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

by Chet Williamson

  So you’re a martyr like Grandier?

  No, he was guilty. He made a deal with Zabulon in the order of Seraphims, didn’t you know?

  Matthew scowled. Who cared, either way? It had nothing to do with Summerfell. Forget about that shit and be straight with me, damn it. I’ve come back to pay for my mistakes. I need information. What’s happened while I was gone? How were you using the bones?

  (Debbi was dead.)

  Yes, A.G. said, you did teach me the lessons, but I won’t hold that against you. Not that. Well … maybe …

  And the black line began scuttling forward, clawing at Matthew’s feet.

  Paperboys. Christ on the cross, they’d witnessed everything afterward; it was as if the neighborhood needed someone to record its slow crucifixion after the release of their harvested sins, after the shapes of these iniquities had been set free.

  (Debbi was dead.)

  Matthew had desperately needed to see his mother. At the time he hadn’t located her grave yet, and his father wouldn’t tell him her Social Security number or why she’d been buried in Potter’s Field with the unrevealed dead. His father caught him going through the tax returns and sealed all her papers—why? Just because she’d gone mad, if in fact she had? And why couldn’t the great psychiatrist save her, of all people? Matthew prayed that her soul might find a way back to him, if only for a little while. Just to talk. He couldn’t have imagined how much he would miss her voice. A.G. sat under the elms and wished his own alcoholic mother would croak, or else leave to make someone else sick with her crappy cooking; she did, soon enough, running off that autumn with a redneck trucker in a rusty Freightliner, packing out sides of beef from the slaughterhouse. A.G.’s dad hadn’t cared much.

  These nightmares could kill.

  Glow-in-the-dark Aurora models of movie monsters shuffled across their desks and climbed the covers, green fangs of Bela leered against starlight while the Wolfman’s mangy paws pulled back their sheets. It happened until they came up with the correct incantations to keep their dreams from running wild. Every night for a month Matthew and A.G. sneaked out of their houses after their fathers had gone to bed, met in the park, and practiced the proper gestures. Patterns were crucial and so complex.

  They tried their hardest to keep from falling asleep. Dreams infected their consciences. Ruth managed to meet them by the lake. She’d somehow learned to handle it better than they by not remembering anything. Slapping their cheeks and sniffing pepper, they shivered in the cold, sneezing and drinking from a thermos filled with poorly made coffee. Their spells took on a new reality. Matthew cursed and cultivated his raw desire for retribution. The atonement. He had a nice feel for it even at thirteen. How his face had burned with it, his hands like white-hot metal when the hexes were good.

  The daemons and djinn came anyway.

  Formless in the beginning in their way, sometimes only visions, sometimes not. Watching the sky, Matthew would see a deeper darkness tacked to the rest of the universe, figures dancing up there on rooftops, dipping into open windows and ducking behind dormers. Handfuls of brief, vicious laughter hovered in the treetops.

  And through those nights A.G. shared the responsibility and never tried to make Matthew feel guilty about any of it.

  Paperboys gone collecting.

  They’d been on Cedar Road when Cherry Laudley dug beneath the walnut tree in her backyard, giggling cruelly and occasionally chewing on something. Only two grades ahead of them, at fifteen she’d already been raped by her own cousin and three of his friends. Rumors spread, and the gossip never let up the entire time she was pregnant. Cherry dropped out of school and moved to the other end of town, where the shacks swayed in the wind and old men sat waiting with their shotguns, hoping to spot rabid dogs. Buck Laudley had skipped all inquiries and supposedly left for a job waiting for him on an oil rig.

  They’d seen Cherry carefully toss Buck’s teeth into the pit.

  Matthew and A.G. had skulked along the streets through the following months, smelling the sweet and sickening scent in the breeze blowing through town. They were doing their jobs: collecting.

  They’d gone to see what they could see, capture what couldn’t escape, and hide from what hunted them. Getting around Summerfell at all hours on their bikes, honing their Summerfell Gazette underhand tosses, perfecting the boomerang curve. They’d slunk around Cherry’s yard and picked up some of Buck’s teeth. There was power in bone. They’d peered into her bedroom window, the two of them listening to her talk to the deformed stillborn child, watching her trying to breast-feed it.

  And they had understood something more about the Goat when they heard the dead newborn cry back, “You had to do it, Momma …” Later, after the cops had found what she’d done with Buck’s body, each piece wrapped separately in a garbage bag, buried beneath the walnut tree, organs in the freezer and the skillet, Charters claimed she was schizophrenic.

  She was the first they knew about.

  They’d noticed the shift of seasons. Folks who enjoyed painting were inspired by the drowning crimson of sunsets. There was less fun to be found. (Debbi was dead.) They dreamed of the druids and pagans who had lived here before them, Batman and Robin, Mork and Mindy. Matthew read the Bible continuously and started frequenting the shops in the slim alleyways of Gallows. Despite the New Age contrivances placed upon the old orders, he recognized the real grimoires when he saw them, having studied and knowing what to look for. Several of the gibbering women of Panecraft were pagans, and he listened to their warnings, learning what was madness and what was hysterical presentation, sifting through their babble to discover what lay at the honest heart of their beliefs. The elderly bibliophiles in the bookstores patted his shoulder as he dug for pamphlets and texts no one else would care about; even the rickety and myopic could feel and see signs in this boy, and everyone knew his father.

  He learned about what he hated, staring up at the lighthouse. (He held pillows over his head, trying to stifle his mother’s cries in his mind, Debbi’s whimpers in the blood.) Concentrating on the occult as if it hadn’t already stolen too much of his soul, chest always burning beneath the cold cream, the scars occasionally murmuring his name.

  Seeing Mrs. Gaddis trotting on the road in the drizzle with her overstuffed pocketbook swinging, a kerchief around her head and ankles so thin it was a wonder she could stand at all, feeding the squirrels that would not come to her, three weeks after she was dead.

  Seeing heartwrecked Mr. Gaddis eating the terrified squirrels in the park, in his right hand the pocketknife and in his left the trip wire to his squirrel trap, his wife’s kerchief tied tightly around his head as if to keep his brain from pouring out his ears, still crying and gagging on animal fur as Sheriff Hodges forced the knife out of his hand.

  Jesus, shut up already, Matthew begged.

  Hey, but listen …

  Telephones rang on Pond Boulevard—Judy Ann Culthbert calling him and A.G. inside for a piece of homemade apple pie. Hmm, wouldn’t you boys like some of that? … How about a five-dollar tip for two hardworking, financially conscious young men delivering those heavy papers out in the sun? … Then pleading with Matthew to answer the phone, just to pick up the goddamn thing, it won’t hurt you, see? … It’s only a telephone, but please pick it up for me. A five-dollar tip for both of you, ten dollars, twenty. The wall vibrated with the rage of the ringing. Judy Ann Culthbert reclined on the couch, lifting her skirt and parting her legs now, opening her blouse button by button, fingernails playing across her nipples as something like a grotesque four-legged fish wriggled out from behind the refrigerator, clambered atop her, and began to grunt, mewling without lips as she groaned in response.

  Matthew answered the phone.

  A voice called him by name and told him to come across to the beach (it wasn’t Debbi, it only sounded like her, oh God), to play in the foam and carry away uncommon seashells to impress the prettiest girl in his class (Debbi was, and Debbi was dead). Bring A.G., come back for me.
He stuck the receiver in the microwave and watched as it sparked and melted. He and A.G. attacked the fish creature with a couple of yard-sale lamps Judy Ann had on top of the television. It was the first time Matthew ever attempted an invocation, but the words wouldn’t come correctly, thank Christ, and he utterly failed. The fishboy bled blue ooze, got mad, and crawled out the bay window.

  Judy Ann Culthbert scratched her belly open with a pair of dull scissors, never thanked them, never talked to anyone again. Later, Matthew learned the fishboy’s name was Elemi, from a midlevel circle.

  They collected and found that six more houses on that block were the same. Ruth Cahill lived on Pond Boulevard, and she swore her grandmother would never be her grandmother anymore, the old lady just standing there doing nothing. Ruth kept an awl in her back pocket. Despite her self-imposed amnesia—she didn’t remember the cave, almost didn’t recall Debbi at all—Ruth had unconsciously learned one hex, and she threw it again and again. “Get her away, A.G., please, get her away!”

  I thought the madness was over, Matthew said, the migraine building.

  No, you didn’t. Now the first real thrust of fury, all of the smarm gone. That’s why you left.

  I thought it would come with me.

  We’ve been together forever.

  Yes.

  Soon will be Year One, Anno Satanas, said A.G., really meaning it, as if he truly believed nothing could stop the different dawn. You can’t save them, you can’t even save yourself. I know, I’ve tried. You’ve started to repay your debt too late. I don’t hold you responsible, the disease was loose before it found us, but you should have stayed. You should have watched out for us. For Helen. Jazz. Joey and Jane. Ruth. And me, Mattie. And for me.

  Biting his tongue, Matthew said, Where’s Ruth? Do you have any idea where she or the others might be?

  No, I searched and found nothing. My baby’s gone, Mattie, the bastard finally took her! Such intense hatred, exploding from his depths, both of them lost for a moment in a swill of rancor before reining in the rage. I was never as adept as you, never had the real power, and now she’s gone. Show me the mark.

  No.

  Show me.

  A.G. unclasped his hands and rubbed his legs, carefully easing them out of the lotus position. The pressure abated. If you stay, those scars of the pentagram will be completed, and Year One will begin. That’s the real reason the Goat has brought you home. It’s always loved you best above all others. I tried my hardest and failed. It’s your turn to fight, Mattie.

  You’re right.

  A.G. stood and stretched. He came to the bars and pressed his palms against them. Spheres uncrossing, drifting back into their own realms. If you lose we’re all going to spend an eternity in torment together. The black line shimmied into the cage and spiraled against A.G.’s ankle, a beloved pet returned.

  “Let the kid go,” Matthew said.

  Chapter Four

  From the darkness, into the dim light and silence, the mighty mouse came around again.

  It crawled from the rotted half-inch space between two baseboards that didn’t meet together properly by the heating vent. Brown and sleek, meandering across the rug, the mouse seemed more like a gregarious kitten.

  Staring at the quivering whiskers, Henry Charters couldn’t decide whether to throw his worn copy of Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria or the unfinished tuna fish sandwich that had been lying on his desk all afternoon. The tuna would probably hurt the thing more than the heavy-handedness of Freud, so Charters tossed the thin book. The mighty mouse dodged with a brisk four-paw sidestep and continued to ease its way through the rug.

  I lied and I am getting old, he thought.

  Charters moved his reading lamp aside and picked up the largest of several picture frames sitting on the shelves behind him. When was the last time he’d actually welled up, much less nearly blubbered as he’d done on Mattie Galen’s shoulder? And when had he ever been so nostalgic, feeling the incessant urge to stare at these photographs?

  It took him by surprise. Undoubtedly, hell, any day now his old forty-five records would bring about another round of wistfulness, as well as his school medals and yearbooks. Soon he’d have to curl up with his bowling trophies to go to sleep. It made him ashamed that he could not face these emotions head-on. He could remember his grandparents sitting back in their verandah rocking chairs on Sundays, telling stories of the European villages, perusing captured fractions of a past destroyed by war, turning the pages of their scraps of memory.

  He wiped a hand over the dirty glass of the frame, revealing a collage of snipped photos: faces, frowns, ball games and costume parties, barbecues, baby smiles and wedding marches, none of them his own. They were pressed together and fitted in no pattern, without any method. Seeing the pictures of his convoluted life was like watching television with a broken remote, continuously changing channels.

  Switching, hopping. Here his first wife, Sophie, and here his third, Maureen. And with a blue sailor’s cap tugged down over her eyes appeared his second wife, Melissa. So close together here as if they were great friends, though they’d never met. Divorced twice and a widower once: It took him three seconds to remember who had died. Melissa. He shook his head.

  His wristwatch beeped twice, signaling the hour, and he nearly screamed.

  “Jesus!” he breathed, stroking his mustache.

  In the four corners of the collage a man drank a beer at four different Fourth of July picnics, toasting the camera each time. Matthew Galen had either never seen, or couldn’t recall, this side to his father. Seventeen-year-old Matthew making his famous ninety-nine-yard run in the championship game, the day he broke his ankle and met Helen. All of their lives laid bared before one another, so why didn’t Matthew know his father? Ten-year-old Mattie grinning into the camera just above a toothless baby Mattie goo-gooing in a hard pine crib. Sophie sat on the white steps waving, hair swept into a thousand auburn streamers by the wind. A.G. in wrestler’s gear, pinning an opponent on the mat, A.G. in the hospital hallway, crying after falling off his bike and skinning his knee.

  Charters picked up the phone and, out of sheer frustration, toyed with the dial and started to call a number that belonged to no one he knew. He dropped it back into the cradle and checked his watch again: 9:05 P.M. He turned back to the frame and used his handkerchief to clean the remaining dust from the glass.

  He found Matthew’s mother and father sitting on a hammock at the bottom of the collage. She had a smile that brightened every facet of her face, freckles lightly sprinkled in a straight line down her tan nose, eyes slanted with a camera-shy glint of amusement; incredibly beautiful. God, it could get him, it could always get him. Her husband’s arm around her shoulder, her fingers reaching up to touch his but not quite meeting, with his other hand resting possessively on her knee. Look at how Galen stared at his wife’s face. Anyone could tell he was eager to kiss her at every instant. Both of them smiling and perfect together, so that their deaths, which had come and gone long ago, felt as if they’d never actually arrived. These people seemed like fabrications—he could imagine too clearly that they’d never truly existed except in his most humble, human fantasies.

  A knock at the door.

  “Come in,” he said, grateful for the interruption.

  Roger Wakowski entered.

  Standing six feet five, the ex-marine filled the doorway, and Charters could sense the disapprobation in the air. He continued to be amazed at how the guard’s intimidation factor could make a swing from zero to one-eighty if the situation called for it. In Tower C, where men could make razors from their own toenail clippings and made themselves throw up into a security guard’s eyes, there was no one Charters would rather be standing beside if a patient went manic. He had yet to see Wakowski in anything less than total control of circumstances.

  Seven or eight months back a weight lifter on LSD—which appeared to be making a comeback as drug of choice in the area—had undergone a whack attac
k and become psychotic in a bar in Gallows, and had later been wrestled into the hospital cuffed and escorted by two police officers who didn’t want him in their jail. By the time they got him to Panecraft he appeared docile and nearly coherent.

  You heard about men who could snap handcuffs when they were on PCP, but Charters never imagined seeing it like this, the links of the cuffs twisting apart as if in frighteningly slow motion, the weight lifter showing no sign of effort at all, just a dazed frown on his face as the bones in his wrists snapped along with the cuffs. He didn’t know he was in agony. Hands held together double-fisted like lumps of iron, the weight lifter swung his massive arms around violently in two sweeping motions, knocking the officers to the ground where he kneeled and began strangling the men despite his broken wrists, one throttled in each hand. Calmly, with great indifference.

  And with an equal amount of indifference, and three unimaginably forceful, quick, effective blows, Wakowski battered the man unconscious.

  With his self-indulgent grin—when he grinned at all—Roger Wakowski proved to be a hell of a nice guy when you got around to it, and considering the figure he cut when he stood in your doorway, you always got around to it fast. He proved himself quite an actor, as well, when ordered to be. Without question, Wakowski performed the part he’d been assigned. He, too, could lie.

  “I have the tape, sir.”

  Charters pointed to the television console and replaced the picture frame on his shelf. “Put it in the VCR, please. How long did Galen stay?”

  “Nineteen minutes.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was simply rhetorical, Roger. Did he say anything to anyone as he left?”

  “No.”

  “Did you view the visit?”

  “As instructed, I merely taped the meeting.” Only the barest hint of unsettling anger in that voice as Wakowski shoved the tape into the VCR.