One of them, close to the door, was his mother.
“This is how they appeared when they were alive on Earth,” the Dark One said. “For the moment, I thought it best to preserve them.”
“As a weapon.”
“Yes. Make your choice. If you walk toward them, you will die. If you go back through the door you came through, you will not die.”
“You’ll destroy everything. My world and theirs.”
“Yes. But you will live. I will allow that. I will let you live forever.”
Now he knew why his mother and the others had wanted to send Reggie instead of him.
She would never have been tempted by such an offer.
As he was tempted …
“My life for … everything.”
“Yes. Perhaps this will help you decide.”
Suddenly he saw the death that awaited him if he stepped onto the red plain. His limbs torn from his body, his living heart bursting in front of his own eyes, his screams of agony echoing in his own ears.
“Do you want to die, human?”
He fell to his knees.
The room contracted. There was a door at his back, and one, closed now, directly in front of him. He felt the cold breath from the door in front of him, and the warmth of the one behind, the caress of what felt like loving arms on him.
He looked back through the other door, now. He was on his own Earth, with the warmth of the sun eternally on his face, a cool breeze and the finest of everything. He had only to wish a thing and it would happen — the best food, the finest entertainment, simulacra of women and animals and anyone from history he wanted to meet. If he wanted to race a car, it would be there, in front of him. If he wanted to fly a plane, the same. Casinos, the best hotels in the history of Earth. Any historical period he wanted to visit, it would be recreated for him down to the smallest detail.
Then, once more, he saw what awaited him through the other door: the horrible wrenching of limb from limb, the tearing of his tendons from their joints, his fingers from his hands, one by one snapped away from his body …
This is why they wanted Reggie.
This is why they didn’t want me.
He felt his bowels contract, fell to the ground, hugging himself in a fetal position.
His hand reached out to the safe door and he felt its warmth emanating toward him.
“Choose,” the voice of the Dark One said, now soothing, helping him to make the choice for himself, what did it matter anyway—
His hand brushed the warm door, and then with a wrenching cry he threw himself at the other door, driving himself through it, listening to his own suddenly unbearable screams—
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Grant had been dozing on and off for hours in Riley Gates’s old lawn chair, facing the stripped pumpkin field, his revolver in his lap, when he felt the ground shake.
It was as if some underground god had punched upward at him.
“Holy shit.”
The ground heaved again, nearly throwing him out of the chair.
He jumped up, studying the horizon. The world outside of Riley’s farm seemed normal enough. The waning moon had traversed the whole sky and now sank toward oblivion in the west.
It would be light in an hour or so.
Again, the ground trembled.
He thought of what John had told him, about the end of the world, and a tight fist of fear formed in his stomach—
Grant was thrown back as a geyser of rock and soil was thrown into the air.
Brilliant light flared from the ground in front of him, and he was momentarily blinded …
He stared straight ahead, expecting the sky to explode, as his vision slowly returned —
There was a whimpering figure lying huddled on the ground, next to an open pit.
Its hair was white as ash.
Grant got up slowly, unsteadily pointing his 9mm.
“Corrie?” he asked hoarsely, tentatively.
The figure sat covering its head, shaking like a leaf.
Grant slowly approached.
It was the little girl, Reggie Bright.
Grant put his gun down and lifted her up.
Her face was streaked with tears, but otherwise she seemed all right.
Grant hugged her close and asked, “Reggie, where’s Corrie?”
She looked at him with her large brown eyes and then buried her face in his shoulder, crying.
“It’s okay, Reggie,” Grant soothed. “I’m going to take you to your Mom and Dad.”
Grant walked off as the sun began to light the east with dawn.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
John awoke in the desert. A familiar sickly yellow sky scudded with low unmoving gray clouds was overhead.
Next to him, the thing shaped like a cardboard cutout was stirring.
Other shapes around him were doing the same.
He turned his smoky form to regard the stone structure in the distance. He could just make out the familiar form of Samhain on the tower ledge. No doubt the Lord of the Dead was regarding with interest the vast scene below him.
The desert plains were covered from horizon to horizon with figures.
His kingdom back to normal, John thought.
“The human Corrie Phaeder saved us all,” the thing that looked like a cardboard cutout said.
“Yes,” John answered. There was a vague ache in him, but he could not place it. There had been something about the young man, something even more special than his role in their salvation …
“Do you remember anything?” he asked the cardboard cutout.
“About what?”
“About … Earth. Your life there.”
The cutout regarded his question, then answered with finality. “No.”
John was silent.
And then, Samhain was before him.
Something about the way he held himself, the vague smoky sheet that formed and reformed, making his ghostly face, his shimmering body, made him feel that he was regarding him with bemusement.
He said: “You were victorious. I congratulate you.”
“Won’t your master be angry with you?”
“I will deal with him when I must. We have had … discussions before. They are not as loud or dangerous as you might think. In a way I’m glad things turned out this way. Eternal rest in the form of nothingness was not as appealing in the end as I thought it would be. But it still may happen … someday.”
“And I will do what I must to prevent it.”
“Someone like you, perhaps. But not you. Your time here is finished.”
“What do you mean?” John asked.
Even as he finished the sentence he saw that a great change was coming over the world. The sky was turning to another, deeper color, almost blue. In one section a whirlpool had formed a hole — a bright, fiery color in its center. And the shapes were rising from the ground around him toward it.
Suddenly, he felt light as air as he watched the cardboard cutout soar into the air and away.
“It is a natural thing,” Samhain said. “This, as you know, is but a way station. It is time to make room here for the newly dead.”
“Corrie …?” John asked.
Samhain shook his head. “He is not among them.”
John was in the air, now, moving up and away from Samhain.
“Good-bye,” he said.
To his vast surprise Samhain smiled wryly, and gave a sort of salute.
“You were an interesting one,” he said. “And so was your son.”
“My son?” John said.
And then Samhain was a speck below, and John moved toward the light—
John felt himself rushing toward another place. Only now he was no longer John, and he was no longer a wisp of smoke. He suddenly knew his real name: Grace, and knew that he was a woman. The tunnel of illumination widened into a bright opening. Behind it was somewhere she couldn’t quite make out, but which was resolving into something completely new. A landscape
of—
There was a figure blocking her way, which held out its hand to her as she drew close.
She knew the smile on the face and felt his fingers close around her own.
“Mother,” he said.
Epilogue
You’ve failed me again, Samhain.
Yes. And …
And I myself failed, as you were about to point out.
Yes, my Lord. As I’ve told you, these humans are strange, resilient creatures.
I was very close to stripping every speck of life from that miserable planet. I will do it yet.
Yes, my Lord …
Do I detect a note of your vile levity? Do you think I’m unaware that you hurried along that last group from your little way station so that I couldn’t demand vengeance against them?
There was very little I could do in that regard, as you know, my Lord. My powers, what little there are of them, only work on Earth. You did have the lot of them yourself—
I thought it best to hold them in reserve. And … still the young man did not choose to save himself.
Once again, interesting creatures—
If you say so.
What will you do now, my Lord?
I am brooding. But thinking, also. Perhaps next time a more direct approach. A personal visit …
You can do that?
I can do more than you know, Samhain. That is why you are my servant, and not the reverse. It will take all of my power, and much time for preparation.
There’s always another Halloween …
HALLOWEENLAND
Book Three of the Orangefield Series
By Al Sarrantonio
A Macabre Ink Novel
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2012 / Al Sarrantonio
Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber
Cover image courtesy of:
Jeremiah Morelli
To
Kate, Richard and Emma:
Boo for Halloween.
Part One
Orangefield
Chapter One
“I’m asleep, Jack.”
Annoyed: his cold hands on her at one in the morning, she could see the illuminated clock face now that her eyes were open, hear his breathing, the catch in it that would make him snore later. Even facing away from him, she could smell the beer on his breath.
“I promised—”
“I don’t give a shit at this point,” she snapped, still curled up in a fetal position, legs pulled up, defensive, half asleep. “You were supposed to come home five hours ago. We were going to try tonight. But instead you went out beering with your moron friends. Don’t deny it, Jack—”
She gasped, not letting him hear it as he slid into the bed behind her, naked she could tell, his hands ice cold but soft as they had always been when he had first caught her eye, this boy of a man with the lock of hair in front that wouldn’t stay put, and the violet eyes and the crooked smile, her heart had melted the first time he looked at her. Melted like the saints and the nuns could not articulate, melted like time stood still and the moon froze solid in the sky and she knew her life was changed forever. His mouth on her later that first time and a kiss unlike any she had dreamed about, two mouths becoming one and then, much later, after fumbling and some laughing, two bodies becoming one. This was nothing like the fairy tales, or the dirty books, or the cable channels only for women where everything was clean and bland with guitar or piano music and then the commercials. This was magic that no one could tell you about, no one could write or sing or tell you about in the bleachers behind the soccer field when you shared a cigarette with your friends and felt the first chill of autumn blowing up under your Catholic skirt like Marilyn Monroe’s in that movie with the sidewalk grating. What the hell were the nuns thinking? Plaid skirts that looked like nothing but delayed sin, in navy knee socks and those black shoes shined to mirrors that made boys look up at your panties —
“Jack, at least let me turn around!” she gasped, surprised at his ardor which was never lacking.
And then turning in the dark to meet his lips and hands and her nightgown pulled up over her head and the panting and the arched back and then three wonderful bit-lip screams while he tasted her nipples and nipped her neck once and then again as he always did, little bites that left pale red marks and she had to wear a turtleneck for two days.
The nuns couldn’t change you but they could make you blush at your own body still—
And then it was over. He ran his hand through her short hair and whispered, “I promised,” and then added, which made her heart flutter, “a baby,” and she murmured, sleepy, and then rolled over away from him again, naked, too tired to pull on the flannel, and returned to sleep.
Chapter Two
Then:
Six hours later in the police station in shock, with her sister Janet with the pinched look and Baby Charlie asleep in the stroller behind her.
Detective Grant: he looked old, tobacco stains on his teeth and the index and middle fingers of his right hand. A sot’s nose, web-work of tiny broken veins. But the eyes: they were hooded in the shadow of their sockets but wary as a hawk’s. He was definitely paying attention.
He had a notebook out and a pencil, and kept looking from the pad to her and back again.
“Mrs. Carlin, let me make sure I have this right.” He flipped back a couple of pages and read to himself, lips moving silently. Then the eyes were on her. “You say your husband came home at one o’clock this morning?”
She nodded, and Janet, beside her, shifted in her chair, plastic seated, uncomfortable. “Only tell him what you want to, Marianne.”
Detective Grant ignored Janet. Those eyes of his, still waiting …
“Yes,” Marianne said. “He … woke me up when he came in. I was asleep facing the clock. I’m sure it was one.”
“And he was gone when the phone woke you up an hour later, at two o’clock?”
“That’s right.”
Cold, she felt so cold and numb and dead.
The eyes looked down at the notebook, then back at her. “You’re sure of this?”
She hesitated, looked at the floor. Embarrassed. “We … made love when he came home. Then I went back to sleep.”
The eyes. But she said: “I’m sure it was one o’clock when he came home!”
“Don’t say another damn thing, Marianne,” Janet snapped. Baby Charlie snuffled in the stroller behind her, then settled back into sleep. “We’ll get a lawyer. I’ll call Chuck now. He’ll know what to do.”
She made to get up, huffing her pregnant belly out of the chair, but now Grant turned to her. “Mrs. Larson, I’m just asking your sister some questions. This isn’t an interrogation and I’m certainly not charging her with anything. I’m just getting the time line straight in my mind.”
Janet glared down at him across the desk. “Then why are we in an interrogation room? I know that’s what this is, I watch TV.”
Grant leaned back in his chair. “As I told you, I thought it would be more comfortable, especially since they’re painting the area where my desk is today. I didn’t want you to have to inhale those fumes …”
“So you said,” Janet said. She was studying the far wall, a mirror, and walked toward it. “There anybody behind there? Like I said, I watch TV—”
“No, there isn’t,” Grant said, trying to hide his impatience. “Though you’re right, it is a two-way mirror.”
Before Janet could say it, Grant heaved himself out of his chair. “Let me show you.” He walked briskly past Janet to a door beside the mirror and held it open for her. “Have a look.”
Janet peered in, noting the short, empty hallway, the view into the room through the visible part of the two-way mirror. “Just like television,” she said.
Grant waited for her to have her look, then waited for her to return to her seat before reclaiming his own. As Janet sat d
own with an “Ooof,” she commented: “If this was a real interrogation, you’d offer us a Coke or coffee.”
Grant looked up from his notebook. “Would you like something?” he asked.
Janet shook her head. “That’s all right. We won’t be much longer, will we?”
“We’re almost done.” The detective studied his notebook and then leaned across the desk to face Marianne again. “You’re absolutely positive about the time?”
Marianne nodded. She barely heard him, Jack on the table, under the sheet, the cold room, colder than his hands had been, he was so white, albino white except for the bruises. The side of his chest that looked like it had been crushed, purple, broken, worse than the veins on detective Grant’s nose, almost black. They wouldn’t show her anything lower, his legs cocked at an odd angle under the sheet.
Baby Charlie awoke with a squeak, as if thrown out of a dream, and abruptly began to cry. Janet instantly heaved herself back out of the chair and fumbled with a blue bag that hung from the back of the stroller. She produced a half-filled bottle which she thrust at the child without looking at him.
The room was quiet again.
“The reason I ask …” Grant began, and then added to the silence in the room.
“You’ve asked her twelve times,” Janet said bluntly.
Grant looked at his notebook and then flipped it closed. “I talked to the driver who hit Mr. Carlin myself. We gave him a Breathalyzer test, which he failed at three o’clock this morning, and a blood test, which he also failed. He’s in custody now. He drove home after his car struck your husband, Mrs. Carlin, and he went to bed. We picked him up at his house. He was so drunk he didn’t remember the accident. There were two eye witnesses who saw the accident, both of them friends of your husband, and one of them, Petee Wilkins, gave us a partial license plate number. A couple of pedestrians also saw it from farther away …”
Marianne didn’t want to hear, she was so tired, so frozen in time, this wasn’t happening. His body so white, the black and blue on his side and they wouldn’t let her see the rest, “I promised,” he’d said, “a baby …”
The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus Page 41
