The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (Necon Classic Horror)

by Charles L. Grant

  But he had died less than a year after it had all begun. Had been murdered. Brutally. Found flung over the hood of his patrol car with his throat slashed and his face mutilated almost beyond recognition. His right ear had been severed and placed between his teeth. Died? Had been murdered. Mrs. Jamieson was fictitious. And the killer had never been found.

  She refilled her cup and nibbled unconsciously at a cold piece of toast.

  When the mourning period had ended, both Sam and his wife, Elaine, launched a campaign to ease her out of town and, failing that, urged her to at least find another home as far from Fox Road as she could get. Natalie was initially too shocked to respond, then too stubbornly annoyed to succumb to their clumsy blandishments.

  ‘‘I’m a grown woman, Elaine,” she’d told her sister-in-law during one prodding session on the front porch. “What good would it do me to run away? Listen, I’m not morbid, you know. I’m not about to turn the place into a memorial, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

  “But Nattie,” the pudgy woman had whined, “there are such awful memories here. Now, Sam thinks — ”

  “Well, good for dear old Sam. Now, what I think is that I am not leaving. No way. And I really wish you’d leave me alone!”

  But she hadn’t, and Natalie wasn’t surprised, had only prayed that she would. And it pleased her to watch the barely suppressed expressions of impending apoplexy on her double-chinned face when she donated Ben’s clothes to several charities, his few books to a hospital library. His meager collection of baseball and bowling trophies she gave to Sam. The only thing she kept when the purge had been completed was a shoebox of memories she hadn’t looked at for several months.

  And on this particular morning, after a nightmare now more horrible in its persistence than its content, she wasn’t sure what it was she was waiting for. The killer’s apprehension? The next man in her life? The end of those dreams that clawed into her sleep for several nights running on the anniversary of Ben’s death?

  What, she wondered, and instantly and relievedly decided it was-had to be-all of them.

  “But you’re not going to get any of them by moping around drinking lousy hot tea,” she told herself, laughing, and fearing as always that her habits were beginning to decline into the stereotype mold of the longsuffering, pining woman, the old maid, the pitiful (but not pitiable) husk of what had once been a woman who had enjoyed control of herself, her life and, as much as she was able, her destiny. Fate, she’d concluded, was the poorer word because it denoted a manipulation beyond her grasp. Destiny, however; she liked its sound and thought of it as a horizon on an unfinished canvas, undefined and waiting for her to get there so she would know what it looked like.

  Hurrying her plate and cup into the dishwasher, she darted upstairs to shower away the sticky residue of her dream. Then she chose a snug pair of slacks and summer-thin blouse and slipped into the light overcoat she’d bought downtown the year before. It was an extravagance, a calculated defiance to those who continued to look upon her with hypocritical sorrow. She knew she was known to many in the Station as the Policeman’s Widow. It annoyed her, then amused her. And no Policeman’s Widow, certainly not in Oxrun Station, wore a bright gold coat with a thickly rich fox collar; nor in Oxrun did she allow her soft sable hair to fight with the wind for the privilege of nestling on her shoulders. Not a Policeman’s Widow.

  She laughed as she locked the front door behind her.

  She stood on the porch of the small, square dark blue house and squinted at the sun poking between the homes opposite. It was a cool brittle morning, and the few birds remaining in the slowly shedding trees rose to greet her raucously. She grinned, took a deep breath and moved to the sidewalk, deliberately avoiding a glance to the left. Once past the three Victorian boxes that hunkered between her home and the corner, she paused with one hand resting on the green metal pole of a Dead End sign. The newborn brightness was decidedly too invigorating to waste arriving early to work. It would be much better for her to walk a mile or so to drive the stiffness from her legs, the patina of the evening from her eyes. In which direction, then? Straight on across Williamston Pike to stay on Fox Road would bring her directly to the police station, and the chance of encountering Sam. Into the sun two blocks would confront her with the library.

  No choice, she thought as though she’d had one from the start, and she put the sunrise to her back. She would take the three long blocks to Mainland Road and turn around. A fair plan, an easy plan, and one she followed several times a week over the past four months.

  So who, she asked herself, are you kidding, lady?

  The collar brushed at her neck, tickled and made her laugh aloud. She adjusted the broad strap of her pocketbook over her shoulder, thrust her hands into her pockets and walked with broad relaxing strides. The homes she passed sat well back from the Pike, protected by high-trimmed hedges and trees nearly as old as the country around them. She paused only once, to allow a battered sedan to back onto the street and join the light traffic headed almost exclusively toward the highway. There was a bus stop on the next corner complete with a freshly painted white bench, but she ignored the temptation to sit, reveling too much in the tightness at her cheeks and the pleasantly sharp sting of cold air in her lungs. She crossed, heard the cough of a starting motor and turned. There was a patrol car parked opposite her, ostensibly keeping an eye on the outbound traffic. She shook her head slowly and resumed her walk.

  Sam, she thought, is carrying his big brother routine too far.

  She had, in fact, mentioned this uncontracted surveillance several times, but each meeting only resulted in his smothering her objections under his own grand illusions of police proficiency and familial obligation. She had never before had the nerve to tell him she was no longer his kin; and with Ben gone, no longer wanted to be. Finally, her persistence penetrated and he admitted his men had more important matters to attend to, and she was relieved. And the absence of the blue uniform shadows helped in cutting away one more strand of the now fragile rope that tied her to the past.

  But it had begun again. Unasked, and unexpected, and she hated Sam Windsor for spoiling her beautiful new day.

  “No!” she said aloud to the empty sidewalk. “No, he will not do it to me again.” And she lifted her head, hunched her shoulders against a gust of October wind, and watched through the traffic as the church where she and Ben had been married drifted slowly by. It was a long and aging structure that had suffered with little dignity the ravages of recent parishioner neglect. Its once clean stone had become blemished with dark, unsavory blotches of some unknown fungus. Its steeple was silent even on Sundays because there was no money left to repair its pre-Revolutionary bell. The double front doors needed new paint, and the stained glass was dull even when lighted from within. Reverend Karl Hampton did much of the handyman work himself, and as a result the rectory beside it suffered as well. Not that he seemed to care overly much. The last time Natalie saw him, he’d been picking out a new Mercedes at a local dealer. His patrician priorities, she thought, obviously weren’t monastic.

  She frowned, ducked away as a truck blasted dust into her face, then hesitated as though she would cross to take a closer look. The frown deepened to a scowl, however, when the patrol car slid into view.

  Confound it, I won’t have this!

  She quickened her step and nearly tripped over the broken curb at Devon Street. She grabbed onto a Stop sign to keep herself from tumbling into the gutter. Another gust, and fur from her collar slid into her mouth. She spat, brushed stiff fingers through her hair, and made a show of examining the houses until she reached Mainland Road.

  Trucks, then, and crowded buses interlaced with automobiles in a swift tide passing in both directions without turning into the Station. Commuters heading for the far larger towns north and south, never once seeing Oxrun to the east nor the checkered expanse of unused farmland to the west. Blind they seemed, and Natalie had long ago stopped thinking it sad that her to
wn was continually ignored. Now she believed the community quite large enough. So let it stay a whistle stop, she thought; it makes things a lot more simple that way.

  She waited five minutes for a break in the traffic, then ran across the Pike and headed back into the sun. Almost immediately she reached one of the few businesses this side of Fox Road: the low profile, red-brick home of the Station Herald. Its plate-glass window was undecorated except for the gold Gothic lettering of the paper’s name, and a taped front page of the previous week’s edition. Peering inside, she could see the ceiling’s embedded fluorescent lights already glowing, and a dim shadow figure obscured by the sun’s glare raised a hand in greeting. She waved back, slowed, and when the office door opened, stopped in feigned surprise, smiling broadly and tugging self-consciously at the collar of her coat.

  “Hey, there, lady,” a man said gaily, “you always walk the streets in the middle of the night? You could get mugged or something, you know.”

  Natalie laughed at the warning she never took seriously, nor ever tired of hearing. “In case you’re interested, my fine-feathered reporter, it’s going on nine o’clock.”

  “And that,” the young man said, “is definitely the middle of the night. You thirsty?”

  And before she could object, he reached out and put a hand to her elbow. “Come on in. It’s cold outside, and I need a little bookish sympathy.”

  Natalie glanced at the patrol car now stationed less than fifty yards away, and nodded. Sam, she thought, I sure hope your boys are taking notes.

  “Coffee? Oops, sorry, I forgot. You’re one of those uppity folk who think coffee drinkers are on the road to perdition. Tea, lemon and sugar, right?”

  She nodded and sat in a stiff-backed chrome chair by the first of a half-dozen desks arranged in a ragged file away from the window. Along the side wall, teletypes were already clattering to a shirt-sleeved man hunched in front of them, a pad and pencil in his liver-spotted hands. A young woman stood by a water cooler combing her hair. The rear wall had been divided in half: on the left the same walnut paneling that carried all the way to the front, and a door that led to the printing plant in back; on the right there was glass festooned with snippets of articles and headlines, and beyond it the boxlike office of Wagner Dederson, editor and publisher. By straining, Natalie could see past the maze of paper and recognized Dederson’s overweight and overdressed figure apparently in argument with someone who, she thought with a start, was Karl Hampton.

  “Hey.”

  She blinked and grinned sheepishly, and wondered how much of that brash newsman image Marc Clayton polished from his watching old movies, and how much was natural. It was, at times, a little too much to take, but she flattered herself in believing it was a role he practiced solely for her.

  “So how’ve you been, Marc?”

  He took his chair and placed it in front of her, sat and put two paper cups on the desk. He was no more than an inch taller than she, slight, pale, and constantly neglectful of the white blond hair that straggled over his ears and forehead. He wore gold wire-rimmed glasses with rectangular lenses and spent more time fighting their slide down the bridge of his uptipped nose than looking through them. At the moment, she thought critically, he looked as though he hadn’t even been home to shave, and tried to picture him with a beard and moustache. It wouldn’t suit him, she decided; he would look like a kid trying to be old.

  “How have I been?” he repeated slowly, as if the question was philosophically impossible to answer in less than an hour. Then he shrugged and glanced away from her impatient stare. “Lousy, if you must know. I’ve nearly been canned again, and the landlady refuses to fix a roof that leaks right over my bed, and if I get one more story of mine slashed again, I’m going to pack up and head for fame and fortune in the big city.” Then he laughed at the dismay in her face. “Well, you asked for it, you know.”

  “I think I’m sorry I did. The roof is nothing new, but what about the firing?” She nodded toward Dederson’s office. “He getting testy in his old age?”

  A wave of his hand almost tipped over the cups, neither of which they’d touched. “Dederson thinks I lean too much toward the purple-prose school of journalism.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I imagine things that aren’t there and then write about them as if they were the apocalypse. Like the creeps last week that smeared black paint all over the synagogue on Devon, down past Chancellor. I said they seemed to be taking part in a conspiracy to defame all the religious community’s edifices in town. Dederson says it was a bunch of drunken college kids feeling their oats.”

  “Well, weren’t they?”

  “Who knows? They weren’t caught. And neither were the poor, underprivileged kids who sliced up the altar cloth and dented the crucifix at St. Mary’s last month. Or the rambunctious students who nailed those dead cats to the Baptist Church doors last June.” He frowned, drained his cup without breathing and dropped it into a wastebasket. “A conspiracy? Nuts. Just kids feeling their enriched oats.”

  “It could be, you know,” she said, at once taken by the seriousness of his tone, and the nervous way he pulled at the tie sloppily knotted and yanked toward the middle of his chest. “I mean, you read about it all the time, don’t you? Rich kids with nothing better to do, so they — ”

  “I know, I know. That maybe I could believe. But ... “ He stopped, suddenly, and swiveled to his desk. “Nat,” he said without looking at her, “how’ve you been lately? Seriously.”

  Puzzled, she could only lift a hand to indicate she was doing fine.

  “You, uh, over the hump, so to speak?” “Oh.” And she surprised herself by saying. “Yes, I think so. Life, as they say, goes on whether you want it to or not.” Her smile was a weak one. “So they say. Why?”

  Marc rubbed at his chin before extracting a crumpled sheet of paper from an untidy pile on his blotter. “There was a murder last night, Nat. In the park. Howard Vorhees, the assistant dean of students out at the college.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear anymore, Marc,” she said. Then, sighing, nodded for him to continue while a tightness around her chest amplified the increased beating of her heart.

  Vorhees, Marc explained, was found just after dawn stretched out on a bench near the ball field. His clothes had been stripped off and tossed into a nearby briar copse. A copy of the Herald had been placed carefully over his face. When the officer who’d discovered the body pulled back the paper, he found the throat slashed, the face mutilated apparently by a razor, and his right ear had been cut off and stuffed into his mouth. Chief Windsor had admitted to no leads and had doubled the park patrol immediately.

  “As of,” and Marc glanced at his watch, “as of twenty minutes ago, there were no clues of any kind. No tracks, no nothing.” He flicked the paper with a forefinger and set it carefully back on the pile. “I also got into trouble because Dederson wanted me to interview you, and I told him where he could find it if he wanted it that bad.”

  Natalie swallowed the trace of bile that had crept into her mouth. A feeling of time displacement unsteadied her, and she felt the coffee cup pressed into her hands. She sipped gratefully, not tasting the cool liquid, and handed it back.

  “It’s the same, isn’t it?” He agreed, sadly. “And when I mentioned that instead of an interview we ought to pursue the possibility of a connection, he told me, and I quote for your edification, ‘Clayton, if you want to be a mystery writer, then move to the city. You, sir, are a reporter. That means you report, get it? Report, Clayton, or cover your typewriter and truck.’ “

  “Truck?” She laughed once, loudly.

  “Truck,” Marc said. “He likes to think he’s up on the latest street language.”

  She pulled her purse into her lap and toyed nervously with the strap. “What are you going to do?”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you. Come on,” he said, grabbing his brown and rumpled sports jacket from the back of his chair.
‘‘I’ll walk you to work. That was where you were headed, wasn’t it?”

  “Where else? I still have bills, you know.”

  And once on the street, they separated just enough to keep their arms from brushing as they walked.

  It was a confusing few minutes. Natalie wished Marc wouldn’t be quite so sensitive about her feelings, her image, but she was also pleased at the consideration. Several of her friends had not so subtly wondered why she and Marc hadn’t been seeing more of one another, and lately Natalie had discovered she was thinking along the exact same lines. Especially now.

  “It was the same,” she repeated as they crossed Fox Road and slowed to stretch the last two blocks before the library.

  “It was, Nat. That’s why I told you. I thought you had a right to know.”

  “I don’t really,” she said, “but thanks, anyway.”

  “I hope I haven’t wrecked your day. I have a habit of doing things like that.”