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

by Chet Williamson

  An old shoebox full of pictures sat on the top shelf. Reed pulled it out gingerly and laid it on the bed beside him, staring at it. At the top was a picture of Carol, weeding her flower garden with Josef resting beside her. She was looking over her left shoulder and frowning at the camera because she didn’t want him taking a picture of her rear end—she thought she was getting fat. Other color snaps clustered around her: Alicia walking for the first time, her fat little legs bowed; Michael working on his bike, his dinner plate balanced precariously on a bicycle tire; Alicia and Michael trying to give Ben a bath, Alicia with her face bearded in suds. He peeled the pictures away, one at a time, dropping them on the bedspread.

  As he went further down into the pile, the pictures changed: smaller size, square instead of rectangular, wider borders around them, some of them with scalloped borders.

  With trembling hands he pulled the small clump of yellowing, cracked photographs out of the bottom of the shoebox. A large man, overweight, his face almost completely whited out by the glare in the picture. All you could see was the thin, downturned line of a frown. Sitting in his favorite chair, his paper folded in his lap. The next picture was Reed’s mother. Reddish hair that looked a light brown in the black and white photograph. At one time she must have been beautiful; he could tell by her eyes, how large they seemed in her small face. Then his little sister, hiding behind Reed’s old teddy bear. Beautiful little thing. One small hand clamped over the bear’s mouth, as if she didn’t want Reed to hear what it was saying.

  He had stopped to grab these pictures from his mother’s dresser the night he’d run away. The first time he’d ever stolen anything, though his father had accused him of thievery along with everything else. Remembering the scared, determined boy he’d been that night, Reed could scarcely believe he’d stopped to steal the pictures.

  He stared at the three time-dimmed faces and put them back into the box. He’d find a lid for it, then find room in his suitcase for the entire lot. He’d call the airport tomorrow; he’d made his decision. The Badger House trash mound. Sifting through the layers of photographs had told him what he needed to do when he got to the Creeks. There should have been plenty of debris left even after the flood—the waters would have been boxed in by the cliff below the house. He could still excavate there.

  The wind roared and pulled the shutter loose by the bedroom window, banging it on the side of the house. Suddenly excited, suddenly agitated, Reed jumped up and ran to the window.

  The clothing hung up on the line in the yard below flapped wildly, twisting and turning on the line like emaciated children. One of Carol’s dresses, Michael’s pajamas, Alicia’s socks, underwear. They flapped and waved and twisted and wrung themselves ragged as the shutter beat and beat against the wall.

  Carol’s dress tore loose from one clothespin, and Reed cried out. Then the other side spun loose, followed by Michael’s pajamas. They flew against the gray cedar fence, caught on the honeysuckle bush. A small sock flew up and over the yard, out into the street beyond.

  Reed fell back into bed and began to cry. He felt ashamed. Because he felt relieved.

  Carol was a long time coming to the phone. Reed could hear the kids in the background, her cousin’s and Alicia and Michael playing, but he couldn’t tell which was which. It made him uncomfortable, her taking so long. Several people were waiting to use the airport phones; one man was glancing down at his watch and then back to Reed irritably. Reed gazed out the wall-size window in front of him. That was his plane coming into the gate. For a moment the planes reminded him of giant, awkward sea gulls lifting out of the mist. Hundreds of them. Full of tiny insects and off to God knows where.

  “Hello?”

  Already she sounded distant. Suddenly he didn’t want to talk to her; he just wanted to get on that plane and go.

  “Hello…Reed? Are you there?”

  “Yeah. You’ll be glad to know I finally made up my mind.”

  “You’re going back to Simpson Creeks, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. How did you guess?”

  “One, because you’ve been leaning in that direction the whole time. Two, because that’s what you need to do—with my blessing, I might add. And three, because I can hear the airport intercom in the background.”

  He laughed. He suddenly felt much better. “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too. Very much. Is the house a mess?”

  “Nope. Cleaned it up this morning.”

  “Good. We’re all getting antsy to get back home.”

  “Me too, Carol. My home is here.”

  There was a long pause. “Take care of yourself, Reed. I want you back safe with me and the kids as soon as you can.”

  “I will.”

  “And write.”

  “That too.”

  “I can’t manage long without you, you know. And that’s love, not dependence speaking.”

  Reed gripped the phone more tightly. He couldn’t speak. He could tell she was aware of his discomfort, because suddenly the kids were on, both of them, giggling and asking him to bring back a souvenir for each of them and when was he going to be back because they missed him already.

  “You’ll be back soon, I guess?” That was Michael, trying to act nonchalant. But Reed knew the boy still felt insecure; every time Reed or Carol went anywhere, Michael was sure they wouldn’t come back for him.

  “You bet. I love you, Michael. Help your mother out now, okay?”

  “Okay.” His son sounded much better now.

  Reed talked to his children for a long time; he almost missed the plane back into his past.

  Chapter 9

  The town of Simpson Creeks did not awaken as most country hamlets do. It did not rise early, few residents had early morning chores, since farming had ceased to be a business and was more a pastime for retirees. Charlie Simpson was usually the first up, for the long ride into town to open up the store. The few remaining miners were next, but they didn’t have to report until eight. That left insects and small animals to greet the dawn, a few deer, and one bear.

  Bear…yes, there’s bear out there…Charlie thought, and discovered that for the first time in his life he didn’t want to drive into work. In fact, he had the sudden impulse to crawl back into bed with a good bottle of whiskey and pull the covers up over his head. He couldn’t bear the thought of passing those woods—no telling what might walk…or swing or slither or fly out of there this morning. Just no telling.

  But he’d been doing the same thing for years and he just couldn’t break the pattern today, not even for what had happened to him out in the woods. Whatever happened…he wondered if he would ever know for sure. He figured not; he didn’t even want to think about it.

  Besides, his old hound Buck would be waiting for him, for food and water and companionship. Charlie figured there wasn’t a being alive who cared about Charlie more, or counted on him more, than Buck did. It made him grin just thinking about it. Now, wasn’t he getting to be the sentimental old fool? Mattie would rib him to death, if she were still alive. He pulled on his pants and shirt, fumbled with his shoelaces, and headed out to the pickup.

  Happily, Charlie found the old truck fast starting that morning. He roared out of the driveway, hoping to get by those woods just as fast as he could.

  Fog usually lay heavy in the valley until almost midmorning, when the sun finally reached over the top of the Big Andy Mountain and began to burn it out of the hollows in layers from the top down, revealing the landscape with no small amount of suspense, if you were driving those roads early in the morning, and if you were still sleepy.

  The old timers said the fog was different since the mines came; the streams full of mine acid added an acrid steam to the mist. They didn’t like to be out in it; they swore it would scour your lungs, give you cancer. The land had changed drastically over the past fifty-odd years. Families who had moved away to Indiana or Illinois or Ohio found little they could recognize when they returned. The Big Andy had
changed its profile; the bear’s head—a head-shaped outcropping on the north face—had disintegrated from the blasting when they blew out the last tunnels. The chimney formations on the east side were carved off during a stripping operation five years ago. If you looked at the base of the Big Andy you saw what your ancestors might have seen, but above eye level he was a butchered animal, his snout lolling into a landslide of tailings.

  When the miners came out of their houses, they stepped carefully into the mist. It was as if Big Andy were dreaming, and they were stepping out into his dream. But something had turned bad in Big Andy’s dream, and the miners drove more slowly up to the main mine inside his severed neck. Something seemed slightly mad about the way Big Andy crouched beside the Simpson Creeks.

  Between the mining and the flood there seemed to be little left of the forest that once blanketed the Big Andy and the slighter hills for miles around. Now it was more concentrated: the thicker, wilder areas had mostly been worked around as the mining operations spread. A lot of those areas were virtually impassable, and discomfiting in their liveliness. So much surrounding the town of Simpson Creeks was dead clay now; it accentuated your sense of being on a safe island in the wilderness. The woods were alive, almost obscene with life—crawling with greens and browns.

  The forest floor could be alluring; more than one Simpson Creeks resident found himself wandering out where he had no business, just to feel what it was like, see what was there.

  Charlie Simpson had spent a lot of time in those woods; as a boy they’d been his playground, his school, his library. And even in their changed, more threatening state, they held much meaning for him. Thoughts of those woods made a lush backdrop for more practical, day-to-day thinking.

  But still, Charlie Simpson knew from his more youthful explorations here that the woods were teeming with life, rocks and rotted logs hiding unseen communities on their undersides, and miles of underground tunnels beneath that. A forest floor burning with thriving, agitated life.

  There wasn’t much undergrowth in these woods; the odd mix of soil and decaying conifer needles made the land too acidic. Mostly herbs and wood ferns spread their leaves here over ground too cold for the more inviting plants found lower in the valley. Layer upon layer of rich humus—the partially rotted corpses of countless plants and animals—dissolving into the layers below, then the minerals, the weathered rock making more soil, then the bedrock, hard and unchanging, the stoic heart of Big Andy. Layer upon layer upon layer, and all of it unthinkably ancient strata.

  From his pickup window Charlie could see the chipmunks scurrying on the embankments bordering the winding gravel road. The sight relaxed him some. Occasionally he would see one disappear and he would wonder if it had entered its underground home a yard beneath the surface. There would be a small central chamber with a bed of grass and leaves down there somewhere, with its own bathroom off a short passage leading even deeper. There might be countless tunnels radiating from the bed chamber like the legs on a fat spider. Thoughts of that busy underground life had made Charlie vaguely uneasy as a boy.

  Small snakes were bursting out of their eggs hidden beneath rocks and logs out there, their untouched skin gleaming wet and bright. Infant mice were squirming in pockets within the loose soil. In decaying logs a madhouse reigned: millipedes and centipedes—their bites were toxic, he remembered painfully—wriggling through masses of pill bugs, oil beetles, abandoned snake skins, worms and salamanders, so thick you might think the log had ceased to be a home for them and become a thin armor their thick masses held together.

  Charlie could remember as a boy jumping into the soil under those ancient trees as if he were playing on a featherbed. All that vegetable and mineral matter honeycombed with pockets of air, pushing back at him playfully, like one great teddy bear of a beast. At times the ground seemed strangely insubstantial, like the ground you walked on in dreams.

  It had always seemed to Charlie that the links in the food chain were unusually close here, the dance of victim and predator so interwoven that one began to blur into the other. Roles were reversed or exchanged. One thing becoming another over and over again—all life was like that, Charlie guessed. It was kind of nice and kind of frightening at the same time. It made it easy to imagine everything becoming animate at one stage of existence—ancient trees shifting their roots in preparation for a stroll, or a patch of insects and moss flowing slowly over a rock like some undersea ray.

  Fungi dotted the woods, mushrooms of all different kinds; from the road they looked like jewel encrustations, or shiny balloons, or colorful pillows sewn to the ground, trees, rocks, anything even remotely physical. They appeared from nowhere, and could cover a log virtually overnight, or vanish just as quickly. One time in high school Charlie tried to learn them all, but finally gave up. He could still remember a few—hen-of-the-woods like yellow coral, the milky ones, lots of them, and all kinds of the giant variety (boletuses they were called) with red and brown, pink and yellow caps, like sinister dwarves. Of course the pillowy things were only the fruit—the tiny network of tubes that ran under the ground from the fungi covered the forest floor like an eerie net, rotting everything it came into contact with.

  Then there was destroying angel, pure white, one of the deadliest mushrooms in the area. His cousin Winnie ate some of those when she was five, and her parents and relatives had all prayed desperately the Lord would take her soon. Sometimes when Charlie was out in the woods her agonized screams would come back to him, echoing strangely through the conifer walls.

  As a boy Charlie had seen a giant water bug stick its snout into a frog, paralyze it with some kind of secretion, then slowly proceed to suck its guts out. Later, when he’d had time to muse on the implications of that, he’d become terrified. The dark woods on the edge of the Creeks took on a new meaning for him. The woods weren’t always a safe, nice place. The lesson had taken a long time to learn. As a young man it didn’t matter so much; he’d brave most anything. But the fear just seemed to settle into him as he got older. He didn’t go into those woods much anymore.

  As Charlie drove by Inez Pierce’s boarding house on his way into town, it looked as if no one there was awake. Mist off the Creeks still clung heavily to the large maples and oaks clustered around the house and the numbers of lilac bushes Inez loved so well. Above the line of trees the windows stared out at the road with steel gray panes. Charlie used to like the silence, the ever-present quiet in the town. But there seemed to have been a slight change in the character of the silence, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something trembling, ever so slightly, in the stillness. He didn’t like it. He gunned the Ford’s aging motor and spun toward the incline leading up to the town proper.

  Inez Pierce stared up at the ceiling; she hadn’t been able to sleep all night. She heard the far-off sound of Charlie Simpson’s pickup and turned slightly to the window, but she didn’t really have the strength to look out. She was faintly surprised. She’d never felt so tired in her life. But she was getting old, she thought. She still had some of the young girl in her: the rounded cheeks and the dark shock of still-black hair in front of all her gray, and she still moved more like a young girl, fluidly—nothing like the way most of the old women she knew walked. But time still took its toll; that was pretty much a law, she suspected. When she looked at the clock, it was running past six. She groaned; another late morning start.

  It was worry over her brother Hector keeping her up. Ever since they found him by the creek, half-drowned and mumbling nonsense out of his numbed face, he hadn’t been the same. The confusion was much, much worse. And he couldn’t seem to manage to climb out of bed at all. He had the physical ability; she’d cared for enough sick people in her time—father and grandfather and two uncles—to know when a body just couldn’t stand up. There was nothing physically wrong with Hector; it was something in Hector’s mind. He just couldn’t stand on his two feet. One morning she’d been so exasperated with him she’d tried to force the issue. S
he’d gotten Joe Manors, the miner who lived on the third floor, to help her pull him up out of bed and stand him up. She was sorry she’d done that, but he’d just made her so mad.

  Hector had scared her bad. When they got him up on his feet he began to shake like he had the palsy—though far worse than any palsy she’d ever seen—moving his eyes around like he was spastic. “Get away! Bbbb…ear!” And it wasn’t anything physical; she was sure of it. He’d been almost hysterical with fear. Poor Joe hadn’t known quite what to do, and had almost dropped Hector on the floor.

  She could hear her tenants stirring on both floors above her ground-floor bedroom. Wasn’t much you could hide in an old house; sound traveled too well through the loose and softening boards. She supposed she should get up and start fixing them all some breakfast, much as she hated the idea this morning. She just hadn’t been herself lately, and for the first time in her life since her father died, she found she didn’t enjoy taking care of people. Something funny about the weather, or maybe it was just changes in her because of age. Whatever, things seemed vaguely out of whack, unbalanced. It made her agitated and cranky.

  Perhaps some handsome elderly man would come by one of these days and take her away to his big house in Knoxville. Could be. She chuckled aloud and climbed into her quilted slippers.

  Reed’s cold was worse, much worse. He felt terrible: his nose aching, chest and throat inflamed. As the plane neared the Kentucky state line, he’d developed a bad cough, a cough that had two stewardesses immediately at his side with alarm in their faces, the elderly black man next to him pounding his back and making solicitous comments. It was embarrassing, but he’d appreciated the attention; he’d been scared, and didn’t want to be alone.