The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  The poundings from below increased. Grant watched the panel move downward an inch.

  He circled around Corrie and Regina, who had settled onto the floor next to one another. Their eyes, filled with black, looked big as saucers.

  The panel creaked again, moved down another inch.

  Grant rummaged under the train board and located a tool box. There was a hammer, but no nails.

  “Shit.”

  Another pounding on the panel, a creaking sound —

  Grant went to the other end of the attic and picked out a cross stud in the bare rafters. He furiously beat on it with the hammer, getting it to loosen.

  There were two nails in each end, and Grant soon had a ready-to-use piece of lumber in his hands.

  He went back to the panel and yanked it up into position, cutting off a green vine which had snaked up through the opening. He hammered the stud into position crosswise over the panel, hammering one end into the door itself and the other into the plywood floor of the attic.

  He retreated to the bare end of the attic again, and repeated the operation twice. For good measure, he located a longer stud and wedged it sideways through an opening in the folded ladder, then hammered the stud into the floor, effectively bracing the panel in place.

  The poundings on the panel continued — but now it didn’t move.

  Grant sat down, sweating and gasping.

  “Well, gang, he said, we’re safe — for now.”

  Corrie Phaeder and Regina Bright stared straight ahead.

  Grant looked at his watch.

  It was ten to nine.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “You’ve been a great disappointment to me so far.”

  Pell Simpson cowered in the farthest corner of his dark basement. He had stripped himself naked; his face was blotched with crying; there was a bruise on his forehead where he had driven his head into the cold cinder block wall behind him.

  “Does this fetal position help you?” the voice said. It was both amused and perplexed. “I must say, as long as I’ve studied your kind, I can never quite figure out all of your symbols and practices. Do you feel cleaner now, or dirtier?”

  “Dirty. I feel dirty.”

  “And that’s good?”

  “I’ve done a bad thing.” He began to tremble and balled his hands over his eyes, crying and rocking back and forth.

  “You’ve done a lot of bad things, Pell. You’ve been doing bad things since you were ten years old. Don’t you remember what you used to do to cats when you were ten, Pell?”

  Simpson nodded, continuing to rock back and forth on his haunches. “I was bad then, too.”

  “Yes, that was the first time we met. But you got over it, didn’t you? Or, rather, you learned how to hide it, just as I showed you to. Didn’t I show you how to manage your need to control things?”

  Pell sniffled, pulling his hands away from his eyes.

  “Didn’t I show you how to get away with things? To wear masks. To be what you needed to be?”

  Pell was drying his eyes, now. “Yes, you did.”

  “I’ve always been good to you, haven’t I, Pell?”

  “I didn’t know you were Samhain.”

  In front of him, in the gloom of the cellar, outlined in a faint rectangle of light from the single window on the far wall, the flapping cloak and ghostly pale gray face appeared.

  “Who did you think I was, Pell?”

  “I thought you were me.”

  Samhain laughed, a not unkind sound. “Oh, don’t brag, so, Pell. You never thought that at all. You’re not that stupid. You weren’t sure exactly what I was, inside or out of your head — but then you didn’t much care, did you?”

  Pell took a shuddering breath and answered, “No.”

  “That’s more like it. The truth. The only thing that mattered was that you got what you needed. That you found animals that no one would miss, and later itinerants that no one would miss, and after that young girls out on the main highway, runaways who would get into a police car who no one would miss. Wasn’t it me who told you to join the police force in the first place, Pell?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was I right? Do you know how many policemen are sadists, and … others with your … special needs? You’d be surprised if I told you, I think. There was another on your own force, for instance …”

  Pell was consumed by curiosity now. “Really?”

  “Yes. He’s no longer there—”

  “Atkins,” Pell said immediately. “He was dismissed last year. We all knew there was something off with him.”

  The cloak hung still, and the face hovered, a gray ghost in the cellar. “Very good, Pell. You’re broadening your perspective. And you’d be surprised how many other men and women in Orangefield I’ve … helped over the years.”

  Pell continued to stare at Samhain with interest. “Who?”

  Samhain chuckled. “You already know about Marvin Soames. The others I can’t tell you about. Trade secrets, you know. Detective Grant is certainly not one of them.”

  “No.”

  “And speaking of detective Grant …”

  Pell began to get nervous again. He was no longer crying, but he started to rock back and forth on the balls of his feet. “I don’t know …”

  “Didn’t I always tell you I might need you for something like this? In return for all the good things I’ve done for you?”

  “I took care of Soames in his cell for you, I took care of the librarian …”

  “You were right there with me for Kathy, making sure it went as planned, that’s true. You have to admit that after the pills you gave her she was ready for anything I told her. All you did was help her with the rope.

  “But I wanted you to take care of Grant and the boy and girl then, and instead you hid on the side of the house and watched as they came and went.”

  “I like Bill Grant! He was my friend …”

  “Aren’t I your friend, Pell? Wasn’t I your friend when no one else was? When your mother …”

  Pell put his hands to his ears and screamed. “Don’t ever talk about my mother!”

  “Why not, Pell? You had no qualms about Corrie Phaeder’s mother, when the time came and I asked you to —”

  “That was different! SHE WASN’T MY MOTHER!”

  “That’s true. But have you forgotten, Pell? Forgotten what happened with your mother?”

  “No! No!” Pell screamed, smashing his hands into his ears.

  “Time you remembered, Pell …”

  Twelve years old, and his mother found him with the Jurgens girl.

  Not like it was the first time, but this time she caught him red-handed, as she would say. Out behind the shed, poking the four-year-old girl with a sharp stick after he had hit her on the head with a rock and knocked her out. Then he had wrapped plastic wrap around the girl’s face, and waited.

  She caught him when she came out looking for a rake from the shed, and the girl was still alive.

  His mother’s face turned the brightest red he had ever seen, and she hit him so hard he literally left his feet and landed in a heap.

  “What in God’s name are you doing!” she screamed, and tore into the girl, kneeling on the ground, ripping the plastic wrap from her head and shaking her. Then she saw the bloodied lump on the girl’s head and lay her down and hit him again with her fist as he started to get up.

  “You little sick bastard! I can’t believe you came out of me! What have you done!”

  The girl coughed then, and began to choke and then she vomited. His mother went to her again, cradled her head, and put her fingers into the girl’s mouth to clear it out. Then she turned the girl sideways and smacked her on the back.

  The girl continued to cough, and then gasped and opened her eyes. For a moment she looked at nothing but then she turned her head and looked up at his mother and began to cry.

  His mother began to rock her, soothing, “Oh, darling, darling it’s all right now,” and it wa
s then that Pell picked up another rock and hit his mother on the back of the head with it, bringing it down with both hands as hard as he could.

  She collapsed in a heap with a groan on top of the girl and then Pell hit the girl with the rock and then his mother again, alternating until they were both quiet.

  He wrapped both their heads with plastic wrap and waited, counting to five hundred.

  Then he took the plastic wrap off and put a shard of a mirror he kept under their noses and when it didn’t cloud he was sure. It had always worked on the animals.

  He balled up the plastic wrap and put it in his pocket, then went into the house.

  Sure enough, his stepfather was asleep in his rocker in front of the television. Pell went to the hall closet and got his winter gloves out and put them on, then he went to their bedroom and took his stepfather’s pistol out of the second dresser drawer and brought it back and held it to the right side of his stepfather’s head and pulled the trigger.

  His stepfather’s snoring stopped immediately, and his head fell over that way. Pell put the gun in his right hand and let it fall into his lap. Then he took out two wads of plastic wrap and pressed them into his stepfather’s left hand.

  He took off his gloves, put them back in the hall closet, and ran all the way to the police station in town, screaming.

  “Of course you killed her, Pell. You killed her and I was there and told you what to do. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here now. They would have put you away, and you never would have been able to control anything again.”

  Pell said nothing, his eyes tightly closed, his hands still over his ears. Then his rocking lessened, and he was still.

  “Do you want to be found out now, Pell? Especially with all the bodies you have buried in this cellar?”

  “No.”

  “They can still put you away forever. They might even do worse to you, considering all the things you’ve done since then.”

  Slowly, Pell nodded.

  “Is Bill Grant worth that, Pell? Is anybody worth your freedom, and your control?”

  In a small, quiet voice, he answered, “Nobody’s worth that.”

  “That’s what I thought. Now clean yourself up, and get dressed. I could have you tell your Captain Farrow where detective Grant was and have him handle it, but I don’t think that would work. There are too many things that could go wrong. I want you to handle it yourself, in your own way. If you do, you can even have the young girl, if you want.

  “Put on your cleanest suit, and strap on your shoulder holster. Here’s what I want you to do …”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The house was quiet.

  Grant cursed the fact that there was no dormer windows in the attic — a fact which he had been thankful for a few hours before. The noises at the pull-down stairs had continued unabated — Grant had even heard banging on other parts of the ceiling below, which meant that the pumpkin creatures were trying to find another way up to the attic.

  But then, suddenly, an hour ago, they had gone silent, and had stayed that way.

  Grant almost began to relax.

  It was now well past eleven o’clock. The moon would be up. In town, the Halloween festivities would be at their height, before the curfew at twelve o’clock went into effect and the streets emptied. This was usually the time when the egg-throwing teens came out, and toilet paper was wrapped around trees in Rainer Park. His own mailbox was probably filled with shaving cream by now. He had no doubt there were eggs dripping down his windows, because he was not home giving out candy as was demanded.

  If that was only my biggest problem, he thought, and almost laughed.

  Corrie Phaeder and the girl hadn’t moved. They sat side by side on the floor, their eyes huge black holes into another world. They had begun to exude a weird sound, a hum almost, and their skin looked hot to the touch. If Grant hadn’t lived through everything he had the last few hours, and hadn’t seen the things he’d seen with his own eyes, he would have rushed them to the hospital or to the nearest research scientist.

  Instead he sat locked in an attic (and a stuffy one at that) guarding them from an army of evil pumpkin men and the Lord of Death because someone who claimed to be dead made out of corn stalks with a smiling pumpkin for a head had told him to.

  He remembered what John had told him, that what happened would seem like a nightmare …

  He shook his head.

  Extremely weird shit.

  His cell phone rang.

  The sound in the attic, faint as it was, was startling. There hadn’t been a sound of any kind but Grant’s own breathing and the weird low hum from the young man and kid for so long—

  He pulled the phone out of his pocket and jabbed a finger at TALK.

  “Bill? That you?”

  Almost simultaneously, he heard a sound below him, a rattle and bang toward the front of the house that was echoed on the phone.

  It was Pell Simpson.

  “Are you here, Farmer?”

  “I’m standing right inside the front door. What in hell happened here?”

  Grant sighed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Well try me — the damn floor is covered with vines and pieces of pumpkin—”

  “Did you see anything alive when you came in? Anything outside …?”

  “You mean like a dog—”

  “Anything at all, Farmer.”

  “No. Quiet as a church on Tuesday down here. And where the hell are you?”

  “I’m—”

  Something in Pell Simpson’s voice, something in the back of Grant’s head that went off with a faint warning buzz, made him hesitate.

  “How did you know I was here, Farmer?” Grant asked.

  Momentary silence. Then: “Cruiser saw your car turn in here hours ago and called it in.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Saw the log myself. Captain Farrow wants to talk to you bad, podna.”

  The warning buzz was still sounding. Something was different about Farmer’s voice, his manner — there was an edge, a sharp wariness in it, that Grant had never heard before.

  “I’m sure he does. You here to arrest me — podna?”

  There was still sound from downstairs: footsteps, occasional bangings and thumps.

  Farmer laughed on the other end of the phone. “Nothing so drastic, Bill. Just need to try to figure this all out, is all.”

  “Figure what out?”

  “There’s a kidnaping charge out on you, for some little girl named Regina Bright. Seems you left her parents standing outside the emergency room at Orangefield General and took their daughter.”

  The shuffling sounds were getting closer and quieter. Grant could imagine Farmer in the hall now, moving down it —

  Grant waited a moment. “What would you say if I told you I had to do it?”

  Farmer hesitated himself. “I’d say you needed a pretty damn special reason and we should talk about it face to face.”

  The sounds stopped somewhere just below him. Pell said, “Jesus, look at this shit! There’s a pile of twisted dead vines and pumpkin halves piled halfway to the ceiling—”

  Some deeper gut instinct in Grant allied with a familiar sound from below made him push himself away from the pull-down ladder as a blast of shotgun pellets came up through the floor. The far side of the wooden ladder splintered into pieces. Grant covered his face and kept crabbing backwards as another blast took off another chunk of ladder. Wood flew by his head and he was stabbed in the arm by a long sliver of wood which he immediately yanked out.

  He stopped and glanced at Corrie Phaeder and Regina, who sat staring straight ahead, unfazed …

  Another blast rocked the floor in front of him, followed by a settling silence.

  “Bill? Do I have your attention?”

  Amazed, Grant realized that he still clutched the cell phone to his ear.

  He said nothing.

  “Doubt I hit you, but that wasn’t the intention
, old buddy. I’m supposed to take the boy and girl in with me is all.”

  “Take them in to who?”

  “To me.”

  Grant turned with a gasp to see the floating, softly flapping cloak of Samhain, not three feet away from him. Samhain was staring in a kind of wonder at Corrie and Regina, his mouth open, showing a similar empty blackness to the one in their eyes.

  Grant glanced at his watch: it was 11:50.

  “This is remarkable,” Samhain said, before turning his attention almost reluctantly back to Grant. “Truly remarkable.” There was almost pride in his voice. “To think those in my world could get this far …” The mouth closed like a trap. “But humans are, in the main, inefficient creatures.” In a louder voice he called: “The same direction, Pell, but three feet on.”

  Grant reacted immediately, scrambling back as the sound of a shotgun cocking came from below followed immediately by a blast just in front of him. He kept moving as Samhain called out directions. Grant moved to the left and right as he scrambled back toward the train table, yelling at Corrie and Regina to do likewise. They nodded vaguely and rose to follow him.

  Grant pointed his own shotgun at Samhain and watched the blast pass harmlessly through him.

  “Can’t kill Death, my friend,” Samhain said calmly, before calling out more directions below. Grant could hear Pell stomping around from room to room below him again; he quickly visualized the plan of the first floor and imagined Farmer must now be in the kitchen.

  A blast tore up, right through the train table, destroying track and scattering the freight train. Grant angled his own shotgun down into the hole and fired it off.

  There was a titter of laughter from below.

  “Missed me, podna!”

  “Move to the extreme far wall!” Grant ordered, and the children obeyed. Samhain turned to watch their tandem progress.

  “Inefficient, but sometimes ingenious creatures. You know that area downstairs is cluttered with support beams and walls for the back of the house behind the patio. Difficult for our moronic friend to do his business.”

  He turned his cold empty eyes on Grant. “And you know by now that I can’t directly harm you. I’ve noticed that the boy and girl are already partly in my world, which has clothed them in a shield of sorts. But they can still be harmed by something, shall we say, drastic.”