, Carol is in the office, outside the house, so I’m responsible here. I have to keep my kids safe. The thought was frightening him. It seemed particularly hard to be a responsible adult at night when he was half asleep.

  What if someone called for Carol? He’d have to go get her. He wondered if he could. He kept thinking about Michael, calling him Dad as he used to call that great big shadow of a man back in Simpson Creeks, Kentucky, his own dead father. He kept thinking about that, and how much he didn’t want to answer the phone if it rang.

  Something was trembling in the room.

  Reed stretched a sleep-palsied hand to where his wife lay…should have lain. For a moment he thought she had died, her and the two kids. Stop it…stop it. He remembered; they’d had an argument. She must still be in the office. Her side of the bed was still tucked in, flat, cool to the touch. He curled up on his side of the bed.

  If they all died, i
t would be as if they’d never existed, as if ten years had just been erased from his life and he was a young man again, who had just left home.

  The worst dream was other people, people you loved. Because when they died on you, part of your world suddenly became unreal. Stop it…stop it.

  Something was trembling in the room.

  Reed thought about turning on the light, but the thought seemed a long time coming, and he didn’t know what to do with the thought when it finally came. He had been having trouble sleeping—the colds were back, yes…he remembered, his nose continually raw—it kept him on edge, and full of faraway sounds with no apparent source. When sleep finally came, he didn’t know it. And the dreams didn’t know they were dreams.