Haunted: Dark Delicacies® III

by Del Howison

  “—as you would have them do unto you.” The mother superior bowed her head.

  Stenecker whipped around and aimed his Luger directly at her. She didn’t even raise her head, just said softly, “I would most strongly dissuade you from that.”

  The field marshal slowly lowered his weapon as a sound began to fill the room, a deep churning as if from some ancient, titanic machine.

  The mother foundress was laughing.

  A sound so low and guttural, it surely came from the belly of some mammoth beast. Her shoulders quaked, and her chains clattered, and her great head lifted, drifting through a slash of light. She was more of a nightmare than he could ever have imagined. Her ancient visage was so severely ravaged by time and gluttony, she had the aspect of some grotesque apple doll. The folds and creases of her withered flesh were so heavy and so deep in her face, they eclipsed her eyes as if she had none.

  “How horrible it must be”—Stenecker thought Mother O’Cyrus was talking about the hideous thing chained to the chair—“to find that your power came only from a gun, a gun that now will only shoot you.”

  “You are a great hypocrite, Sister!” Stenecker spat back. “Thou shalt not kill! Have you never heard of this?! You are breaking your own commandments!”

  The mother foundress laughed so hard that her great heft seesawed in the chair. Stenecker felt it right through his boots.

  “Are you finding religion, Herr Field Marshal?” The room rocked suddenly as if it struck by a mortar shell. It rattled the doors as Stenecker rushed to throw them open.

  The dark hall was lined with the bodies of floating soldiers.

  The field marshal thrust his candelabra forward, and its orange light caught their rifles as they clattered to the floor beneath feet that no longer touched the ground.

  These men weren’t floating—they were impaled!

  Each was on one of the iron candleholders that lined the walls, as if all of the soldiers had been lifted in unison and then slammed against the upturned spikes—left to hang there like grisly ornaments.

  Stenecker rushed to the nearest one, whose mouth opened but only sputtered blood. The field marshal barely glimpsed the glistening mass that slipped off the metal spike. It was the soldier’s liver. It had been pushed out and dropped neatly between Stenecker’s boots.

  A gentle whisper wafted into the hall: “It gave us no joy, Herr Stenecker, no joy at all”—it was Mother O’Cyrus, stepping from the dark room into the hallway—“to know that the moment she opened the gates, none of you would be leaving.”

  The field Marshal stared back as the color ran from his face. “We shall see about that!” His pistol came up again—a reflex. Then he remembered he couldn’t fire, and in desperation he sought out his only remaining ally, the sixth sentry: a soldier who, like him, was the color of a sheet.

  Stenecker raced down the hall with him, a move that sent the mother foundress wailing, lurching up from her great wooden throne back in the shadows and straining the heavy chains. One of them snapped as if it were twine, and a long piece of it flew like shrapnel across the room toward the doors.

  A terrible sound whirled Stenecker around: he saw the soldier lurch to a halt as if he had been stabbed in the back. His mouth opened, but he never spoke. The length of chain dangled out of his stomach like a rusty umbilical cord—and in the instant he clutched it, it yanked him back like he was a fish on a line.

  He ran screaming past the nuns and disappeared into the dark mouth of the mother foundress’s room. The sisters did not look back; they simply bowed their heads, and while Stenecker watched, made the sign of the cross.

  The field marshal was no longer masking his terror. He raced away so fast that his candles snuffed out, leaving him to sprint madly through the dark in the desperate hope that it would deliver him back to the lights and fire of the dining hall. He was breathless by the time he staggered through the archway and was met by young Hans. “We have radioed, Herr Field Marshal! They are sending more men!”

  Stenecker grabbed him and swung him around. “Run!” He pushed him toward the doors far across the room. “All of you!” The room full of soldiers looked back in utter confusion. “We are leaving this instant!”

  “The mother foundress would never allow that,” Mother O’Cyrus said, casting a long, dark shadow as she stepped into the hall with the sisters gathering behind her.

  “She is a devil!” Stenecker pointed at her rabidly. “She is a demon and you are at her mercy!” The vast chamber rocked as if it objected to this remark; the floor erupted, hit by an invisible force that blasted several soldiers off their feet. One slid all the way down the long dining table, screaming at its end as he pitched into space. He smashed into the roaring fireplace, striking it so hard that a blast of sparks and cinders flew out like fireworks.

  Others who found themselves airborne were equally unlucky: they struck the walls and left gruesome trails of gore as they slid to the floor.

  Stenecker could muster only a coarse whisper. “Run for your lives….”

  He started a frantic exodus across the hall as it trembled up to its highest rafters.

  “How can you pretend that she is something holy?” Stenecker screamed across the room as he ran. “She is pure evil, Sister, and you know this! She is as far from God as any one thing has ever been!”

  A rafter splintered and the long blue banner embroidered with Latin came loose. Its metal pole, still tethered to a heavy rope, fell. Stenecker saw it descending and ran, certain he was its target. He pushed madly ahead of the terrified exodus as the long metal rod swung down in a graceful arc and pierced three retreating soldiers at once. Like a mammoth needle and thread, the pole pulled the rope through them, sewing them together before it found Stenecker and staked him to the wall.

  Hans charged toward him as the field marshal wailed. The boy struggled to wrestle the pole out of his lower shoulder: first by pulling madly, and finally by sliding back the others who were skewered on it as well.

  They collapsed to the floor, the rope still laced through their wounds like some grisly human necklace.

  The pole finally slid out of Stenecker and he howled in pain. Hans pulled him toward their escape, and Stenecker staggered ahead as he found ire enough to bellow back at Mother O’Cyrus, “You crazy old bitch! Don’t you see? She is an abomination! You are in service to a monster!”

  He was already gone when Mother O’Cyrus replied, “Heil Hitler, Herr Field Marshal.”

  Stenecker almost tumbled down the long descent of stone steps from the abbey. His men ran with him—the ones who weren’t pitched over the parapet by a force unseen that he now understood was the mother foundress, still in a tantrum deep inside the granite walls of her chamber.

  He could hear the men raining down the stairs past him and hitting the frozen cobblestones far below. Their skulls cracked and their bones snapped. Stenecker jumped from the steps at the first survivable elevation and staggered to his feet, his shoulder throbbing and his right arm useless as he raced with young Hans toward his sedan. He stopped abruptly with the others.

  The massive gates were closed.

  Shut tight as a tomb as the moonlit snow fell past them. Stenecker grabbed his men and threw them forward. “On the gates! Everyone!” They charged forward and were struggling to achieve a unified grip when the earth beneath their boots rumbled and shook and the gargantuan doors began parting without their help.

  Stenecker stood breathless, peering at the first increment of moonlit countryside revealed. But as the gates swung wider, they presented an even more heartening sight, one that filled the men with joy and brought a cheer from young Hans.

  A full German platoon stood out in the snow just beyond the gates.

  When they saw Stenecker and his men, they raised their arms in a perfect salute.

  “They came! They came, Herr Field Marshal!” young Hans cried out, and he raced toward them as his boots spit up snow.

  The field marshal pointed behind him,
but words failed as he tried to explain to his rescuers what horrors lay up the dark, stone steps of Greystone Abbey. Instead he could only laugh as he moved forward. Or was he crying? Or were the sounds he made more like a madman singing in the wind?

  Whatever they were, they were cut short as the platoon opened fire on him.

  In a flash of blinding light and angry sound, Stenecker felt his body being torn into. A terrible burn rushed down his torso and took the power from his legs. He crashed to his knees.

  He saw young Hans’s beautiful face as it met a spray of gunfire. It belched out blood from a gaping mouth, a split nose, and an eye socket suddenly missing its globe. The young lad pitched into the snow, and every man around him was cut down as quickly.

  Stenecker struggled to stay up and saw that their executioners were more of the frozen Nazi dead, their eyes frosted white, helmets dusted with snow, and flesh the sickly ash-gray of the no longer breathing.

  The field marshal was the last to close his eyes. He stayed alive long enough to watch the snow falling past the parapet. “It is the dust of the angels,” he could hear his mother telling him from somewhere. But the only figures he could see were dressed in black and filing onto the balcony with Mother O’Cyrus at their center.

  They looked more like an army of Grim Reapers than angels, staring down in their dark shawls as they watched Stenecker finally topple lifeless onto the icy cobblestone.

  * * *

  In the eerie quiet of the whistling wind, they made the sign of the cross and then headed back inside. Only Sister Mary Ruth slowed as she heard movement in the snow below. She did not turn—she simply clutched her rosary in her trembling hand and walked away.

  She had nightmares enough and did not need the sight of the freshly dead field marshal and his murdered men pulling themselves up from their puddles of blood-red snow and moving out the abbey gates.

  The granite cross above them cast a deep, black shadow in the snow they crossed—to join the mother foundress’s army of the dead as the great gates of Greystone Abbey swung closed again.

  MAN WITH A CANVAS BAG

  GARY A. BRAUNBECK

  WHEN I WAS a little boy, there lived on our street—four houses down from my family, to be exact—a man who killed his five-year-old daughter. I can’t say “accidentally killed” because for all the years my family knew Earl and Patricia Spencer, Earl spoke of the event (when he spoke at all) as if Cathy’s death had been a premeditated act on his part, the culmination of some grand evil scheme, meticulously planned and skillfully executed. He spun the narrative of his crime with such deep conviction that anyone listening would almost believe he had deliberately taken her life. Earl needed to believe that we thought him guilty, so we pretended that we did, and that our forgiveness was implicit. It made the truth easier to live with when never a word of it was spoken. It was simpler for Earl to blame himself for Cathy’s death than it was for him to accept the probability that we live in a charnel-house universe where everything was, is, and always will be a random fuck-up, including the formation of certain dyssymmetrical protein molecules that arbitrarily gave way to the double helix and—voilà!—humankind doing its endless happy dance across the face of this planet.

  I was nine years old on the morning Cathy Spencer was killed. American troops were still in Vietnam. Richard Nixon was still president. It was the twenty-ninth of October and every house on either side of North Tenth Street had two things in common: Halloween jack-o’-lanterns, and autumn leaves raked into neat piles at the curb, or at the foot of driveways, or the base of trees. The air was rich with the afterscents of neighbors’ burned leaves from the night before (you were still allowed to burn leaves back then, and, God, how I miss that smell being part of the world). The Kid-Countdown-to-Beggars’-Night clock was ticking so loudly it was all anyone under the age of twelve could hear or wanted to think about.

  I was raking leaves in our front yard. I loved raking leaves into a great big pile because then I could take a good running jump into that pile, watch the explosion of autumn colors, and hear that unmistakable dry, scratching whisper only autumn leaves can make as the wind pushes them across a cold sidewalk. Sometimes I’d hide in the pile when I saw one of my friends approaching and then jump out with a monster scream just as they reached our driveway. One of the greatest joys of childhood is that earsplitting shriek of terror made by your friends when you’ve successfully scared the living shit out of them.

  “Hey, Tommy!” shouted Cathy Spencer jumping up and down and waving her arms like she was trying to signal an airplane. She was dressed in her Wilhemina W. Witchiepoo costume, her favorite character from the H.R. Pufnstuf television show. I was an Orson Vulture fan, myself, but only my parents and Cathy knew that.

  I waved back at her. “You aren’t wearing your nose.”

  She giggled and rolled her eyes. “Dummy.”

  “Well, you aren’t wearing it. But, hey, it looks real good anyway.”

  Cathy smiled at me and pointed to my ever-growing leaf pile, then to the one at the foot of her parents’ driveway. “Lotsa leaves, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I still go trick-treating with you?” Her eyes got really wide when she asked this, like I was going to say no. I’d taken her trick-or-treating for the last three years. She was fun to be with on Halloween.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You did forget to put on your nose.”

  She stuck out her tongue and giggled.

  “We’ll have the best costumes, you and me.”

  “Uh-huh. Thank you, Tommy.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “There’s lotsa leaves.” She scooped up a handful and buried her face in them, taking a deep smell. “Pretty.” She dropped the leaves, smiled again, then waved as she made her way back toward her front porch. I turned my attention back to the project at hand and doubled my raking speed. I couldn’t stop smiling. Cathy had that effect on you. She was sweet, courteous, a little sneaky when she put her mind to it, and everyone’s friend. Cathy was also retarded. Back then, it wasn’t called Down syndrome, a person wasn’t “developmentally disabled,” and the term “special needs,” as it’s known in its current context, didn’t even exist. A person like Cathy was retarded, period. It wasn’t a contemptuous term—no, for that, you pulled out that old chestnut “mongoloid,” a word no one in the neighborhood ever used or allowed anyone to use. Though she was five then—almost six, she’d remind you when given the opportunity—Cathy would always be three years old. And like any three-year-old, Cathy could be, as my mom put it, “a little stinker.”

  When I looked back, Earl Spencer was trotting out the front door, lunch pail in one hand, keys to the bus in the other. Earl’s “bus” was actually an extra-large passenger van that held a maximum of twelve people. He drove a route that took him from one end of Granville Street to the other, then into downtown Cedar Hill, where he made a circle around the square before heading back. The Cedar Hill City Council contracted with Earl and three other drivers (each of whom owned his own “bus”) to cover the entire city, and while there was decent enough business to keep all four drivers busy year-round, the last two and a half months of every year were a particularly busy time—lots of people doing early Thanksgiving shopping, early Christmas shopping, or making last-minute Halloween candy and decoration runs.

  Earl gave me a quick wave as he rounded the front of the bus and climbed in, firing up the engine. Looking at my trusty Superman watch, I realized that he was running about fifteen minutes late. He put the bus in gear, honked his horn as he waved good-bye to Patricia, and backed out of the driveway. Then the pile of leaves at the foot of the Spencers’ driveway moved.

  Lotsa leaves.

  To this day I can’t tell you how I knew it was Cathy and not the autumn wind.

  “… a little stinker.”

  I just knew, period.

  I threw down the rake and ran toward the bus as fast as I could, screaming for Mr. Spencer to stop, Stop S
top STOP!, but he either didn’t hear me or didn’t realize what had happened until he looked in the rearview mirror and saw me standing in the middle of the street, my pants soaked in Cathy’s blood because I’d slipped in the heavy wet streaks left by the tires.

  I remember the loud pop! as the bus backed over the leaves and into the street (he’d run over her head right away, but I didn’t know that yet). I remember seeing the great, wide splash of bright red spit up from inside the leaves and spatter the back side of the suddenly too-white bus (and running over her head first, that was a blessing in disguise, wasn’t it?). I remember looking down and seeing one of Cathy’s arms shudder (involuntary muscle reaction, but at the time I thought she was still alive). I remember looking up and seeing her other arm being dragged by the rear bumper (that proved she was still alive, because she’d grabbed the bumper as if she really were Wilhemina W. Witchiepoo and could stop the bus just by touching it). I slipped in the blood, scrambled to my feet, screamed at Mr. Spencer again—“She’s hurt real bad! She’s hurt real bad!”—and then spun around, dropped to my knees, and began pulling Cathy from the now soaked and half-crushed pile of leaves.

  I was later told that it took three people to get my arms loose from her body. I was later told that I tried to put her head back together using the bits of skull and pieces of brain that I could find, and then clumps of bloody leaves and small broken twigs when there was no more skull or brains to be found. I was later told that Earl Spencer stood frozen at the back of his van, howling like a wounded animal. I was told all of these things by my parents, and so I never questioned whether or not they were true.

  Since I was the sole witness to what happened, the police talked to me first. I remember that Mom knelt beside me the entire time, holding my hand in hers. I told the police everything that I’d seen, up to the moment I started digging Cathy out of the leaves; from there, I had no concrete memory of events.

  “He’s in shock,” said one of the officers. “We’d better get him to the hospital.”