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

by Chet Williamson

  But the echoes told Wakowski differently. He’d heard something in the tunnels below. Like the sound of cloven hooves.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The house hadn’t changed much.

  His father would kiss his mother in that doorway beneath the mistletoe hanging there at Christmas. It didn’t make any difference what they were doing—writing letters, reading medical journals—mistletoe seemed to speak to them like music calling dancers, as his father cleared his throat waiting, and his mother came down the stairway laughing. While she cooked, his dad would come up behind her, grab her around the waist, and twirl her into his arms, a little Fred Astaire move thrown in, the only one he’d ever mastered. She’d smile and pretend to protest as he carried her like that to the doorway. When their friends came by, stamping snow off their shoes, his parents would be in the door, already giddy and kissing, until the neighbors threw up their hands.

  Darkness descended.

  Fading sunlight settled behind the thick branches of the trees that ringed the front yard. Matthew stood watching the remnants of home, grinning in his own fashion as some of the good memories returned and ebbed and flowed, yet keenly aware of worse ones rippling below his present thoughts, waiting to shove through.

  It had been like this for nearly fifteen years, since his mother had been brought to Panecraft.

  His grin embarrassed him. His laughter couldn’t last, and much of the time he didn’t miss it. Seated in the back of the Krunch, looking out at the woodlands, he would sometimes kiss the ketchup out of the corners of Helen’s mouth as she ate her curly fries. He liked to listen to her analyzing him; it sounded so harmless the way she did it. She knew his depths, and it irritated her that she couldn’t share everything. Her talk went around in circles, and she’d even gone so far as to try to get him high and drunk, shotgunning beer. A simple spell could guard against the liquor when he chose to use it. She’d make exotic love to him, hoping to screw the pain away, believing the scars on his chest were from a childhood accident—he’d forgotten what story he’d told her.

  Helen had wanted him to see a psychiatrist, which was unthinkable—as awful as it was wasteful. His father was a psychiatrist, and all his father’s friends who’d filled the house at Christmas. Matthew had listened to dream interpretation throughout his childhood, until the content of dreams no longer mattered.

  The men had wrestled with and eventually killed his mother, and his father would not tell him where she was buried.

  That resentment would never be resolved. One time, Helen had talked with his father, which Matthew had eventually stopped doing. His dad had listened in silence for a long while, until muttering a few carefully chosen words that caused Helen to sob and flee. She never told him what his father had said.

  The house had not changed much, which surprised him. From the outside it looked as though no one had been here since the night he’d left town. Shutters hung askew in the wind, methodically clapping against the battered verandah rails. Hundreds of shingles littered the dead lawn and his mother’s forsaken flower garden. The picket fence—Jesus Christ, he’d almost forgotten, they really had owned a white picket fence—was stripped of paint, blunt points of splintered wood leaning helter-skelter through the surrounding brush. He tried the front door and found it unlocked but jammed shut. He could see that most of the panes in the windows were cracked but not yet shattered.

  He would burn it.

  Here at the edge of the park, away from the other houses of Summerfell, his family had been left without a name for their street. There was merely a sharply bent little road of gravel hidden behind a jutting screen of evergreens, virtually invisible and inaccessible except to those who knew of it. His father liked it that way, for reasons never fully explained or discussed. Without any name or number, their mail was addressed to #1 S. Park Road, an address that didn’t exist. Now Matthew realized how well all these facts lent themselves to the milieu of the quiet October world.

  He braced his shoulder against the front door, shoved it open, and walked in.

  The scars tittered.

  The furniture had been removed—auctioned off, he supposed, to pay the taxes, or simply stolen. For a moment he wondered who in town had taken which pieces, who was seated tonight at the dining room table that had been in his family for generations, back when there had been a family. A torn and fungus-covered settee and the sticks of a broken wooden chair lying in a heap were all that was left. The floorboards creaked under his weight as he crossed the room. Stale air made him cough as he wandered window to window. Rats scurried in other halls, the attic alive with noise. Walking up the stairs, he listened to the branches scrape the roof like the broken hands of tortured witches.

  Matthew stepped into the second-floor corridor and opened a door, his hair whirling into his eyes. The oak tree outside his bedroom window had turned in mid-reach and clawed its way inside, thrusting and crushing the entire window frame.

  He grunted and stared down the length of the tree, thinking, I should’ve expected this. Leaves blew everywhere in the room. The boughs wavered.

  The scents of fall. This scene brought him back to the days when they would go trick-or-treating in their costumes: Dracula, Superman, Wonder Woman, and Debbi could never decide if she wanted to be Pippi Longstocking or Samantha from Bewitched. The wind was always rustling in the trees. Instigating cats and unbemused dogs chased each other across the lawns, yard gates clanking open and shut, and the other kids prowling the area like the goblins they pretended to be. You couldn’t get away.

  Every hedge hid the ghosts of your friends. Halloween was the only holiday you didn’t have your gruesome, unknown relatives grabbing handfuls of your hair to kill you with their tobacco-tasting cow mouths and smear waxy lipstick over your cheeks. The only holiday you were allowed to roam.

  Debbi had never been in his bedroom.

  There was something ludicrous in that.

  Matthew rubbed his nose. The pain was gone. He glanced at the blood on his shirt, knowing it could call the djinn to him and caring little. He’d come so close to murdering Hodges. It disgusted him to know just how natural and good the hate felt to well inside. The sheriff had been fractured a long time ago, and never fully recovered. All he had to do was press a bit harder on the man’s mind, the temptation to kill always nibbling at his mercy.

  Leaning back against a limb of the intruding oak, he stared at the door to his closet. He closed his eyes, shoved a fist into an open palm. A sign of peace, a show of control and strength, nothing arcane about this particular craft.

  But the words were different, rising within him, sentences from a long-dead language. He mouthed extinct phrases and names of power that only a handful of people alive could understand, and even fewer could pronounce correctly. “ … ezphares irion estyion eryona onera soter Sbaoth Adonay …”

  Breeze played against his collar, tonguing his neck.

  Threads of protection snapped one by one. He heard them audibly breaking, whip-cracking around the room. Rats scrambled and squeaked in the attic, scratching at the corners of the water-stained ceiling.

  He visualized his parents’ wedding photo Dad in the tux, Mother so radiant, the white of the veil so striking against the black of her hair, both of them with so many glowing teeth—woven as a tapestry, blanketing and guarding the closet, now unwinding, faster and faster as he pulled at the image with his mind. It took perhaps five seconds for him to maneuver through his own defenses. Concentrated on their eyes. Their smiles, of course. When the last thread had been lifted, Matthew dropped his hands. Insects buzzed and luna moths fluttered before him.

  He opened the closet door.

  Inside, packed beneath the carpet, were his old Aurora models. The Wolfman, Dracula, the Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Jekyll in the process of becoming Mr. Hyde, and the Frankenstein Monster (Jesus, you got into more arguments in grade school because you always corrected your peers by never referring to the Monster as Frankenstein, the name of his crea
tor). Certain pieces were luminescent; the gravestone behind the Lord of the Undead glowed green, a rat at the Phantom’s feet, Jekyll’s spilled chemicals and the test tube he drank from.

  Matthew stooped and kicked at the baseboards and the surrounding molding until they slid along carefully filed ruts and came free. It didn’t take long for him to remove the slats, revealing a cubbyhole.

  Here he’d kept the books that had cost him more than his paper route money; a dealer in Gallows who asked for three of his pubic hairs—which had to be plucked in the light of a perfect half-moon—in exchange for an ancient Latin grimoire transcribed by Pope Sylvester II as dictated by his demon mistress Mendiana, a book that sweats when holy men die. Pubic hair from young boys and girls was sometimes used to make love potions. The notion intrigued him, and he soon came to understand that the bookseller was a fraud more interested in selling talismans and ersatz charms, but who had a glimmer of the arcane affixed to him from generations past.

  Touching the smooth wood of his hiding place, he let his hands brush over the leather of the books. Again he was puzzled as to why the Goat or some other agent had not at least tried to take them, after all this time. He lifted the tomes free, centuries-old binding crackling in his hands as he paged through the texts. The Key of Solomon and The Enchiridion by Pope Leo Ill, and The Grand Grimoire with its instructions for necromancy that Arthur Edward Waite, another member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, believed “only a dangerous maniac or irreclaimable criminal” would dare to recite from. A.G. had called Waite a wuss. Matthew agreed.

  Off to one side, wrapped several times in soft cloth, lay the mirror in which they’d performed their scrying, divining the future from visions seen inside the glass. It had once been his mother’s mirror, given to him by her grandmother, and in age resided power. As a child, Mom had brushed her hair one hundred times each night in long, nonstop movements of elegance, straight through her shifting black tresses, just as her grandmother had been taught as a girl. He used to watch them both when they were children, the memory retained in the scrying glass.

  Before his mother had taken to swimming naked in the lake, she used to check herself in the mirror all the time and primp her hair for his father. Matthew looked at his features and couldn’t find any resemblance to her, not even in the eyes where a similar insanity reigned.

  She’d danced in the storms and vaulted waist-high hedges like a ballerina leaping across the span of a stage, finally hearing something other than the mistletoe urging her on to such grace. Matthew had been proud of her, looking down at night from his bedroom window. His father was openly crying by then, wringing his pale hands and holding his head down between his knees a lot, silhouetted in the light of the reading lamp as he pored over outdated Freud, sitting in his chair without speaking or moving.

  Matthew, now possessing two pairs of eyes and twin sets of memories, understood that he’d been an entirely different person before the runes. The same recollections could make him both smile and cry, as when he saw his father falling on the sidewalk, mumbling and giggling. As a child he’d laughed at that, good-naturedly as his father had once laughed, but now understood that the man had been drunk again. His father wept in those days, but dismissed the incidents without word; Matthew followed suit, as you were supposed to follow your father.

  He had seen nothing wrong in the way his mother walked the empty streets before dawn with her nightgown flowing behind her like a wedding dress, humming a soft song to herself before shrieking and arching herself against fallen logs, as though being beaten, or loved too much.

  The rage rushed up in him. “Why was that so horrible?” he said, calling on his father, seeking to collect. “Couldn’t you live with it? Was it so bad compared to what happened?” His fingernails dug into the leather.

  Half of him enjoyed the thought of his old man rotting in Hell.

  He could afford to condemn his father when the fury swelled and twisted inside his chest. His plays were filled with irresolution; he’d made a career of bitterness and the irredeemable. The myth of his father had been broken beneath the truth of the man, shattered by adolescent preconceptions, and further destroyed by the horror in the caves. Matthew soon lost any sense of his father’s authority, realizing the Goat owned everything, and after his mother was put away, he lost all sense of the reality of his father as well.

  The oak tree clapped him on the back.

  He put the mirror in his jacket pocket and reviewed the texts, finding that he had not forgotten anything of importance. He put the grimoires back in their slots and replaced the boards, shut the closet door, and repeated those steps it took to reweave his parents’ tapestry of protection, forging a bond of spirit between himself and the hidden place.

  Leaves flitted across the floor, catching at his feet.

  He hopped up into the crook of the oak, where it felt natural and somewhat safer to be in physical contact with another living force, especially one that had been with him since birth, guarding the home. Druids had found solace in their gardens and earth gods, and were rewarded for their faith.

  Matthew touched the mirror for fortitude and support, letting the heaving branches strike against his arms, slapping his jacket. His breathing quickly became shallow as he set himself to the task, a sickening cold sweat dripping down his back, anxiety and nausea rising.

  A cat screeched in the park not too distantly and he wondered if it was being burned alive.

  He took off the jacket and hung it on the branch beside him, pulled out his shirttails and undid the buttons, noticing how much gray now tinged his chest hairs, and him not yet twenty-five. He stared down at the two triangular marks that had been burned into his chest. Two-fifths of the inverted pentagram, the sign of the Goat, upon him.

  Centering on the darkness behind his eyes, far off behind his brain, in that region of blackness as deep as the range of death’s possibilities, he saw the infinite shades that lay across the landscape. The axis of eternity sat at the back of his skull, where the knowledge of necromancy remained—the raising of the dead—power looming large and red, always the same distance from him, inside the infinity already inside him. Falling and rising, as the circle of the living revolves once again past the dead. He shivered as the wind blew upon the sheen of his sweat. Words bubbled from his throat. Welts appeared as the boughs continued to lash at him, now like a cat-o’-nine-tails, purging him of sin. This evocation would steal yet another part of his soul, the price he would pay the Goat to kill the Goat.

  Matthew wrenched himself sideways, following his father into Hell as he pronounced the ultimate word of power, the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, Yaweh, Jehovah, oh Lord, the most sacred name of God, and the dead girl screamed as the heat hit.

  The blacklash of energy—of life, of this death—punched him out of the tree and sent him high up against the far wall, near the ceiling, arms and legs thrown at awful angles as something in his torso ruptured and his mouth filled with blood. He bounced off the wall, leaving an impression of his body outlined in the cracked paneling.

  Agony worse than the other two times.

  He hit the ground with unimaginable force, the floor’s structural beams snapping beneath his weight as he came down. Sawdust fell. The impact shook rats out of the widened seams in the ceiling. They dropped with loud thunks all around him, squealing with broken bones, crawling over him now and run through his blood. His chest was on fire, the smell of his own burning flesh making him choke. He thought he heard barking, or the bleating of a goat. The malevolent laugh returned once again, cackling as the flames seared his skin, scarring him further. A new voice had been added.

  The rats writhed, their disgusting bristles burning, as they turned over to thrash and bit at him. He spun and smothered the flames with the crumbling leaves and dust beneath him, hauling himself through the filth.

  He raised himself to his knees, and the girl screamed again.

  Matthew groaned and slowly turned his head in her direction, att
empting to stand.

  Joanne Sadler sat shuddering beside the closet door, her arms locked around her calves, moaning, staring at him, the rats dragging themselves across her feet, her eyes murky without pupils. His parents’ wedding photo wavered in the background, billowing behind the cringing dead girl, eclipsing the closet. The juxtaposition made it more difficult for him to approach her. These two spheres should never have been moved together, and now never would be separated. He saw his mother behind the murdered child, the girl behind his mother. Passages from the books recited themselves, chanting, Aieth Gadol Leolam Adonai … His father’s gaze followed wherever he walked, so full of mortality, the kind of stare that a man who could hang himself would have.

  Sobbing. Joanne hid her face against her knees, realizations of life and death fully upon her. Matthew took a step forward but stumbled. The third mark showed that three-fifths of the inverted pentagram had been completed: the Goat’s mouth pointing down, and now the left ear and right horn pointing up. Scabs and scar tissue were already forming. He buttoned his torn, singed shirt over it, put the jacket on, trying to layer these disfigurements.

  He moved to her.

  Telling her, Forgive me.

  “It hurts,” she said, her mouth moving, the voice exactly as it should be, except not a voice at all any longer, though he could hear it. He could imagine her reading her poetry aloud to audiences who could appreciate what she had to offer, soft and humble in the dim lighting. She lifted her chin to face him, those colorless eyes full of pain and contempt. It had been a long time since he’d spoken with the deceased.