He stepped into the dining room next and found exactly the same sort of situation. Aside from a dining room set that had not been dusted in a coon’s age, the place was empty.
But there was a smell in the air that he knew far too well. He’d caught it a few other times in his life, like when Milt Donner—father of Glenn Donner—had decided to hang himself on a Monday and wasn’t found for another five days. Craig’s ears started ringing and he got a rusty sort of taste in his mouth that he always associated with a sudden need to toss his cookies.
He stepped through the threshold between the dining room and the living room and stopped where he stood, his eyes ignoring the furnishings in the room, which had been torn through and ruined with an almost manic intensity, immediately going to the remains of Douglas Habersham.
At least he hoped it was Habersham. It was hard to tell. What he could see was mostly meat and gristle. Craig’s vision went a little gray as he tried to figure out exactly what he was looking at. Near as he could tell it was probably human, but it was sort of hard for him to decide. There wasn’t any skin to see; at least not that he could make out through the blood. And there was nothing at all that resembled a head, even a deflated one. That was the best he could have hoped for, really, because every single bone in the bloody, wet mess had been removed. If he had to hazard a guess, he’d have to go with the bones having been pulled out of what was left of the body.
Craig managed to get all the way to the backyard before his gag reflex forced everything he’d had to eat earlier out of his body. He stayed on his hands and knees, facing a thick tide of puke for several minutes before he could gather the strength to call Glenn on the radio and tell him to come on over, but not before calling the coroner. No, no ambulance. It just wasn’t going to be necessary.
V
Rob Harris wasn’t exactly known for being squeamish. Between his insatiable fascination with serial killers, autopsy photos, and cheesy horror movies, he’d long since earned the nickname “ghoul.” Still, even by his standards, the crime scene was disgusting. He snapped the photos and left everything else to the professionals; in this case, his father. Howard Harris was a family physician by preference, but he didn’t usually mind doing a little side work as the local coroner. Damn near every county needed one, and just of late Melmouth County was running low on them. He had no idea what, exactly, had happened to Nick Muller while he was in Utica, but whatever it was, it had cost Melmouth a fine medical examiner. Until the county commissioners finally decided what the hell they were going to do about replacing the man who’d been dead for the last four months, they’d asked a few of the local physicians in various and sundry townships to handle matters as best they could. It wasn’t really a problem in this case, as Rob’s dad had been doing that anyway for as long as he’d been a doctor. Coroner was an appointed position: Medical Examiner was an entirely different thing, and since coroners came and went, it wasn’t at all unusual for the local doctors in the area to do double duty.
But most of those county types would have probably had embolisms if they knew he had his teenage son taking the crime scene photos. Then again, most of them didn’t have an award- winning amateur photographer for a son, and even if they did, the odds of the kid also loving to look over the grisly remains were probably pretty damned slim.
Rob worked over the remains first, taking both black and white and color photographs from every angle he could manage. After the body, he’d take shots of everything else. This was the one time when the police chief didn’t seem to mind having a kid on the scene. Gallagher looked a little green around the gills. Rob could understand that. Craig Gallagher was not exactly known for being forgiving when it came to teenagers, so slighting him, even in a small way, would be a bad thing. Besides, the man was a decent enough sort, especially for a cop.
Rob looked over the body, part of his mind refusing to grasp that the bloody twists of torn meat and ruptured organs could ever have been human, let alone ever been a part of Douglas Habersham.
Who the hell would want to hurt the old man? Rob didn’t have a clue. He spent a thirty-six exposure roll on pictures from every angle he could think of that didn’t actually involve standing in what was left, and then backed up to reload and look at the actual scene. The puppets were torn to hell. The ones Habersham had used the last six or so years when he told his Halloween story. Someone had decided they weren’t very pretty, he guessed, and decided to rectify the situation. There were papers, as old as the house he was in or older by the looks of them, scattered everywhere, many of them covered in drying blood. He had no idea what they pertained to and it wasn’t his business to find out. Instead he just spent two more rolls of film shooting images of them, and seeing the trajectories of the blood splatters his father would be examining as soon as he finished.
“Don’t forget the wall, Robbie.”
“Not a chance, Dad. I just want to be thorough.” He and his father argued a lot, and he knew sometimes the old man didn’t approve of what he did in his personal life, but when it came to the job he was strictly business, and what his father said went. Failure to agree to the terms of his employment meant failure to work. His father didn’t need him to take the photos. He was just nice enough to let him take them.
Rob worked on automatic, popping the full rolls of film from his two cameras and replacing them with new rolls while he looked around the room. Aside from the papers and the wrecked puppets, there was little out of the ordinary—well, okay, the body, but that was pretty much a given—except for the wall leading to the dining room. Somebody’d had a regular field day there, going all ghetto with the graffiti and using the available natural paints to do the job.
The words were crudely scrawled in human blood and viscera, dried to a rusty brown and decorated with fleshy bits that had already blackened. It read:
He lied about everything.
Her name was not ‘Hattie.’
You will know the truth soon enough.
You will know fear even sooner.
Not really very much to be made of that. Apparently there was a fruit loop running through town who had a little too much of the old stories bouncing around in his head.
His father spoke in hushed tones, almost but not quite whispering to Chief Gallagher. They were discussing the crime scene and the fact that a lot of the body was missing. There were no bones that could be seen in the twisted mass of flesh on the ground, not so much as a tooth. Of course, as there was no head in the mess, either, the lack of teeth wasn’t too shocking. If there was any actual epidermis in the stuff, it was hidden under all the gore. Finding out about that would have to wait until after the photo session was finished. Until Rob was done, no one touched a damned thing.
He thought about the stories Habersham used to tell and thought about what was left of the body. “Dad? Chief Gallagher? I don’t know if it means anything, but what I can see fits.” They stared at him blankly. “I mean, with what was done to the bodies.”
The chief got an annoyed look on his broad face for an instant and then forced himself to calm down. Rob could actually see the effort on the man’s face. “It fits with what, Rob?”
He blinked and thought about it for a second before realizing the man really didn’t understand. “With the stories.” He waved one hand, gestured toward the body and then looked back at his cameras. “There’s no skin and there’s no bones. Patches needed fresh skin and Old Bones needed bones.” He put the lens cover on the first of his cameras and looked up. “I’m not saying it’s a couple of ghouls. Just that whoever did this might have been thinking about the stories. I mean, everything that got trashed looks like it belonged to the old witch’s story.”
The two older men looked studiously at the remains of the body and the scattered debris. “You finished, Robbie?”
“Yeah, Dad. All done.”
“Head on out then. And not a word about this to anyone, understand me?” He nodded and said nothing more. He knew when he’d been dis
missed. He had pictures to develop and he had plans for the night. Dead man or not, there was a party planned for over at Beth Chambers’ place and he had every intention of being there. A party was a party, and Beth was one of his little passions in life. Of course he had to keep that last part a secret, as her boyfriend—Troy Hammer, who would gladly live up to his last name if he saw anyone looking too hard at Beth—might not like the idea of him drooling on her.
He nodded to the two other cops on the scene and then went on his way. The pictures first, then he could concentrate on other things. Once outside he pulled his coat a little closer, glad of the warmth. The weather was getting colder, and he’d never been too fond of the chill that was creeping into the air. He walked, bypassing the car his father had taken him in, preferring to just get his tasks finished. It was half a mile to his house if he took the roads, but only about a quarter of a mile if he took a shortcut through the woods.
He thought about the murder scene and decided he’d stick to the road. Screw it. He could always use a little extra exercise. No skin, no bones, no head. That was just about as fucked up as anything he’d ever heard of, and he’d made it a practice since the age of twelve to hear about everything involving serial killers and murderers in general. No, he didn’t feel a kinship to them or have any desire to go Columbine on his classmates, or even to torture the occasional stray puppy. He just found the subject matter fascinating. What the hell would make a person do what most of the known serial killers since Jack the Ripper had done? Rob didn’t know, but if he had his way, he’d be the one trying to find out some time in the future. His plans included college and a degree in criminal justice with a sideline in psychology.
The books only said so much. If he wanted to really understand the mentally whacked without actually being one, he figured a nice, long career in criminal profiling wouldn’t be a bad place to start.
He moved over to Sullivan Street, taking a left at the intersection and meandering in the general direction of his house. No reason to hurry, really. There was still plenty of time. The photos wouldn’t take all that long and aside from that he didn’t have much prep to do for the little gathering. The good thing about not having a girlfriend—or at least he kept telling himself it was a good thing—was not having to worry about when to pick her up.
The houses along the road were mostly large, with substantial lawns and trees that had been in the same place since before the War of Independence. Without exception, there was something of Halloween in every yard. Just across the way was a gathering of scarecrows—or is that a murder of scarecrows? He thought, considering that a gathering of crows was called a murder—that was too cool to ignore. There were eight of them all told, each built out of old clothes, hay, and pumpkins. One of them was facing the house, its backside to the road and whoever had built them had used two small pumpkins for the butt of the thing. It was bent over, the pants partially lowered and the gourd-ass flashing at the street. Next to that one, a scarecrow with a painted pumpkin for a face was dressed in a prom dress that had to be ancient if the fashion—pure ’80’s and extremely tacky—was accurate. The cleavage of the thing was also made of pumpkins and the stems had been made into nipples that pressed against the chiffon. There was a football player, a cheerleader, and a nerd—complete with overly thick glasses and pants that were too short. The nerd was looking at the cheerleader and the jock was coming up behind him, his jack-o-lantern face carved into a savage scowl. There was a minister holding sermons. A little girl scarecrow held a teddy bear made of pumpkins and lastly there was the one that caught his attention and held it. The thing was creepy enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. It was tall and gaunt and stood at an odd slant on the rolling hill in front of the Horowitz house. Unlike the others, it was dressed in ancient clothes, almost like a pilgrim ready for Thanksgiving instead of a modern parody. The clothes were black and frayed, a mortician’s suit, gone bad. White gloves adorned the hands and shoes with old-fashioned buckles covered the feet. A Quaker-style hat covered the head, leaving the features in shadow, and spilling a thick flush of white hair down the shoulders, which were in turn covered by a funereal shroud. The dark clothes on the thing’s frame were positively ancient, with spots of mold growing in a few locations. The head was carved from a pumpkin that almost looked mummified. The mouth was a jagged leering grin that rose higher than most to the misshapen center of the pumpkin all the way up to the thin triangular slit of a nose that was centered between the high rising edges of that grin. Deep cavernous sockets were carved out for eyes. And though he knew it was strictly in his imagination, he could have sworn the thing was looking at him.
He looked closely at the skull-like holes of the eyes and felt a shiver run across his spine. Somebody just walked on my fucking grave. This thing is just plain nasty. For a second he was tempted to walk over and touch it, just to see if somewhere under the layers of cloth he could feel the skeletal remains of some poor, murdered bastard. The chill came back stronger than before and he wondered if the bone he’d find would belong to poor old Mr. Habersham.
Rob couldn’t resist pulling his camera from his shoulder and loading in more film to catch the scene. He’d never been too much for the whole Halloween thing—well, okay, not since he’d hit fourteen at least—but this was a decoration he could appreciate, especially with the lighting from the sun hitting it just so. He looked down at the camera and made sure the film was seated properly and then closed the back, listening as the motors drew the blank celluloid to the proper spot.
When he looked up, the scarecrow was gone. Just…gone. He looked around the yard twice to make sure he’d checked the right spot, but the scarecrow was nowhere to be found. Puzzled and a little freaked out by the vanishing act, he let the camera fall back against his chest, next to its partner. The rest of the scarecrows were where they were supposed to be.
“Little too weirded out today for taking extra pictures, Robbie-me-lad.” He started walking again. This time he didn’t bother to look around much, just kept his head low and pushed on a little faster. The air was cold with autumn’s breath, but the chill he felt went much, much deeper.
VI
Excerpt from Crowley’s Compendium of Exotic Botanicals, 1842 Edition.
Melmouth County, New York, and in particular I speak of the area around the town of Beldam Woods, seems to be an almost endless supply of unique flora. There are no less than seventeen plants I have discovered and cross-referenced that cannot be found in any other part of the state, or, for that matter, the country.
In the swampy areas to the west of town, there is a small cluster of trees that seem to be unique. The bark is black and seems almost constantly to perspire with a foul-smelling sap that I have to assume is a defensive mechanism against any animals that might seem to either live on the branches or consume any part of the wood. The bark on the trees is thick and particularly soft. From what I have witnessed, the exterior layers of the wood peel back and flake away as the tree grows, rather like an Aspen or Birch.
Sadly, there seems to be little proof that these trees, referred to locally as “Victims,” are likely to reproduce. From what I have been told by the locals, the trees never develop leaves or flowers of any sort. As I witnessed them both in the early part of the spring and on four more occasions between April and September, I am inclined to think that they are already dead. What a loss.
In the same immediate vicinity, I found a thick, ropy moss growing on several of the surrounding trees. I must point out that none of the moss was found on any of the Victim Trees, which is more evidence of my belief that the foul sap spilling from the trees is, in some way, toxic. The moss is a very pale and unhealthy white, with strands that fall from the center of the mass to drape down as far as seven feet, within mere inches of the ground in many cases. I find it interesting that no parasites were identifiable within the moss. I have been assured that the flesh of the moss is purely toxic and that any animal or person attempting to eat it becomes v
iolently ill, though it remains unclear if anyone has ever died from an attempt to ingest the vegetation.
I’ve also identified no less than ten varieties of fungi that I personally have never encountered before. My correspondence with several botanists of solid reputation leads me to believe that I have, in fact, discovered new varieties. I am currently awaiting responses from several additional sources outside of the United States.
The most interesting of these fungi is a mushroom known locally as “Witch’s Tongue,” a black, spongy growth that is uneven in shape and covered in droplets of red that strikingly resemble fresh blood. The toxicity of these fungi cannot be disputed. I watched as a swallow landed on a patch of these mushrooms and mere contact with the syrupy red fluids that leak from the crowns killed the poor creature a few minutes later. While it remained alive, it struggled through a series of seizures that actually caused it to break its own wings as it fell to the ground.
The sheer volume of unusual flora I have seen on my visits to the “Witch’s Hollow,” not far from Beldam Woods, New York, has me baffled. Obviously, a great deal of time will be needed to fully understand what has caused these strange mutations. Anyone interested in studying the unusual plant life in the area is advised to do so with extreme caution. There are too many chances for injury or even death if one is not careful.
Chapter Two
I
There might be rules against many things in public schools across the nation, but if any rules forbid the celebration of Halloween, they were ignored completely at James Irving Elementary School. Miss Holly Fredericks was most decidedly just fine with that. Her fifth grade class seemed happy with the idea as well. Because she liked to encourage a little interaction between the students, she’d given them an assignment: to find a selection of ghost stories that they felt best captured the spirit of the holiday. The tough part was having to read the stories. Even that was easy in comparison to having to read a story in front of the whole class. No one got to read a story unless it was approved by Miss Holly, and if someone else already had the story, the second person wanting to read it was out of luck.
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