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

by Chet Williamson

  Charlie’s eyes had narrowed to cat’s slits.

  There was something more than anger in them. Brad had seen it before, that night Charlie had guessed Abbie’s nickname. It was as if those eyes were an open doorway to somewhere. A threshold to somewhere Brad had never gone, would never want to go. Brad broke eye contact. He had no choice. Charlie’s gaze was too intense. It almost burned.

  Charlie later would feel tremendous guilt over what happened next, happened in lightning-quick fashion. He would chastise himself, and he would come very close to apologizing to Brad—although he would not. But now, his anger exploding as it had that day in court, there was no insight, only instinct.

  Charlie reached down and grabbed Brad by the shoulders. His fingers dug in, causing Brad to wince with the sudden pain. “What the fuck are you—”

  He did not finish. Letting out a tremendous whoop, Charlie lifted him out of his seat.

  Thomasine watched, horrified. She knew how fatigued Charlie still was—the pniese seemed to have aged him five years—and she knew the toll his nightmares and insomnia continued to take. This wasn’t the first time she’d sensed that this was a man on the edge.

  But it was the first time she thought he might go over. “Charlie!” she screamed.

  Charlie had Brad over his head now. The veins in his neck looked ready to burst. His skin was suddenly flushed. Charlie felt nothing. No exertion. No pain. His mind was strangely empty, as if the outburst had temporarily drained it. He didn’t have a plan or a next move. He hadn’t come here with any intention of throwing a man through a window or across a floor, although he clearly had the strength.

  It seemed surreal—this crazed, ponytailed man lofting this smaller, but not small, man with the glasses and button-down shirt. Brad tried to yell, but a strangled gurgle was all that came out. He was too startled to be afraid, but he was embarrassed. And enraged, more so than at any time since his fury with Heather. When this was all over—it would soon be over, wouldn’t it?—Tonto here was going to pay in a big way. The red man might not have a concept of civil liberties, but the white man sure as hell did.

  “You’re going to hurt him!” Thomasine shouted. She looked around wildly for help. Except for the waitress, a busboy, and the cook, who seemed to have disappeared into the kitchen, the diner was deserted.

  “Charlie! Put him down, goddamn it!”

  Thomasine’s words penetrated. As quickly as it had sprung up, the storm was over. Charlie returned Brad to his chair, putting him down almost gently. It reminded Thomasine of a parent returning a slumbering infant to its crib. Brad immediately set about fixing his collar, settling his hair, preening himself, as if that might restore some measure of dignity.

  “Maniac.” He swore at Charlie. “Let’s go,” he said to Thomasine, rising.

  Silently they went to the door. For several minutes Charlie did not move. Then he, too, left.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Wednesday, November 19

  Late the day before, Dexter’s editorial had landed on the desk of the director of the state Department of Health. It was the first Morton C. Smith, M.D., had heard of Morgantown or the goings-on out way out there somewhere at the opposite end of the Massachusetts Turnpike. He was livid. He threatened firings. He made no secret that epidemiologist Dr. Henry R. Hough, a man whose competence had never impressed him, was in greatest danger.

  Hough arrived back at Morgantown Elementary before the students this morning, accompanied by one of the Health Department’s young, and competent, epidemiologists.

  This time they did more than review files. They had a nurse draw blood from every child at the school—sick or not. They took samples of food, paint, water, soil, sending all of them, along with the blood, by Federal Express to the department’s Boston laboratories. They made plans to stay the remainder of the week, so they could interview every parent of every sick child. Per deliberate instruction by the boss, they made themselves extremely accessible to the media (including a paper and radio station from Pittsfield), and they hand delivered an urgent letter from Smith to Dexter. The letter committed the “full resources” of the department “until this situation is settled once and for all.” Without meaning to panic, it hinted at calling in the Centers for Disease Control “the instant it is deemed necessary by a full and thorough review at the highest levels of the Health Department.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Sunday, November 23

  Tom, of Tom’s Turkey Farm, liked Abbie so much that he climbed into the pen and waded through about a million terrified birds until he’d captured the one she had her eye on. He had a hell of a time corralling it. This year, he explained, the birds had been unusually skittish.

  “There,” he said after she’d petted the dumb creature to her heart’s content. From his coat pocket he withdrew a length of twine. “I’ll tie this around it so you’ll be sure to get it on the big day.”

  “Does it hurt when you kill them?” Abbie asked.

  “Oh, no,” Tom lied as he released the turkey, which, along with its brethren, had three days left to live.

  “Honest?”

  “Honest.” He turned to Brad. “Let’s see.” He mused. “It’s Sunday today. You want to pick it up Tuesday or Wednesday?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “Tastiest bird you’ll ever have,” he said, heading back to the farmhouse. “And that’s my personal guarantee.”

  Brad and Abbie lingered by the pens after he had disappeared into the house. Abbie had eaten turkey before, of course, but this, Brad thought, was a heck of a lot better than plucking a plastic-wrapped carcass out of the freezer case. This was what living in the country was all about.

  “Mommy’s not coming, is she?” Abbie still didn’t understand—not completely—that Heather and Brad hated each other.

  “No, honey,” Brad said.

  “And I’m not going there, am I?”

  “Not unless you want to. You don’t want to, do you?” he prodded.

  “Nah. I didn’t have much fun last time. She was out with her doctor friend mostly.”

  “I know,” Brad said, incensed again.

  “I don’t think she’ll miss me.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well, it’s true,” Abbie said, her tone clipped and cold. Two months ago, when she spoke about her mother, Abbie’s sentences often were laced with emotion: sorrow, perhaps guilt, maybe a twinge or two of dark, smoldering anger. Now, nothing. She could as easily have been talking about what vegetables they were going to serve with their turkey. Brad decided it was another positive sign. Time, the great healer. Knock on wood, her nightmares had been slacking off lately. It had been a week since her last one. Prohibiting dinosaur books at bedtime, he reasoned, had been the smartest move he’d made in a long time. He didn’t know why he hadn’t put his foot down sooner.

  “We’ll have Thanksgiving here,” he said.

  “You mean at Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s?”

  “I think she sees enough of you, young lady, during the week,” he said good-humoredly. “Dig me, pygmy?”

  “Is Thomasine coming?”

  “No, she’s going to her parents’,” Brad said. Since the—what would you call it, altercation? Comedy? Absurdity?—with Charlie, things had been cool with Thomasine. Although she wouldn’t say it, he knew she blamed him for what had happened. Brad was convinced no permanent damage had been done in their relationship, but he acknowledged that a few days apart could do no harm.

  “Can Jimmy come?”

  “I think he’ll be at his house,” Brad said.

  “You mean it’s gonna be just you and me?”

  Brad was crushed. “Is that so bad?”

  “Of course not, Dad,” she said enthusiastically. “That’s good!”

  “I was beginning to wonder.”

  “Can I help with the dressing?”

  “Sure,” Brad said. “You can help with everything.”

  “Oh, goody!” she bubbled.

 
Behind them the turkeys kept up their mindless gobbling.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Thursday, November 27

  Thanksgiving

  Starting at dawn, it snowed steadily. By nightfall almost a foot had fallen, and the wind had piled the drifts to a yard and deeper. A real corker, showing no signs of letting up. The weatherman had said eighteen inches might get dumped before it broke—sometime after midnight, if they were lucky. Definitely a year for the record books, the old-timers marveled as they dozed, sated, by their wood stoves. No one could remember a crazier one.

  As dusk brought shadows to the second floor of Berkshire Medical, Hank and Susie McDonald continued their vigil. Earlier they’d shuffled down to the cafeteria for their only meal of the day. Staff had done its best to put on a home-style feast, but man has yet to find the secret to disguising institutional food, especially when it’s served on a fiberglass partitioned tray and the salt and pepper come in tiny paper packets. The McDonalds took only a few bites before abandoning it for overly sugared coffee, the new staple of their diet. Before going back up, they exchanged a few words with parents of two other children hospitalized for the same reason as Maureen. It was mindless talk, something about storms and food, and it ended quickly and awkwardly. Misery loves company, but today . . . today misery wanted to be alone.

  What was this, the tenth day of Maureen’s second hospital admission? How long had she been sick? The calendar had lost all meaning. Everything now ran into everything else, the minutes into hours, the hours into days, the days into the worst time of all, the nights. They’d read stories about parents with terminally ill children, always wondering where they’d summoned the amazing courage to get through such ordeals. Now they knew it was neither amazing nor courageous. It was purely a matter of survival, of breathing, napping, picking at tasteless food, drinking endless bad coffee, resuming cigarette habits so proudly broken when their daughter had been born. Everything but the hospital seemed to have slowly receded. Here was reality, only here. Nothing else seemed to exist. Hank had taken LSD once, in high school. It had been like this, a merciless distortion of both time and space.

  They were losing their grip.

  At six, Bostwick dropped by.

  He’d driven his four-wheel-drive Bronco, standard machinery in these parts for a doctor who still believed in house calls. He parked in the deserted doctors’ lot, located between the hospital and woods that stretched over the hills all the way back to Morgantown. Preoccupied with thinking about the three children he was here to see, he did not notice a set of tracks leading from the woods, around the Dumpster and up onto the loading dock—oversize, large-clawed tracks, left clumsily in the snow.

  It did not matter. In another five minutes the wind had erased them.

  He found the family in Maureen’s room. Hank was at the foot of the bed, thumbing mindlessly for the fourth or fifth or millionth time through a dog-eared People magazine. Michael Jackson, it seems, had taken to sleeping in an oxygen chamber in an attempt to slow aging. Hank had to laugh at that one. They all could use an oxygen chamber; he felt he’d aged ten years this fall. Susie was at the other end of the bed. She was stroking her daughter’s brow.

  In the last half hour Maureen had crossed that fine line from semiconsciousness into sleep, as Susie called the feverish, moan-punctuated state her daughter had been slipping into and out of for a week. Since Maureen’s eyes had shut, Susie had been watching the rise and fall of her chest. Was there something different about that motion—one of the few reassuring signs left in this nether-world?

  Or was it only in her mind?

  No, it wasn’t. She could see it plainly. Maureen’s breathing had become more labored. Before, the rise and fall of her chest had been hypnotic. Now it was irregular, disturbing.

  “I don’t like that,” Susie announced to Bostwick.

  “What?”

  “Her breathing. It seems . . . different.” It was not the word on her mind. Susie believed in jinxes.

  Bostwick listened through his stethoscope. He heard a familiar wheeze, pneumonia’s telltale voiceprint. He was convinced it was a complication of the child’s primary disease, not the disease itself, and for two days he’d been flooding her with antibiotics. So far to no effect.

  “She’s still congested,” he said noncommittally.

  “This is worse.”

  Bostwick listened again. “You may be right, but I don’t detect a change.”

  Susie looked at Bostwick and burst into tears. “She’s dying, Doctor,” she sobbed. “I—I can feel it.”

  Bostwick said nothing. Because she was right—Maureen was dying. The only question now was when. Over the last week, as her condition had worsened, he’d found himself wondering morbidly how he was going to tell her parents about the autopsy, how they would have no choice about it. Now that the Health Department was fully involved, it would be a long, nasty affair. A real pathologist’s dream. They would cut everything open, biopsy every part of her, probably take whole organs—brain and liver would be likely candidates—pack them in formaldehyde and ship them hundreds of miles to specialized laboratories, where even more strangers could pick and slice and stain to their heart’s content. It made him sick thinking of it, even though he knew it was the right course, the only course.

  Outside, the wind howled and the snow beat against the window. The heat was at hospital level, but Bostwick still felt a draft. Hank threw Michael Jackson onto a chair and went to his wife to put his arms around her, comforting her. “Let’s take a break,” he suggested when she’d regained a degree of composure. “I think we need one.”

  She nodded.

  All three went downstairs, where a vending machine faithfully dispensed a murky substance, allegedly coffee, twenty-four hours a day.

  Eyes still closed, Maureen sensed the room was empty.

  She didn’t mind.

  Recently she’d found a new place to go. A deeper darkness than that place where dreams were so awful. The shadow place. It had been a scary place at first, but once she’d gotten used to it, she’d found it was safer there. There was no pain there. No dry throat or gnawing feeling in your stomach.

  The bear materialized at the end of her bed.

  “I promised I’d be back,” it whispered.

  Maureen was not aware at first who had spoken—if anyone.

  For longer than it was possible to say—maybe it was her whole life—she had been in the hospital place. A place where there were no pets, no outside, no playmates, no fun, where the smells were all mediciny, and the grown-ups used words you didn’t understand, and they stuck so many tubes and needles into so many parts of you so often you didn’t even feel it anymore. Sometimes, most times, your parents were there at your side, comforting you, promising you it’s going to be all right (but it’s really not, Mommy, is it?), and it was then, only then, that you might have a fleeting pleasant thought. Other times your parents faded from sight, and it was like being lost in the woods on a moonless summer night, your whole body hot, as if it were on fire, and you wanting to scream, but you couldn’t; nothing felt the way it used to.

  “Maureen?”

  The bear moved closer.

  “I’m back. And I have a big surprise.”

  The voice was beginning to penetrate. At first Maureen thought it must be her mother.

  “It’s not Mommy,” the bear corrected her.

  Then it’s Daddy. I love you, Daddy.

  “It’s not him either,” the bear said. “You know who it is, Maureen. It’s me, your friend.”

  Maureen opened her eyes. Lately it took effort to open her eyes. Concentrating, she brought the room into focus. She kept hoping that one of these times she would find herself not in a Very Bad Place but in a Very Nice, Very Bright One: like her back yard, with her swing, and the playhouse Daddy had built, and the flower garden she and Mommy planted every year.

  She kept hoping, and hoping, and—

  She saw the bear. It was grinning,
as usual, its fangs bared.

  She tried to speak, tried to order it away (please, PLEASE, go away), but her mouth wouldn’t work. The tube they’d inserted—the tube that made her mouth so dry—had robbed her of speech.

  “We’re going on a trip tonight, Maureen,” the bear declared.

  No! she wanted to say.

  But she was tired of fighting. Tired of fighting the sickness, tired of fighting the bear, the hospital, everything in the Very Bad Place. She only wanted darkness—the new, good, very deep kind. The shadow place.

  “Come,” the bear invited. “Time’s awasting.”

  She closed her eyes. A crimson froth bubbled on her gums. Pain—a new pain, an all-pervasive pain—stung her entire body.

  “I see you’re ready,” the bear said, touching her forehead in the same place Mommy always did.

  Maureen’s body instinctively stiffened. An observer might have noticed a tiny spark arcing from the girl’s forehead to the bear’s claws. It lasted only a second. Her body began to spasm—lurching, electrocutional spasms that rocked the bed so violently the bear was sure that damn code team would come running. They passed quickly. The new pain did, too. Slowly the knots in her muscles loosened. There was a momentary awareness of trying to enter the shadow place, and not being allowed to, and then there was nothing.

  Maureen exhaled her final breath. It left her without protest, her lungs slowly collapsing. Her left hand, drawn to her face in a gesture of futile defense, flopped back to the mattress.

  Maureen McDonald was dead.

  The bear did not linger. It had what it wanted—and knew where to deliver it, while still fresh.

  A smile flashed across its chops. It did not have to crawl out a window, of course. Crawling in and out of windows, leaving paw prints, skulking around after dark were only tricks. Useful tricks where kids were concerned, tricks that were fun to play on adults, but still only tricks.