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

by Chet Williamson

  “So what did they do?” Thomasine asked. She was fascinated by Charlie’s tale. At Brown she had read similar tales of illness among the New England Indians, who, on the whole, were rarely sick. Until the English arrived, that is. The English brought smallpox, measles, diphtheria, other new diseases against which the Indians had very little natural resistance. Some whole tribes had been wiped out; others were nearly destroyed. It was during this period, the 1600s, that a whole new body of Indian legends had arisen, including, she suspected, the one Charlie was relating.

  “From what the powwow had seen and heard”—Charlie picked up the story—”it was obvious that the ‘sickness’ was a threat to the whole tribe, not just that one village closest to the mountain where Hobbamock had his home. The chief sachem called a meeting of the tribal council, and it was decided that there was no choice: The evil spirit must be fought, and he must be defeated, or soon all the children would die. Cautantowwit himself pledged to join in battle. So they gathered the warriors, and they armed themselves with spears and hatchets and bows and arrows, and one day, one thousand strong, they marched to the top of the mountain.

  “The battle went on for two weeks, day and night. Hobbamock was very cunning, and his spirits were very fearsome, and hundreds of warriors were lost, despite the intervention of Cautantowwit. As far away as the ocean the screams of the confrontation could be heard. But in the end Hobbamock was driven back underground, into the cave where he lived, and the entrance to the cave was sealed with rocks, too many for even the god—a badly wounded god now—to move. Hobbamock could not be killed, but he could be injured, and he could be weakened, and ultimately he could be contained.”

  “And the children recovered,” Brad said.

  “The children recovered. Hobbamock, being immortal, lived. Legend has it that it is he, still feeling his wounds, still trapped inside his cave, who is sometimes heard as low thunder.”

  “The noises,” Thomasine said. “One of Brad’s reporters wrote a story about them in the Transcript.”

  “According to the legend,” Charlie said, “Hobbamock can never forget his defeat, no matter how much time goes by. He is angry, and he is eager for another chance in battle. He is eager for more children, who give him strength. But my people never gave him that chance. The memory of that dreadful fight lingered in their minds. That is the reason they would never enter any of the caves on Thunder Rise.”

  “Well, it’s an interesting legend, Charlie,” Brad said. “As Thomasine mentioned, we had a story awhile back about the noises, and we mentioned something about an old Indian legend in it. Too bad my reporter didn’t talk to you. He could have fleshed that part of the story out a little. It was pretty sketchy in spots.”

  Brad wondered if actually Charlie believed any of what he had said or considered it folklore. As Brad did.

  There was no answer in Charlie’s silence.

  After Charlie was gone, Brad and Thomasine made love for the first time.

  “Would you like to stay the night?” Brad asked simply.

  “Yes” was Thomasine’s equally simple answer.

  Arms around each other, carrying half a bottle of wine, they went upstairs to Brad’s room. Brad moved Abbie to her own bed and returned to Thomasine. They fell on his bed, tangled in embrace, lost in deep kisses.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Friday, October 31

  Halloween

  Despite herself, Thomasine giggled the next day when she saw his cabin. When it was seen through her eyes, Charlie had to agree, there were comical elements.

  “Eclectic,” Thomasine pronounced when she’d finished laughing.

  “That’s not the word you were really thinking,” he said good-naturedly.

  But it really was.

  How else to describe the disparate elements of his environment? The collision of old and new, synthetic and natural, traditional Quidneck and contemporary American? What else but eclectic? What a wealth of detail for her thesis. There was a book in Charlie Moonlight, a book that would not only educate but entertain. Yes, she thought, thrilled once again at having discovered him. A more valuable subject you’d be hard pressed to find.

  Next to the wood stove there was a twenty-five-inch floor-model color TV. On top of the TV, a videocassette recorder and a library of early Woody Allen films, which were next to a pile of books on Indian culture. In the kitchen, cabinets full of canned goods, over a counter with fresh vegetables and three skinned rabbits, which he would soon make into stew. Outside the front door, his Honda generator, whose cord ran through the kitchen, past the sink and the old-fashioned handle pump, and into the living room. In the living room, a Naugahyde reclining chair, surrounded by birchwood chairs he had built.

  “Who’s this?” Thomasine said, examining the only photograph, a picture of a boy—obviously the young Charlie—and an older man.

  “Can’t you tell?”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. He’s been dead a long time.”

  Thomasine picked up the photo for a closer look. “You look happy. Both of you.”

  “We were,” Charlie said respectfully. “I loved the man. He was good, strong, gentle. He respected nature. He loved his wife and his son with all his heart. You can’t ask for more.”

  “No, you can’t,” Thomasine agreed.

  She replaced the photograph on the mantel. For some reason, hearing Charlie mention his father had reminded her of the dinner at Brad’s.

  “That was a pretty intriguing story you told last night,” she said. “About the legend of Thunder Rise and the Great Evil Spirit.”

  “Intriguing?”

  “I mean, it’s a marvelous legend. It shows a lot of imagination. There certainly were easier ways to explain the noises in Thunder Rise. I mean, look what the white settlers decided they were: thunder. You Quidnecks came up with an evil god trapped inside a cave after a gargantuan battle. It’s, well, highly creative.”

  Charlie didn’t respond. Thomasine was learning not to take offense at his silences. He wasn’t brooding, he’d let her know early on. Wasn’t offended, wasn’t trying to insult or put off. His silences meant he was thinking.

  “You think it’s more than a story, don’t you?” she finally said. “More than a folktale.”

  Charlie sidestepped the question. “Stories about Hobbamock have been with the tribe for centuries,” he answered. “This is but one of many.”

  “And you’ve told me a couple of the others.” Thomasine persisted. “None with the conviction of last night. Hearing about Abbie’s nightmares really bothered you. I could tell.”

  Charlie wondered if Thomasine knew Abbie wasn’t the only child in Morgantown who had been having nightmares the last several weeks. And he didn’t just mean Jimmy. Ginny had told him that several of her students had been experiencing recurring bad dreams, apparently quite vivid and forceful. Bad dreams, their parents had related, with common animal themes. Bears . . . wolves . . . snakes . . . a flying creature some said was a dinosaur, others said was a vulture, almost never seen in the Northeast anymore. Dreams that sounded disturbingly similar to Charlie’s own. No one, not the doctors, not the parents, not Ginny, not Brad or Thomasine last night, appeared to have drawn a strong connection between the nightmares and the sickness . . . and maybe there wasn’t a strong connection.

  Maybe it was too incredibly farfetched.

  Probably it was.

  “I’ve been having dreams of my own,” Charlie stated.

  “Nightmares?”

  “You would call them that. I would say I have been visited by spirits.”

  “What kinds of spirits?”

  “I don’t know. Dark spirits. Animals.”

  “Are they evil?”

  He hesitated before saying, “Yes.”

  “Does that worry you?” She was trying to draw him out.

  “It doesn’t leave me happy. Would it you?”

  Charlie lit up a Marlboro and drew deeply into his lungs. It was a cur
ious relationship that was developing between him and Thomasine. The woman was a stranger—funny, well spoken, smart as a whip, but still a stranger. She claimed to be a scholar, a breed of people he’d always distrusted for their arrogance and contempt.

  It would have been easy to dismiss her as someone who had tiptoed down from her ivory tower to mingle momentarily with the savages. Someone who soon enough would retreat back to academia, where, over cocktails, or an afternoon tea, she could regale her upper-crust friends with amusing tales of the tall half-Indian with the funny habits and the long ponytail.

  But Charlie had always trusted his instincts, been a good judge of character. And he liked this woman with the brown hair and excitable eyes. He’d liked her within five minutes of meeting her; that was why he had agreed to be her subject. There was a bonus. She seemed to have genuine empathy for the modern Indian’s plight. Seemed to believe in the virtue of the old ways, even if recognizing, as did he, the impracticality of many of them today. It seemed more than academic onanism, this thesis of hers. More than once he’d insisted she had to have Indian blood. She swore she didn’t.

  “Could Hobbamock return?” Thomasine asked. “I mean, could he get out of his cave?”

  “No. At least I never heard he could. Not on his own. But he could be let out. Someone could release him—intentionally or by accident. It happened once, my father said. Lucky for the tribe, he was returned.”

  “Do you think he’s out now? Is that what you’re leading up to?”

  “I don’t know.” It was a truthful answer. It seemed he didn’t know a lot lately.

  “But you believe in Hobbamock?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believe he’s behind the sickness?”

  “I—I can’t answer that. I’m inclined to, I suppose, yes.”

  “You know about the noises being louder than usual this summer and fall, of course.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard them myself, here in this cabin. As recently as last week.”

  “And you know about the children being sick.”

  “My nephew’s one of them.”

  “Abbie’s nightmares would fit into the legend, wouldn’t they?”

  “Yes. Jimmy’s, too. He sees a wolf. And there are other children who’ve been having nightmares, if that’s the right word—how many, I don’t have any idea. Ginny says there’s been talk about them at school. Of course, the dreams have been overshadowed by the sickness. I would expect that. Quidneck beliefs aren’t on the curriculum, last I checked,” he said.

  “Do any of these people know of the legend?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Ginny?”

  “No. The old stories have pretty much died away. You know that.”

  Outside darkness was gathering. In town the children would soon be trick-or-treating. They would have to dress warmly, Charlie thought. The afternoon high had only been about forty, and now the temperature was approaching freezing. When he came home, the air had had the certain feel of snow. Before the clouds had obscured it completely, he’d seen a ring around the moon.

  Charlie stoked the wood stove, sending a blizzard of sparks up the chimney. Ordinarily it was the kind of evening he would have felt at peace. Ordinarily he would have stoked the fire, sat by it, and either read or watched one of his movies as he drifted off to sleep. But sleep would be difficult tonight, he knew, and when it came, it would be tortured.

  “He doesn’t put much stock in such beliefs, does he?” Charlie said.

  “Who?”

  “Your friend.”

  “Brad has a more clinical mind,” she said, not disparagingly. “I think it comes from being in journalism so long. There’s very little room for gray; it’s mostly blacks and whites.”

  She remembered how Brad had politely dismissed Charlie’s story after the Indian had left. Charlie was right—Brad did put very little stock in Indian legends or any other kind of legend. “Very interesting,” he’d said, careful not to mention how unnerving Charlie’s “guess” about Abbie’s nickname had been.

  Thomasine hadn’t exactly embraced the legend of Thunder Rise, either. If an anthropologist swallowed every story she came across, the contradictions would mount until ultimately she would be left with nothing to credit. Still, she had a rule of always keeping her mind open. Her professors had taught her that there was usually a kernel of truth in even the most bizarre legend or myth, not to mention the possible insights into the culture that had spawned them. Unlike Brad, who put his money on technology and science, Thomasine believed that man did not have all the answers. Likely never would.

  “That’s why I left so much out,” Charlie said. “Because of Brad.”

  “What did you leave out?”

  Charlie’s eyes roamed around the room, as if what he were about to say were hidden up there on a wall. “The part about the souls,” he said.

  “What souls?” She was mystified.

  “The children’s. According to the legend, Hobbamock stole them. Collected them, to be more correct, the way one might collect seashells or pretty rocks. That’s what caused the sickness—his theft of souls. That’s what killed the children before we were victorious on Thunder Rise. Slowly, bit by bit, day by day, he separated their souls from them.”

  Thomasine had read of such beliefs—among other places, in a tribe tucked away in a remote corner of the Amazon rain forest. But as far as she knew, the concept of soul theft was rare and even more rarely documented. Which made it all the more interesting.

  “But why torture them so?” she asked. “Why not trick the children? Bribe them somehow, like the Pied Piper of Hamelin?”

  “Because he derives great pleasure from making them sick. This is an evil god, Thomasine. Vile. The closest thing Christianity has to him is Satan.”

  “Did Hobbamock steal adult souls, too?”

  “No,” Charlie said firmly.

  “Why not?”

  “Who would want them? The innocence is gone. A grown-up soul is a hardened thing, damaged goods. But children . . . the souls of children are still pure. Still sparkling clean and virtuous—Abbie or my Jimmy, for example. If you wanted to, you could look at it like honeybees, seeking nectar. Instinctively Hobbamock knows to pass by the dried-up flower in favor of the fresh bloom.

  “Perhaps in time, having exhausted the children within his reach—the children around Thunder Rise—he might turn to adults. Or perhaps he’d extend past Thunder Rise for more children. There’s a world of children. Having consumed what was at his doorstep, he might go in search of others. Might leave Thunder Rise and go on some kind of world hunt. I don’t know. I have no idea of his appetite or the limits of his powers. I don’t know they’ve ever been tested. He has never been allowed to get that far.”

  “But you believe he is gaining strength.”

  “Yes.”

  “With every soul he takes,” Thomasine ventured.

  “Exactly. Like an animal feeding. Like—like a bear in March, breaking its hibernation. Yes,” he said solemnly, “I think I believe that. And I think I believe there would come a point where it would be extraordinarily difficult—I hesitate to say impossible—to stop him.”

  “What point is that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  The conversation changed soon after that. But the echo of it lingered while Charlie made a quick rabbit stew, and the two of them prepared to eat.

  “I want to be an Indian,” Abbie announced as the last light of the day drained from the sky over Thunder Rise.

  “But I thought you were going to be a ballerina,” said Brad, who’d scrounged the necessary ingredients of the costume from Mrs. Fitzpatrick when he’d picked up Abbie on the way home from work.

  “Yeah, but I changed my mind,” Abbie said. “Can’t I, Daddy? Please?”

  “But we don’t have the right costume.”

  “We can make it, silly. Mrs. Fitzpatrick taught me how to cut feathers from construction paper. They look real neat.”<
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  “What about the rest of it?”

  “You use finger paints on your face. A skirt for the skirt, which is supposed to be from a deer. And black knee socks for the leggings. That’s what girl Indians put on their legs. And, oh—my old slippers look just like moccasins.”

  “Has Mrs. F. been talking to you about the Quidnecks again?”

  “Yup. Plus Charlie, last night. Remember?”

  “OK. I give in.” He looked at the kitchen clock. “But let’s get a move on. It’s almost six-thirty.”

  “Thank you, Daddy.”

  They drove—there was no other way to trick-or-treat in their neck of the woods, Brad had been advised—but by eight o’clock they’d still only managed to make a dozen stops, including the Ellises, the McDonalds, Thomasine, and Mrs. Fitzpatrick.

  “You look like a real Indian,” said Dexter, opening his door and depositing a fistful of Milky Ways into her shopping bag. The publisher was their last stop.

  “Thanks,” Abbie beamed.

  “And you look like you would appreciate a beer,” Dexter said to his editor. “Do you have time for one? If I get this young Indian a can of Coke?”

  “It’s really past her bedtime,” Brad protested.

  “A quick one.”

  “Yeah, a quick one, Dad. Don’t be a poop.”

  “Well, I can see I’m outnumbered. A beer and a Coke it is,” Brad said, closing the door behind them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Saturday, November 1

  Overnight it had snowed. Old-timers couldn’t recall ever seeing snow this early, and they would marvel about it through the weekend and well into next week. Almost two inches blanketed Morgantown—not quite enough to bring out the plows, but more than ample to make driving treacherous.

  Or hair-raising, if you were a little nutty behind the wheel. Brad was this morning, the first day of November, as he and Abbie headed for the market.

  “Ooooohhhhh!” Abbie shrieked in pure pleasure as Brad fishtailed the Mustang down Thunder Rise Road.