“Can I help you, detective Grant?” Phaeder asked in a flat voice, re-entering the shed; he was lost to view in the darkness, rummaging around.
“Just wondering why you’re back, Corrie,” Grant said, trying to keep any venom from his voice. At first sight of Phaeder in more than a decade he instantly felt the same dislike he’d felt the first time.
“Weren’t you told to stay away from me?” Corrie said. He was still in the shadows. “Detective Farrow—”
“He’s Captain Farrow,” Grant offered. “He’s my boss, now. You can call him if you want. I’m sure he’ll paste my ears back for coming over here. But I thought someone should.”
“Despite what you think, detective Grant,” Phaeder said, walking out of the shadows; he had a paint brush in one hand and screwdriver in the other, “I always liked you. I admired your intelligence.” Phaeder’s eyes did not avoid his own. “I could never understand why you wouldn’t listen to me.”
Grant met and held the kid’s level stare. “Because you were full of shit.”
“If only that was true, detective,” Phaeder answered. He put the paint brush and screwdriver down on a drip covered gallon of paint already on the driveway. As if Grant had left he added, “I have no idea if this paint’ll be any good after all this time …”
“Why did you come back?” Grant asked. He was aware that his ever-present notebook was open to a blank page, and his pen ready, but that he had written nothing.
Again Phaeder met his gaze. “I wish I could tell you. I certainly didn’t want to.”
Grant was suddenly overcome with anger, the thing his mentor Riley Gates had warned him about years ago. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and stupid, but he couldn’t help himself. He flipped his notebook closed, jammed it into his coat pocket and jabbed the pen in Corrie Phaeder’s direction.
“Because you’re lying. Because you lied from the beginning. I remember your bullshit well: ‘how your dreams were real and reality your dreams.’ They found your mother at the bottom of those stairs stabbed twenty three times and you were the only one in the house. I don’t care if you were in a wheelchair. You killed her.”
Phaeder’s voice was calm. “I told you then, and I’m telling you now—”
“You killed her, dammit! There was no other way she could die—”
“Wasn’t there? Have you ever had anything strange happen to you in this town, detective?”
It wasn’t Phaeder’s calm but the question which made Grant pause.
Phaeder went on, calmly, as if he were talking to himself. “Have you ever heard a noise you couldn’t identify, or seen something you knew couldn’t be real, or had something happen that was real but couldn’t be? Can you tell me that in all your years in Orangefield, nothing strange has ever happened to you?”
Before Grant could answer he went on: “Well, that’s my life, 24/7. That’s what I do. And I didn’t kill my mother. Please leave me alone, detective.”
Phaeder turned his back on Grant, knelt down in front of the paint can and began to work on it with the screwdriver, trying to pry open the lid.
“Just tell me why you’re back in Orangefield,” Grant said after a moment. He had his notebook out to the blank page again, but already knew he would write nothing.
“I told you, I don’t know. I lost everything to come back here.” He turned around to look at Grant with haunted eyes. “And I’d give it all up just to be anywhere else but here.”
Grant said, “I’ll be watching you,” and turned around to walk back to his car.
It had not gone the way he wanted to. He was mad at himself twice — first, for letting the kid control the interview and second, because the kid had thrown him.
Have you ever had anything strange happen to you in this town, detective?
The fact was, he had. And more as time went on. And plenty lately.
Weird shit.
Have you ever had anything strange happen to you?
For the first time since he had first met Corrie Phaeder, he felt he had been able, in the tiniest part, to crawl into the kid’s head. Which had really been his problem with the kid all along — he’d never met anyone, guilty or innocent, who wouldn’t let him in. And now Corrie Phaeder, with that one look, had let him have a taste.
Have you ever …?
For the first time, he felt he knew something about Corrie Phaeder.
The kid, for some reason, was scared shitless.
Chapter Nine
Corrie met the Bright kid while he was trying to mix the glue that the porch paint had become.
It looked like a trip to Sears after all, before that porch could be painted.
The Bright kid was standing in front of him when he stood up and turned around after all but giving up. Even the addition of a little ancient turpentine hadn’t helped.
For the briefest moment he thought it was detective Grant, either returned in different form or metamorphosed by the house; but then the kid grinned and said, “Hi!”
She waved her hand in a circular motion, her smile widening.
“I’m Regina Bright. Everybody calls me Gina for short though I’d rather be called Reggie but no one will call me that will you call me that?”
Her words came in a rush, and Corrie was instantly reminded of the cartoon character Sniffles the Mouse, who spoke whole paragraphs as one sentence.
“Uh, sure, I’ll call you Reggie if you want.”
She smiled. She was short with red hair cut in bangs, dressed in painter’s pants and a gold tee-shirt. Her blue sneakers were covered with mud.
“You’ve been playing by the river? Didn’t your mother tell you not to do that by yourself?”
Her smiled vanished for a moment, then came back. She looked at her shoes. “Yes I guess I shouldn’t but there was no one to play with and I wanted to make some mud pies so I went down to the riverbank but not too close and the river isn’t rushing by so much today and I didn’t get wet just my sneakers got muddy.”
“I—”
“My mom told me not to come near you either ’cause something bad happened a long time ago but I wanted to see the haunted house like Bella my friend from school told me and the scary guy who lives in it you don’t look so scary are you scary?”
The smile was back; this kid didn’t have an ounce of fear in her.
There was a tentative, concerned shout from up the road: “Gina …?”
Reggie’s smile widened: “That’s my mom she’ll whack me one if she finds out I’ve been here so I’m gonna go I’m seven years old how old are you?”
“I’m, uh—”
Again the call of her name, closer, more urgent: “Geeee-naaa!”
Reggie turned to run, then stopped. “You can tell me next time I’ll sneak over again you look like a nice man aren’t you glad to have met me?”
“Uh, yes—”
She was off like a rocket, into the tall weeds across the street. Corrie watched her progress as the weed tops moved with her passing, and she was soon away toward her house, where she would be walloped not for playing in the mud, but for going to see the ‘scary man.’
Then again, Corrie would put his money on the bet that she was sneaking all the way around her house at this moment, into her backyard, where she would remove her sneakers, creep into the house and up to her room, and pretend that she had been there all along.
It’s what he would have done.
Two hours later he was back from Sears with three gallons of white outdoor latex paint, a new brush, and the will to get the porch done.
But the day had clouded over, and he wasn’t part of the way through scraping the old peeling paint before it began to rain. The temperature cooled as if someone had suddenly turned on an air conditioner, and then the rain came down in summer torrents. The wind picked up, and then blew sheets of water at the porch. Corrie could hear the nearby river churning and splashing.
Shivering, Corrie retreated into the house with the paint and tools, whic
h he stacked in the hallway behind the front door. His eyes turned for a brief moment to the bottom of the stairs, the spot where he had found his mother—
The chandelier in the dining room, through an archway to his left, blinked on and off. It was an ornate glass piece, heavy and dusty.
It blinked on again, stayed, brightened, then went off.
Corrie ignored it.
The rain was beating at the windows, many of which he had opened, and he moved around the house closing them, starting with the front where the force of the wind was located. It had become very damp and cold in the house.
He stopped in his bedroom to pick up a sweater from his bag, and pulled it on over his head.
The floor moved beneath his feet.
It felt like a wave had ripped across the room — and sure enough, as he watched, the floor — bare wood covered with a braided oval run in blue and red, began to churn as if it was the Sagett River. The wood turned elastic, throwing up peaked waves, which then rolled toward him.
He was thrown to the floor, and buffeted by what felt like liquid beneath him. His bed was rolling as if it was a ship on the ocean. He looked out into the hallway, and all was normal there: the floor as flat and even as a pane of glass.
He tried to go there.
The walls began to ripple, long streaks from top to bottom. Then they melted into sheets of rain. The door slammed shut as he approached it in an almost swimming motion. He saw the doorknob melt away and then the door vanished, replaced by a wall of rain. The window was gone, too. The ceiling pulled up and away, revealing a black sky filled with lightning and coal-dark clouds. A crack of booming thunder that he felt in his chest tore over the room, and he began to sink into the floor, drowning—
And then it was gone, all of it.
The room was as it had been, and when he stood up he was as dry as he had been before it started, his sweater neatly pulled into place.
Rain from the storm outside was beating against the window, pushing in at the bottom where he had left it open a crack. He walked to it and slammed the window closed.
Back to normal.
Things are back to normal.
He looked around the room, which looked like it should: bed, rug, wood floor, open suitcase by the door.
And I don’t mean this.
The sky cleared at two. As abruptly as the storm had come, it was gone. The house stood dripping water from its eaves around him, a not unpleasant sound. He fixed a late lunch of tuna fish sandwiches, chips, and a couple of beers and took them to the back porch. He watched the sky clear from the back porch.
The air smelled like a colder version of a post-summer storm: fresh but almost icy. The sun popped out of the clouds, and the thousands of raindrops sitting up on the back lawn and unraked leaves suddenly burst into bright sparkles. If the ground was still wet tonight, there would be frost tomorrow morning.
Under the eaves of the porch roof, a brilliant rainbow had formed in the sky, and Corrie got up to follow its progress — it arched up and away, and then down again—
It faded away as he watched.
He went back to the ancient Adirondack chair, finished his second beer, and then took the remains of his lunch into the kitchen. There were chucklings and gurglings from the basement, a single loud clang followed by tinkling bells, but he ignored them.
Sun streamed through the windows.
He checked the front porch, but it was too wet to do anything with today.
Perhaps tomorrow …
He went upstairs, not looking at the landing or the first step, and went to the guest room next to his bedroom. It, too, had a view out the front of the house, and its window was unimpeded by the large oak tree. He had set up his Nikon with a telephoto lens on it on a tripod, and aimed it toward the cornfield across Sagett River. With a little positioning, he had been able to focus it on the spot where the scarecrow with the pumpkin’s head was stationed.
He looked through the telephoto, but the spot in the cornfield was empty.
He could just make out the pole that the scarecrow had been mounted on.
“I’m not there, I’m here.”
Corrie’s blood chilled, and he turned away from the camera to see John perched on the end of the guest bed, legs crossed. His head was featureless, and oddly shaped—
John reached up his cornstalk hands and grasped his pumpkin head — with an audible liquid sound he wrenched the pumpkin around 180 degrees. There were carved features on the other side, the ones Corrie remembered — triangle eyes, nose, upwardly sickled mouth with two offset teeth — which now faced Corrie, though the pumpkin was still misshapen.
“Lost my other head I’m afraid, in the service of duty. Picked the first one I found that was the right size,” he explained. The smile expanded slightly, up at the edges. “What do you think?”
Corrie said nothing.
The smile contracted. “I thought it was time we talk again, Corrie. Today is October 15th. You’re going to notice things getting much worse the next couple of weeks.”
“What do you mean — worse?”
John gave an approximation of a sigh. “Worse.” He held his hands out wide, and looked around him. “You’re … used to this, more or less. You grew up with it. But it’s going to get more … intense.”
Corrie’s already cold blood nearly froze. “I don’t think I can handle that.”
“All I can tell you is not to worry about it. Things will get very bad later on.”
“Later on—”
John held up a hand, and the gesture was almost gentle. “Please. This is as hard for me as it is for you. Harder, perhaps. You may not believe it, but you and I are allies. I’ve been watching over you for a long time …”
“Thanks for nothing.”
Again John sighed. “I knew this would be hard, on both of us. All I can tell you now is that when October 31st comes, you must be ready. In two weeks …”
Corrie waited for him to continue.
“In two weeks, something will happen to you that your whole life since you were young has been leading up to. It’s what all of this” —again he spread his hands— “is for. What it’s always been for.”
“You mean there’s a reason for everything I’ve gone through since I was seven?” In an odd way, Corrie felt almost relief, until John spoke again.
“Oh yes,” John said, and his voice, his countenance, became very grim. “There’s a reason …”
“What is it?” Corrie demanded. “Tell me.”
John shook his head. “Not now. But listen to me: be careful of that little girl you met today. Watch over her. She’s important, too, perhaps more important than you know. And Samhain will try to harm both of you, in whatever way he can—”
As if he had already said too much, John went suddenly quiet.
“I have a thousand questions—”
“I won’t answer them,” John replied. “Not now. Just believe me that there is an end to all this, and a reason, and that you are an essential part of it. To your world and mine …”
“Your world?” His head was spinning with confusion, fear, hope—
John held up a hand. “I’ve already said too much to you. You much watch Reggie. And soon you will see poor Kathy Marks.”
“Kathy Marks …”
“These next two weeks, it may seem at times as if you have gone insane—”
Corrie blurted ironic laughter. “And the last twenty-three years?”
The pumpkin face was silent. The features became suddenly frightening, fierce — the mouth straight, the eyes flared with inward light.
John leaned forward, and Corrie was assaulted by a smell unlike any he had ever experienced. It was cold without pity, emptiness itself, the smell of something beyond death.
It was the smell of nothing.
“This is what we’re dealing with,” John said, in a hissing low voice. “I’ve let a bit of it pass from the Dark One to this world, to let you see.” His hand reached out, i
mpossibly long across the room, and took Corrie’s wrist in an iron grip and drew him forward. The arm retreated but brought Corrie to his knees, then closer, and closer still until his face was flat against the pumpkin’s own. Corrie’s nose nearly snugged into the pumpkin’s own nose cavity; his eyes were blinded by the violent light in John’s own. Corrie fought against the smell — the fear — he felt radiating from John.
The smell got worse, and worse, and now Corrie, on the edge of passing out, felt a terror so horrible and deep that he began to quake and then cry, blurting out, “No! No, please God, no!”
He felt his eyes seared, his being violated by something more than filth, more empty and evil than evil itself—
“That is what we are dealing with,” John said, his voice almost gentle again as he let go of Corrie’s wrist. “Something much worse than Samhain. Samhain is only a servant.”
Corrie collapsed to the floor, gasping, his face wet with tears.
When he looked up, John had leaned down over him — the light still burned brightly in his eyes, and his mouth was still a straight line.
“That is what you and I must fight.”
“But—”
“You will see and hear and feel and taste many things that scare you before the end of this,” John continued, “but that is what waits at the end.”
“Oh, God …”
John stood up. He had regained his calmer demeanor; the smile was back on his face, and it widened again at the corners. The fierce, violent light was gone from his eyes.
“Enjoy your dreams, Corrie,” John said. He sounded oddly sad and wistful. “They’re the only remembrance of your real life that you’ll have now.”
Chapter Ten
A black and blasted landscape.
The ground underfoot resembled charcoal, of a particularly fine and used-up sort. There were what had been mountains, and a dry, cracked brown riverbed filled with ash. In the far distance a gray-yellow sickly looking haze hovered over the ground, coiling like a snake.
The sky beyond a certain point ended. Sky and earth met in nothingness — as if Columbus had been wrong in this world, and if you sailed too far you would fall from the face of the Earth.
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