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

by Chet Williamson

  It was as if Big Andy had been hiding that stuff all these years, deep inside him, and now was coughing it up like an old man with a diseased gut. You can’t get away from your past…his daddy had always said that. He should have listened to his daddy more. You might ignore your past for a long time, for years, but something would always happen to scrape the scab off, dig away at the ignorance you’d piled over it, and shove that mother lode of guilt and pain right up in your face.

  Something light brown, twisted, patterned like a cobweb, was drifting Charlie’s way. Her mother had made that bridal veil for her…the whole family had been so proud…

  “Mattie…” he choked, and turned. He wasn’t about to see what floated up after it.

  Flames were dancing out of the trees, racing toward the edge of the flooded mine. Charlie stood still, entranced by their terrible beauty. Dancing. Dancing…as they grew closer, he knew it was a woman, her head on fire. Her feet weren’t even touching the ground, and she moved so swiftly she was soon only a few yards in front of him, increasing speed as she neared the dark floodwaters, and rising ever so slightly in the air.

  At the last moment Charlie saw that Inez was right behind her, reaching, her face frozen into a white sheen as she began to enter the damp fog bordering the waters. He reached, and pulled her to him. They fell, tumbling to the edge of the flood.

  A scream made them both look up. The woman with flaming hair twisted within her blazing tresses, suspended several feet over the flood, her bright face a maze of cracks. A naked form flashed out of the woods to their right and plunged over the embankment, her arms outstretched, face exploding into a scream.

  “Doris…” Inez mumbled groggily.

  Charlie shielded his eyes as Doris’s form struck the flaming woman. But the expected burst of fire didn’t come. The two ran together like a wet, dripping sheet, pulsing phosphorescent green and orange within the folds. They fell into the water, the mass turning over slowly, spreading out into what seemed to be a thin layer of pale, melted skin before the darkness swallowed any remains.

  “It’s going to kill the whole town, Charlie,” Inez said quietly.

  Charlie didn’t answer her. He was watching the fog. It was beginning to drift away from the mine, entering the trees a little bit at a time, moving toward the road into town.

  And the dark flood was creeping up on the embankment, following.

  Reed walked out into the living room of his childhood. Little had changed. There was the old radio in the corner, the one on which he’d listened to shows like “The Lone Ranger” and “Jack Benny.” His mother would come right through that shiny wood door beside it and bring him freshly baked cookies. That perfume of hers that smelled like a mix of several kinds of flowers, some of them not at all compatible. And beneath that: the aroma of freshly ironed and starched shirts hanging up in the kitchen. He could almost see her face, her hair a glowing nimbus from the kitchen bulb showing through it into the darkened living room.

  She was always nicer to him with his father away. When his father was there, she was much too frightened. Fear was her magic, he realized, not the sex. Fear made her seem sensual to his father. He had always waited for the day when she would be fed up with Daddy Taylor’s treatment of her, and then maybe she’d slap him. Often Reed had even fantasized her kicking Daddy Taylor out of the house. It had been a silly fantasy; it could never happen.

  Reed wished Carol and the kids could have seen this, so much as it had been when he was a child.

  He felt half-asleep, groggy with the day’s work. Perhaps removing all that dirt had been more taxing than it seemed. Had he really done all that? He couldn’t remember. He slumped into his father’s favorite overstuffed chair. It was a bright blue, and the lace doilies his mother had made for the arms were as neat and white as ever.

  He could not connect the moist smell, however, with anything he was now seeing. He wondered if it was the smell of his mother’s cookies baking.

  He felt peaceful, at home. The radio played quietly. The dust lifted like a shroud into the ceiling, then was absorbed completely into the creamy white plaster.

  The announcer’s voice on the radio suddenly grew garbled and indistinct. He decided to get up to adjust the radio’s knobs but found he could not. He called his mother to please come fix the radio. He could hear her at work in the kitchen, the pots banging, the oven door slamming…

  He watched in fascination as a shadow crept into the room from under the shiny kitchen door. He sat quietly, pleasantly relaxed, as the shadow turned floor, walls, and ceiling a dim greenish color. His mouth began to fill with moisture.

  The bear came roaring out of the fog-shrouded woods, his gut on fire, his throat filled with an agonizing rage that gnawed at his muzzle.

  The old homeplace rose out of the mud before him, and he started forward, his wild eyes fixed on Reed’s window just above the new ground line. He was going to beat that son of his, beat him within an inch of his life. He looked down at his bear body, and gloried in its strength. His eyes burned.

  But he seemed to have trouble getting traction. He looked down: the ground was turning to mire. Pools of water were slowly spreading across the floor of the hollow

  Ben readied himself to move to higher ground. It was a strange thing. There was now a good eight feet of water inside the fog covering Main Street. He could hear the buildings creaking, groaning: one wall of the old hotel had started buckling inward.

  Yet there was no water where he stood. He could have walked right up to where the fog ended, rearing over him like a wall twenty feet high. He could have touched that wall, and found a flood contained behind it, waiting there, with a depth far over his head.

  Yet there was no water where he stood.

  Faces floated in and out of view there, staring at him, speaking to him even though he couldn’t hear any words.

  Just a hum of mixed voices. Like drowning bees.

  Things had fallen apart at Inez Pierce’s boarding house. Several of the tenants had seen the fog out near the town from their windows, and the dark water rising up inside it, and vague, shadowy things within those dark floodwaters no one wanted even to try to identify. They’d run down from their rooms on the third floor, but soon everybody was back up there, crowding the windows, watching the progress of fog and flood, speaking in whispers, wondering what it might all mean.

  “It’s the final times come down upon us,” someone said. No one answered him.

  Somebody, an old-timer, mentioned the flood of ten years ago. Several of the men left in an old wagon, others on foot, on their way down to Four Corners or seeking higher ground. No one knew where Inez might be.

  Joe Manors and two salesmen staying there overnight had their hands full with Hector Pierce; it looked like he’d finally gone off the deep end. Joe could tell this time was different; it scared him…the way Hector’s eyes looked, the colorless quality to his skin, the way his mouth moved, Hector wouldn’t be coming back to them out of this one. He was going to stay in that place, wherever it was.

  “I tell ya he’ll drown! Can’t count on his momma and daddy to save him, no sir! They’s gone crazy since they died! That other boy’s been watchin’!”

  ‘’You gotta stop him! He’s gone crazy!” one of the men shouted at Joe.

  Joe looked down at the old man bucking and snarling on the bed like a wild animal. The sight both saddened and disgusted him. He found himself wondering, vaguely, if he still had bullets for that gun of his.

  Somewhere the phone was ringing. Reed sat up suddenly, reaching for Carol, and closed his hand on the neck of his old teddy bear, its eyes torn out. The teddy bear that shouldn’t have been there at all. He howled savagely and threw the stuffed toy across the living room. It bounced off the now-silent radio.

  The phone still rang, ringing a line into his head, wedging a slowly growing headache there.

  He stood up to answer the phone. Dark, noxious green filled his eyes, his mouth, his lungs. He could hardly
move because of the green holding down his legs. By a strong exertion of will he lifted one foot, then another. He turned slowly, drifting his arms up and out as he made his way toward the phone by the staircase.

  It was like moving through gel, swimming. It was like running in a dream.

  The bear moved swiftly across the damp ground, splashing through the spreading marsh, bellowing in rage and excitement as it approached the familiar window, and the being within tried to forget in his dim and crude way that something else was back with the girl in the trees and fog, now and then watching from the forest’s edge…

  “Reed!” Hector Pierce shouted, in a voice not quite his own. Joe Manors’s skin crawled at the strangeness of it. “When you comin’ home, boy?” The old man laughed harshly. Then a moaning and a crying came from within his chest. Joe started. Hector’s mouth had locked shut, but Joe could still hear it distinctly: a child’s cries, a trapped child’s desperate pleas.

  The phone floated up into Reed’s hand. He held it up to his ear in slow motion.

  “It’s time you were gettin’ home, boy,” his father was saying, his loud voice garbled as if under water. “Long past time. We need you here.”

  Then the moans began, interspersed with the slaps of hard leather against skin, the moans drawing out, dying…

  Reed’s little sister floated past him, her eyes white and cloudy, her small dress torn and streaked with some dark substance, her nose and ears and lips disintegrating into clumps and ribbons of soft flesh that drifted about her head.

  Reed opened his mouth wide, hoping for the greenness to fill him, but it would not.

  Chapter 31

  Ben had been on his way out of town. The spare pickup, the old Chevy, had been hard to start, so hard that at first he thought he’d be stuck here, to face the flood. Maybe that was proper; he’d missed the first one. But finally the engine had fired, and though the truck did sound like a cross between an old washing machine and a vacuum cleaner, it still ran. The old logging road that passed behind his house was barely negotiable, but the main road had been filled by that eerie fog. The logging road ran a little ways up the slope behind the town, then parallel to it for a while before cutting up a narrow hollow past the old Maynard place. From there Ben could take a couple of dirt roads that eventually came out above the Taylor homeplace.

  Maybe he could get Reed out of there before the flood moved up the hollow.

  But Ben stopped in his escape when he heard the gray boards flying apart behind him. He pulled the truck onto a wide place overlooking the town, got out, and leaned against the hood. He should be going, time was short, but it was important that he see the last moments of Simpson Creeks, the town he’d lived in all of his life.

  He watched in fascination as the concrete slab suddenly seemed flexible, buckling all up and down its length like a series of piano keys being played. Great cracks broke the slab into dozens of large pieces, it settled into a rough sort of levelness, then buckled once again, more explosively this time, sending sprays of gravel and plumes of dust high into the air, followed by smaller eruptions of cans, bottles, bits of wood, that had been hiding under the stone.

  Then the shadows slipped out of the cracks, long and narrow with a strange delicacy to their movements. They didn’t linger for Ben to identify any of them, but blended quickly into the lines of the waves, adding a further darkness to the water.

  The surf foamed suddenly whiter over the slab, and then the slab sank beneath the waves, trailing a mass of air bubbles.

  The hotel was the first building to come down, as he would have expected. The north wall buckled in completely and the flood, discovering the breach, pushed in with all its force, expanding the wound and bringing down most of the second story. The other walls wavered, seeming to expand and contract, then the front facade collapsed in all directions with an explosion of bricks. The roof hung on a little longer, bobbing up and down like one of those statues with the bounding, spring-necked head. Then it too fell, bringing down all the uprights with it. The roof spun around loose in the water, then the flood took it down the road and out of town, toward Inez Pierce’s.

  The flooded street was full of shadowy debris at this point, gathering around the main buildings and clustering in pockets here and there. The debris seemed somehow softer in the increasing darkness, with more curves than before.

  Like heads, backs, shoulders, arms, hands.

  He could see them now, the hands grasping at the sides of the cafe, the railroad station, the Parkey house. Shoulders pushing against Simpson’s General Store, his own Feed Store. Bodies massing against every wall. Dark fingers tore at the tar paper covering the Simpson Creeks Post Office, pulling at its small support beams, rending it from the side of the General Store.

  The dark flood rushed in through the door of his Feed Store, carrying a mass of the black shapes with it, and the walls suddenly pushed outward, the building collapsing like a house of cards.

  Dozens of the dark shapes clumped together like black mushrooms on the side of Charlie’s store. There was a brief pause, then the entire building went over on its side. Some of the shapes drifted away on the flood, others slipped inside the fallen structure with the water. Hundreds of cans, bottles, packages, barrels, masses of paper and cardboard, tools, household goods, spread fan-like into the swift-running water.

  Then everything fell silent. Maybe it was all over. But Ben felt compelled to lean forward off the hood, holding his breath, waiting.

  Reflections suddenly broke the darkness of the water. Highlights. Dim lights under the surface. Here and there, a growing clarity of movement.

  When they were first married, Ben and Martha went on a honeymoon trip through Pennsylvania and some of the New England states. One afternoon they had stopped at a shop outside Philadelphia, where an old watchmaker had a model village displayed in his window. Periodically small figures came out of the buildings of that village to perform—clockwork automatons. Fine Swiss movements, the old man had said.

  That model village had looked exactly like Simpson Creeks did at the moment. Bustling with people going about their daily activities.

  Several old-timers walked around the remains of Charlie Simpson’s store, chatting animatedly, gesturing, occasionally picking up cans and bottles out of the water and examining them. Ben recognized “Moldy” Clarke and Jessie Flanders, who’d both been killed in the first flood, but their bodies never found. He could also see—if he could believe his eyes—Bobbie Gibson, who’d died of a heart attack when Ben had been a teenager. Vivid, brighter than life. He could see the bright pinkness of their faces, the dazzling white of their hair. They were much more real than the landscape around them.

  Lizzy Gibson, Bobbie’s ancient mother, was walking down the street using her cane, a paper sack under her arm. Her feet and cane tip touched the surface of the flood and sank no further. Ben couldn’t remember if she’d survived Bobbie or not.

  Johnny Shedako, the Japanese man who’d been many things throughout Ben’s childhood—junk dealer, insurance salesman, farm equipment mechanic—was helping Garter Jones with his corn husker at the site of Ben’s wrecked store. The corn husker was a twisted wreck, rusted throughout, pieces missing, and, unless Ben was mistaken, upside down there in the water.

  Jimmy Decker, Wilson Fenton, and Jackie DeLanny were racing each other down the street, their feet making no noise as they struck the water. They’d all lived in houses in a row along the banks of the main channel of the Simpson Creeks, and had perished when those houses were reduced to kindling by the flood.

  Gillian Marsh was flirting with Harold Specktor near what used to be the cafe. Emil Johannsen was chasing his dog Crawdad up the street. The oil-colored hound had a tail like a snake. When Ben had been six or seven, Mr. Johannsen had spent several hours each week showing off the tricks his dog could do with that tail.

  Ben heard the tinny sound of the bicycle bell and was suddenly a boy again, ten years old and running terrified down the grav
el road past their house. He jerked the truck door open and leaped into the cab.

  Alan Marley passed the pickup slowly on the ancient bicycle, the shiny hell-wheels spinning, spinning in the air a good three feet above the roof of the truck.

  Ben shuddered and tried to pull his eyes away. Marley doffed his hat and cracked his mouth, filling it with shark’s teeth. A great purple birthmark clotted the entire right side of his face; it seemed to move like a separate, living parasite when Marley turned his head.

  Alan Marley had delivered mail for Charlie Simpson’s dad when Mr. Simpson was postmaster. Marley had been the terror of Ben’s childhood, of all the children of that long-ago time. If he caught you out on the road alone, he’d chase you with that bicycle, trying to break a foot or a leg if he could. Cindy Gasson became a cripple because of him. And the worst thing was, none of the adults would believe them; they thought the children had made it up because of Marley’s unfortunate birthmark.

  Then Marley finally killed somebody, little Timmy Peters; Timmy’s brother saw the whole thing and said Marley had ridden back and forth over the three-year-old dozens of times. Later Ben heard the little boy’s neck and back were broken, the ribs crushed into the lungs. Dan Peters caught up with Marley the next day—he’d been riding his bike down to Four Corners trying to get away—and shot him twelve times, reloading as he went. There never was a trial.

  Marley grinned and rang the bell again and again. Ben thought he was going to cry. Then Marley was gone, and there was a tall man in black, preacher-looking clothes striding toward the pickup out of the darkness and the fog ahead. As he neared, Ben could see it was his father, with the same grim face.