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

by Chet Williamson

  But not before Charlie had caught a glimpse of its dark, low profile. A wolf. Hobbamock’s wolf.

  Almost immediately, another image shot through his head. And another. And a third. Three animals, each with almost human features. A bear. A snake. A vulture, no doubt what Abbie calls the dinosaur. Hobbamock’s servants.

  “I’m not sure I can endorse going much further.” Bostwick joined in. “Abbie’s not—”

  “Shhhh!” Charlie hissed, motioning the group to stop. They did. Brad and Bostwick settled Abbie’s stretcher down onto a dry spot away from the stream. She did not open her eyes, although Bostwick thought he detected a change in her breathing. Heavier, as if preparing to rouse herself.

  “What is it?” Brad whispered.

  “Shhh!”

  Another image came into Charlie’s head, departing as quickly as the last. Again Charlie had a fleeting picture of what it was: a boy. A boy who looked familiar. Who looked like . . .

  . . . Jimmy.

  A shiver ran up Charlie’s spine.

  “What is it?” Brad repeated. To this point, he had not been scared. Disconnected, numb, increasingly dubious—but not scared. Charlie’s crazy tales—they just didn’t ring true, not even here traveling down the glistening bowels of this Through-the-Looking-Glass cave. Brad had been more frightened any number of summers listening to ghost stories around a Boy Scout campfire. But now . . . now he had a crushing impulse to retreat. Instinct, the same instinct that a million years earlier had alerted his Neanderthal ancestors to the presence of saber-toothed tigers, was telling him he had to get out, and fast. Something that hadn’t been there even five minutes ago was in the air, beyond the reach of their flashlights, but he could feel it, palpable, unfriendly. Mocking. His mind seized on that word and wouldn’t let go.

  Thomasine could feel it, too. The exact same feeling as last fall, only stronger, steadier. Like laughter . . . but the joke was on them. She could not tell if it was only inside her head or if there really was laughter . . . hushed but audible.

  “Do any of you . . . feel it?” she asked.

  “It’s just a breeze,” Bostwick said.

  “Inside a cave?”

  “No, I suppose there wouldn’t be, now, would there?” the doctor said absently.

  Bostwick flashed his light along the stream, up one wall, along the ceiling, down the other wall, and back to their feet. Charlie probed, too. The roof seemed much lower here, as if the cave were some sort of giant funnel, and they were being sucked into the stem. Except for that, there were no differences, no signs that anyone or anything had ever set foot inside here.

  Except for that feeling.

  “I don’t like it,” Brad said. “It’s like . . . being watched.” Instinctively he knelt by his daughter’s side to offer himself as protection. Abbie’s hair had clumped around her face in a messy tangle; one thin strand disappeared into her mouth. With one hand, he brushed it away. With the other, he clasped her hand. There seemed to be more strength in it than the last time they’d stopped. He didn’t know whether to be encouraged or further disconcerted. He didn’t dare ask Bostwick what it meant.

  “Do you feel it, Charlie?” Thomasine asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Is it him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “His . . . helpers?”

  “Maybe. Maybe a trick. But he knows. He knows we’re here.”

  Charlie focused, hoping for another image, another clue, anything. Silently he invoked the name of his father, not knowing if George Moonlight was along or not. During pniese his father had indicated this was a job that only someone who resided in the land of the living could handle. Charlie concentrated, closing his eyes at one point, the way he sometimes did at the blackjack tables when the dealer’s cards started drifting out of focus. The image of the boy re-formed. It flickered longer than before, then was extinguished.

  There was no doubt this time.

  It was Jimmy. Jimmy suspended between the land of the living and someplace else, some place Charlie had seen in pniese.

  “How long for that medication to take effect?” Charlie asked Bostwick, gesturing toward the doctor’s bag.

  “Until she’s fully conscious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Five minutes. Ten at the outside . . . if it works.”

  “Go ahead and wake her.”

  “You know I can do this only once,” Bostwick explained. “And it’ll last only a few minutes, half an hour at most. If it turns out this isn’t—”

  “Wake her,” Charlie ordered.

  Bostwick was past the point where resistance, even the most lukewarm resistance, was possible. He reached obediently into his bag and dug with a surprisingly steady hand for a vial and a needle. Brad watched, transfixed, while he broke the needle out of its package and uncapped the vial. He filled the needle, turned it upside down, tapped it to settle the methamphetamine, and squeezed the excess air out. A cc or two of liquid squirted onto his hand in a tiny fountain. The needle was ready. He held it like a dart he was preparing to throw.

  Convulsively Brad reached for the doctor’s arm, restraining it. Bostwick stopped uncomplainingly. Brad looked at Charlie, who had moved off several paces. The Indian stood erect, eager, like a bloodhound straining at its leash. He wanted to move. Brad could imagine the muscles of his legs and arms, knotting and unknotting in anticipation of action. We couldn’t stop him now if we tried, Brad thought. And if we tried independently to leave, he might . . .

  He would not allow himself to finish. “Are you sure now’s the time?” was all he said.

  “Positive,” Charlie answered.

  Brad released Bostwick. Mechanically the doctor reached back into his bag for a foil-wrapped alcohol daub. He dropped to a crouch and freed Abbie’s left foot and lower leg from under the blanket and straps. He did not want to inject her arm for fear lingering pain would interfere with her throwing the spear. He explored her calf, found his spot, sterilized it with the alcohol, then plunged the hypodermic deep into the muscle. Abbie’s leg stiffened. It relaxed as soon as he withdrew the needle.

  “Done,” Bostwick announced.

  “Then let’s go,” Charlie ordered.

  “Same way?”

  “Same way.”

  They set off again, more slowly this time. They were not exhausted. On the contrary, the feeling that they were no longer alone, momentarily subsided, had left them in a heightened state of alert, a state accompanied by fresh energy. They moved more slowly only because Charlie was moving more slowly. Never in his life had he been so sensitized, not even on his winningest night in Las Vegas. It was as if his entire body had been changed into some sort of ultrasophisticated warning device, tuned in simultaneously to sight, sound, tactile sensation, the more ethereal wavelengths that plugged him in. He had to move slowly. Any more quickly, and he might vibrate apart.

  They had not gone more than a hundred feet when the methamphetamine had penetrated Abbie’s central nervous system. She tossed, as if encountering something unpleasant in a dream, and then her eyes flitted. Bostwick monitored her, anticipating each new level of consciousness. She licked her teeth, and her tongue darted along her lips, which the doctor had kept from drying and cracking with a thin coating of Vaseline. Her eyes opened. Nothing registered in them at first. Then they began to rove, from Bostwick to Brad to the cave, strange and dark and utterly incomprehensible. Perhaps it was a new neighborhood in the shadow place. Perhaps only another dream . . .

  She raised her head.

  “Easy, honey,” Brad said, balancing over her. “Lie back. We’re just going on a little trip. A little trip inside a cave. Now lie back.”

  Abbie complied.

  Brad fancied the questions that must be going through her mind: Why are we in a cave, Dad? Will we be home soon? You said we would, and you never lie. You’re not lying, are you, Dad? Is it Christmas yet, Dad? Did Santa Claus come? Did I get a Tropical Barbie? A She-Ra, Princess of Power? Will ther
e be any more needles, Dad?

  In truth, she was thinking none of those. In truth, her only question was: Can I go back to the shadow place now?

  “Dad . . .” she began, her voice hoarse, inconsequential.

  “Apple Guy,” he said, comforting her. “You just—”

  The rhamphorhynchus burst from the stream.

  It landed at Abbie’s side, spraying her and everyone with icy water.

  “Jesus Christ!” Bostwick exclaimed, uncertain what he was seeing, certain he would faint. His body went suddenly limp. His end of the stretcher crashed to the ground, toppling Abbie.

  Brad knew immediately. He froze, his panic flaring like flame inside his skull. And I kept saying it was a nightmare. Shadows on the wall. An overactive imagination. Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God. Forgive me, Abbie. Forgive me for not believing you all this time. If only I had known. If only . . .

  Thomasine buried her face in her hands and vented her tears. The rhamphorhynchus did not speak. This was no time for another of its casual chats with the little bitch. This, Hobbamock had made clear, was a different set of stakes. This was war. It snarled, its mouth open impossibly wide, its fangs long and white and viciously sharp. Its head slowly rotated, as if sizing up each of the humans it encountered, one by one by one. As if deciding (Bostwick thought as his bladder threatened to let go) which one to devour first. Abbie was on the ground. She’d toppled into a small pool, landing on her right side, and she was suddenly wet and cold. The effect was not harsh or unpleasant. On the contrary, it was invigorating. Something that could be called a scream escaped from her mouth, but it was not a scream born of terror. It was a scream of protest, of disgust—of extraordinary anger for a child. She hated the beast. Hated it more than anything she’d ever hated. All those nights the beast had scared her, and then, then, when she was sick, it had tried to be her friend. But it was not her friend. Could never be her friend. It was not nice. It did not tell the truth. It told lies, including that very big one about how nice it would be to go away with it.

  The creature advanced on her, beating its wings with a sound like a helicopter rotor.

  She struggled to get to her feet—and was amazed to find this time that she had the strength. She rose, wobbly and weak-kneed, unsteady. But she rose. “Nooooo!” she yelled when she was upright, her posture painful and hunched. “I don’t want to go with you! I don’t want to! You’re bad!” With her fists, she began to flail at the creature. It dodged and danced just out of reach, hissing, teasing, mocking, trying to lure Abbie into the water, black and deep and capable of sucking her under for good.

  Not five seconds had elapsed since the rhamphorhynchus’s appearance. It had taken Charlie most of that time to digest what was going on. Now his mind raced at hyperspeed. He could try the spear, hoping it was effective against the creature, suspecting it was not—that it was potent only against Hobbamock. But he could try. And what if it lodged in the beast and the beast flew off with it? Probably that’s what Hobbamock’s charge to the creature had been. Get the spear. Or get the child.

  The rifle.

  He’d forgotten his rifle. They’d lashed it to Abbie’s stretcher, just in case, along with extra ammunition. Charlie trained his light on the upended stretcher. Come on, damn it, he thought frantically. But there was no sign of the rifle. It might have been tangled in blankets. For all he knew, it might have skidded across the ground into the stream when Bostwick had dropped Abbie. By the time he found the gun, it would be too late.

  With an iron grip, Charlie clasped the shotgun case in his left hand. He would not allow it to be snatched away. Flexing the muscles of his right arm and hand, he advanced. The rhamphorhynchus had abandoned its strategy of trying to lure Abbie into the stream. It was going for the kill. It was on top of her, digging its talons into her shoulders, trying to haul her into the water like a cat dragging a mouse off the killing field for someplace quiet to feast. Only Abbie’s frenzied defense prevented it from succeeding.

  Thomasine, Bostwick—frozen. Brad—kicking, beating ineffectually on the creature with his flashlight, his fist.

  Charlie reached for the rhamphorhynchus’s neck, clamping and unclamping his right fist with the brawn to crush stones. “You filthy bastard,” he sneered, his jaw muscles rippling the skin of his lower face.

  He reached.

  The creature disappeared.

  Soundlessly.

  As if it had never been there, all just a figment of their overburdened imaginations.

  Abbie went for her father’s arms, but she was not crying—yet. Blood trickled from scratch marks on her shoulder where the creature had tried to get its claws into her. If he hadn’t seen them, Brad would have sworn the creature had been a hallucination. But the blood was no illusion. Nor was his daughter’s sudden new state of alertness. With his fingers, he wiped the blood away. Bostwick would have to treat her.

  So the little bitch thinks she too good for us, does she? Hobbamock shrieked into Charlie’s head. Gotten bold all of a sudden? How’s this, then, Chucky? How do you think she’ll do with this one?

  There was a hissing, like steam escaping an antique radiator or a genie being released from a bottle, Brad thought.

  In place of the rhamphorhynchus a doctor materialized. He was dressed in a green scrub suit and wore a white surgical cap and mask.

  But this was not just any doctor. This one glowed, filling the cave with eerie green luminescence, as if it were some strange denizen of the deep sea. This one was almost as tall as the ceiling—thirty, thirty-five feet. In one hand, he brandished a huge scalpel, in the other, a hypodermic.

  “Jesus Christ!” Bostwick exclaimed again. His legs were suddenly energized, and he bolted backward, getting only three strides before he tripped over a small boulder and fell. His flashlight flew out of his hand and skittered across the rocky floor and went out. Bostwick lay in semidarkness, suppressing his moans, rubbing his arm, which was already beginning to swell. The pain radiated into his neck, down to his fingertips. He’d treated enough broken arms to know when he had one himself.

  Abbie might be able to handle the rhamphorhynchus. But not this. Not another needle. Not a needle that big. “No,” she whimpered, the tears she’d been holding back releasing in a tidal surge. “No . . .”

  The rhamphorhynchus reappeared overhead. It circled, its wings fluttering. “Told you so!” it screamed. “Told you so! They’re trying to kill you!”

  Charlie studied the doctor, towering over them. The flying thing had been real. Charlie had smelled its foul breath, felt the beat of its wings, had come within inches of throttling it. It could appear and vanish at will, but it was real. For all its bulk, this other giant seemed not to have mass. It seemed diaphanous, a clever magician’s prop, no more. To prove it to himself, Charlie swept his arm through the giant’s leg; it passed without resistance. This wasn’t real. This was a trick.

  Abbie kicked, attempting to burrow deeper into Brad’s chest.

  “It can’t hurt you, Abbie,” Charlie yelled. “It’s not real!” He couldn’t tell if she’d heard. Again he swept his arm through what should have been solid muscle and bone but was no more substantial than fog. “See?” he shouted. “You can put your hand right through it!” But Abbie was not watching. Not listening. Her face was buried in Brad’s chest.

  Like Bostwick and Thomasine, who’d found shelter crouching behind a boulder, Brad had been jolted into shock. Not a crippling shock—to lung or heart—but a subtler jolt that could lead to catatonia. “We gotta go,” he was intoning, over and over and over. “We gotta go. We gotta go. Gotta go.”

  “No!” Charlie screamed. “That’s what he wants!”

  “We gotta go,” Brad repeated.

  “Gotta go,” Thomasine mimicked.

  Chickenshit, aren’t they, Chucky? Hobbamock gloated inside Charlie’s head. Not mighty and strong like you!

  The giant began to stoop. The needle descended on a trajectory that would take it to the approximate area of
Abbie’s forehead. As unreal as the ghoul-doctor might have been, the needle it wielded seemed the genuine article. It was one of those old-fashioned stainless steel instruments, with two finger loops and a metal plunger. Brad shielded his daughter, covering her eyes with his hands. Thomasine screamed—a high, haunting scream that drilled into Brad’s fear, exacerbating it.

  What do you suppose the little bitch is going to make of that, Chucky? I bet that’s the biggest needle in the world!

  The ghoul-doctor stopped, its needle arm poised over Abbie, as if pinpointing its target. Charlie grabbed for its wrist. His arm passed straight through it.

  The rifle.

  It was a desperate shot, a wild shot, but it was a shot. If anything could stop it, if anything could restore Charlie’s swiftly evaporating authority, that had to be it. He reached for the overturned stretcher, pawed frantically through the blankets Abbie had cast off. It had to be there. Had to. But it was not in the first blanket. Not in the second. The needle continued descending, steadily but not impatiently. Brad stumbled backward, but the ghoul-doctor’s reach was tremendous. It could reach back to the cave entrance if it had to.

  Charlie found the rifle. It was loaded.

  He clicked the safety off, raised it to his shoulder, sighted the ghoul-doctor’s masked head.

  The apparition vanished.

  The cave was filled with laughter—mocking gales of laughter. “Bastard,” Charlie swore. How ridiculous to think an ordinary gun would be of any use. He dropped it.

  “Come on,” he said. “It can’t be much farther.”

  The caravan began to reassemble. Bostwick emerged, only a little punch-drunk, from his boulder hiding place. With his good arm, he began treating Abbie’s scratches with a Betadine sponge. Abbie’s crying tapered off to sniffles. It was long past the point where she could comprehend what they were doing, or why. She wasn’t at all convinced that this wasn’t merely another shadow place, one far more violent and dangerous than the other one.