Festival of Fear

by Graham Masterton

The pilot eyed him narrowly. ‘You pulling my chain, son?’

  ‘No sir, Bub.’

  We climbed into the helicopter and buckled up and Bub took us up almost immediately, while Jerry unfolded the maps. ‘We want to fly west-north-west to the Roseau River and then south-south-west to Pierce’s Peak.’

  We triangulated the Lost River Forest for over three and a half hours, taking photographs and videos and shading in our maps with thick green crayons. At last I said, ‘That’s it, Bub. I think we’re just about done for today. Are you OK for tomorrow, though, just in case we need to double-check anything?’

  ‘So long as the weather holds off.’

  We were heading back toward Saint Nicholas when Jerry suddenly touched me on the shoulder and pointed downward off our starboard side. ‘See that? The Sad Dog River oxbow. That’s where Satan had his shack.’

  I turned to Bub and shouted, ‘Can you take us down lower?’

  ‘You’re paying.’

  The land was flat and scrubby here, and the Sad Dog River squiggled its way across the plain before dividing itself into an oxbow. In the middle of the oxbow, I could make out the ruins of an old shack, with only its stone chimney left standing. The river ran on either side of it, shining in the two o’clock sunlight like two streams of molten metal.

  ‘Let’s take a look!’ I yelled.

  ‘You want to land?’

  ‘Sure, just for a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Bib’s thinking of buying this place for a summer home,’ put in Jerry.

  Bub angled the helicopter around the trees and landed only fifty feet away from the shack. Jerry and I climbed out and approached the shack with our coat collars turned up. It had been burned right down to the floorboards, so it was impossible to tell if it had ever been painted black, but because most of the timbers had been reduced to charcoal they hadn’t rotted. The roof had fallen in, and there was nothing left of the door but a corroded metal catch, but there was still a wheelback chair beside the fireplace, burned but intact, as if it were still waiting for its owner to return home.

  ‘What are you actually looking for?’ asked Jerry, clapping himself with his arms to keep himself warm.

  ‘I don’t know . . . I just wanted to see the place, that’s all. I mean, if the stable where Jesus was born was still standing, you’d want to take a look at that, too, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘This place gives me the creeps.’

  I looked around and I had to admit that the Sad Dog River oxbow was a pretty desolate location. Bub had shut off the helicopter’s engine and the quietness was overwhelming. The Sad Dog River itself was so shallow that it barely gurgled, and there were no birds singing in the trees. All I could hear was the fluffing of the wind in my ears. A crow fluttered down and perched on the back of the wheelback chair, staring at us with its head on one side, but it didn’t croak, and after a while it flapped off again.

  I had the unsettling feeling that somebody had walked up behind me, and was standing very close to me, staring at me.

  ‘Come on,’ said Jerry. ‘I’m in serious need of a drink.’

  We were walking back to the helicopter when Jerry stumbled. ‘You got it wrong again,’ I told him. ‘It’s drink first, then fall over.’

  ‘Goddamned tripped on something.’

  He went back and kicked at the tufty grass. Then suddenly he hunkered down, and took out his clasp knife, and started to dig.

  ‘What have you got there?’

  ‘Some kind of a handle.’

  He kept on digging out chunks of turf and at last he exposed a rectangular metal box with a rusted metal handle. He tugged it, and tugged it again, and at last he managed to wrench it free.

  ‘The lost treasure of the Sad Dog River Satan,’ he announced.

  ‘OK . . . let’s see what it is.’

  The box was locked, and the lock was thickly rusted, but Bub found a long screwdriver and after considerable cursing and grunting we managed to pry the lid open. Inside was a soft gray cloth, in which a collection of bones were carefully wrapped; and seven glass jars containing some kind of powder; and five blackened sleigh-bells. Jerry lifted up one of the glass jars and peered at the handwritten label. ‘Human Dust’.

  Bub said, ‘What is it, magic-making stuff?’

  ‘It looks like it. Did you ever hear of the Satan of Sad Dog River?’

  Bub shook his head. ‘Wasn’t brung up in these parts. Came from Sweet Home, Oregon, me.’

  ‘He was supposed to have lived in that shack. Killed twenty-seven children by cutting their heads off.’

  ‘No shit.’

  Jerry closed the box and said, ‘Let’s go find that drink. I reckon this could be worth something. You know, maybe the Roseau town museum might be interested in buying it.’

  ‘You think so? They don’t even want to talk about what happened that night, let alone commemorate it.’

  We took the rusty old box back to Roseau and showed it to John Shooks.

  ‘There,’ he said, picking over its contents with undisguised triumph. ‘Told you it wasn’t mythology.’

  Alma Lindenmuth puckered up her nose in disgust. ‘It all looks horrible. What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Sell it, most likely,’ said Jerry.

  ‘Not in Roseau you won’t,’ said John Shooks. ‘That’d be like trying to sell bits of airplane wreck to the people in New York.’

  ‘I think maybe we should find out exactly what all of this is,’ I suggested. ‘I mean, if the Sad Dog River Satan used it to make the wheat crop grow, how did it work?’

  Jerry said, ‘He was lucky with the weather, that’s all. You don’t seriously think that human dust and old bones can give you a bumper cereal crop?’

  ‘I’d just be interested to know what kind of a ritual he was carrying out. And don’t be so dismissive. I saw a TV documentary about a Modoc wonder-worker once, and he used bones and powders and circles in the dirt. He brought on a rainstorm in under an hour, and it went on raining for three weeks solid.’

  ‘Oh, please. What was that, the Discovery Channel?’

  ‘OK, but I still think we ought to look into it. Suppose it can help us to make pines grow quicker?’

  ‘Good soil, good light, regular rainfall, that’s what makes pines grow quicker.’ Jerry lifted out the jars of powder one by one. ‘Not Crushed Mirror, Rowan Ash, Medlar Flower, Houndstongue, Sulfur Salt and Dry Frog Blood.’

  ‘Well, sure, you’re probably right,’ I told him. But I still couldn’t shake off the feeling that had crept over me by that burned-out shack on the Sad Dog River, like somebody coming up close behind me and breathing on my neck.

  We were called back to St Paul the following afternoon. Since there seemed to be no prospect of making any ready cash out of Satan’s box, Jerry let me have it. I wrapped it up in a copy of the Roseau Times-Region and packed it in my suitcase along with my cable-knit sweaters.

  Even in the city it was minus five and when I drove back out to Maplewood my neighbors were clearing a fresh fall of snow from their driveways. We lived in a small development close to Maplewood golf course, just six houses in a private loop. I parked outside and Jenny opened the door wearing jeans and a red reindeer sweater, her blonde hair shining in the winter sun. Tracey and Mikey came running out after her, and it was just like one of those family reunions you used to see on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.

  My neighbor Ben Kellerman raised his woolly hat to me to reveal his bald dome and called out, ‘Go back to your woods, Jack!’ It was joke between us, based on some Robbie Robertson song about a hick trying to make it big in the city.

  There was chicken pot-pie that night, and candied yams, and the house was warm and cozy. I took Tracey and Mikey upstairs at seven o’clock and sat on the end of Mikey’s bed and read them a story about Santa Claus. Not the Santa Claus that John Shooks had told me about, but the jolly fat guy with the big white beard.

  ‘When it’s Christmas, I’m going to stay awake all nigh
t so that I can see Santa coming down the chimney,’ said Mikey. He was seven and a half, with sticky-out ears. He was a whirlwind of energy during the day, but he could never keep his eyes open later than a quarter of nine.

  ‘I’m going to bake him a Christmas cake,’ said Tracey, sedately. She was such a pretty thing, skinny and small like her mother, with big gray eyes and wrists so thin that you could close your hand around them.

  When the kids were tucked up in bed, Jenny and I sat in front of the fire with a bottle of red wine and talked. I told her all about Satan from Sad Dog River, and she shuddered. ‘That’s a terrible story.’

  ‘Yes, but there must be some truth in it. After all, we found Satan’s box of tricks, so even if he wasn’t responsible for making the crops grow, he existed, at least.’

  ‘I don’t know why you brought the box back with you. It’s ghoulish.’

  ‘It’s only a musty old collection of different powders, and bones.’

  ‘What kind of bones?’

  ‘How should I know? Dog’s, probably.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want it in the house.’

  ‘All right, I’ll put it in the garage.’

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t just throw it in the trash.’

  ‘I want to find out more about it. I want to know what this Satan was actually trying to do.’

  ‘Well, I don’t. I think it’s horrible.’

  I put the box on my workbench at the back of the garage. I stood looking at it for a while before I switched off the light. It’s difficult to explain, but it definitely had a tension about it, like the wheelback chair, as if it were waiting for its owner to come back and open it.

  I locked the garage door and went up to bed. Jenny was waiting for me and she looked so fresh and she smelled so good. There’s nothing to compare to a homecoming when you’ve been away for two weeks looking at trees and more trees.

  When she fell asleep I lay awake next to her. A hazy moon was shining, and just after one o’clock in the morning it started to snow. I turned over and tried to sleep, but for some reason I couldn’t, as tired as I was, as contented as I was.

  Just after two o’clock I heard a rattling noise, somewhere downstairs. I sat up and listened, with my ears straining. Another rattle, and then another, and then silence. It sounded like somebody shaking dice.

  I must have fallen asleep around three, but I dreamed that I could hear the rattling again, and so I climbed out of bed and made my way downstairs. The rattling was coming from the garage, no question about it. I pressed my ear against the door, listening and listening. I was just about to turn the key when the door was flung wide open, and a white-faced man was standing in the doorway, screaming at me.

  I sat up in bed, sweating. The moon had passed the window and it had stopped snowing. I drank half a glass of water, and then I dragged the covers over me and tried to get back to sleep again. There was no more rattling, no more screaming, but I felt as if the house had been visited that night, although I couldn’t understand by whom, or by what.

  The next morning Jenny took the kids shopping at Marshall Field’s, which gave me a chance to go into my study in my blue-striped robe and my rundown slippers and do some research on the Internet. I sipped hot black coffee while my PC looked for Santa and Satan and fertility rituals and crop circles.

  I was surprised to find out how recently our modern idea of ‘Santa Claus’ was developed. Up until Clement Clark Moore published his poem The Night Before Christmas, Santa was almost always portrayed as a haggard, old Father Time figure, with an hourglass and a scythe – deeply threatening, rather than merry – the pall-bearer of the dying year. But Moore described him as ‘chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf’, and in the 1870s the illustrator Thomas Nast drew him as a white-bearded figure in a red suit with white fur trim. In the 1930s and 1940s, Haddon H. Sundblom, an advertising illustrator for Coca Cola, painted dozens of pictures of the grandfatherly Santa as we think of him today, with his red cap and his heavy belt and boots and his round, rosy cheeks. The gaunt, doomy Father Christmas – the real Father Christmas – was forgotten.

  Much more cheerful, I guess, to tell your kids that Christmas is the time for lots of toys and candies and singing, rather than remind them that they’re one year nearer their graves.

  After I had checked out Santa, I went searching for any rituals involving Human Dust and Crushed Mirrors. It took me over an hour, but at last I turned up details of a ceremony that dated way back to the days of Nectanebo I, the last native ruler of Ancient Egypt, in 380 BC. Apparently, good king Nectanebo had an entourage of black magicians, who were employed to do deals with the gods. They were said to have derived their powers of sorcery from a god called Set, a dark and sinister being who is historically associated with Satan. It was Set who murdered the fertility god, Osiris, in order to steal his powers, and Set who blinded Horus, the Egyptian war god, which led to the invasion of Egypt by Assyria and Persia and other foreign invaders.

  In the Les Véritables Clavicules de Satan, a fourteenth-century book of demonology which was banned by Pope Innocent VI, I found an account which said, ‘Satan walks abroad, offering his assistance to those in the direst need. When cattle give no milk, he will work his magic to restore their flow. When crops die, he will ensure that they flourish. He will appear to be a savior and a friend to all, but woe betide any who do not pay him what he demands, for he will surely take more than they can bear to give him.’

  The ritual for reviving crops was recounted in detail. It involved lighting five fires, and sprinkling seven spoonfuls of powder into each of them, and inscribing a five-pointed star in the soil. The sorcerer would then tap five bones together and repeat the words of the Satanic invocation five times. ‘I summon thee, O Prince of Darkness, O Spirit of the Pit . . .’ and so on.

  I made a few notes and then I sat back and had a long think. This sounded like total mumbo-jumbo, but if it didn’t work at all, why had it survived for more than twenty-three centuries? And what had really happened in Roseau, when the wheat harvest had failed?

  While Jenny and the kids were out, I decided to try an experiment. I pulled on my boots and my thick plaid coat and I took Satan’s box out into the snow-covered yard. I lit five fires out of kindling, and drew a five-pointed star with a sharp stick, and then I walked around each of the fires in turn, spooning in powder from Satan’s screw-top jars. To finish up, I unwrapped the bones, and held them between my fingers, and rattled them together while I read out the Satanic invocation.

  ‘I adjure thee to grant my will and my pleasure. I adjure thee to make my crop grow tall and strong. Venite O Satan, amen.’

  It was then that Ben Kellerman looked over the fence with his duck-hunting cap on. ‘Christ, Jack, what the hell are you doing out here? Cooking a chicken with the feathers still on it?’

  ‘Sorry, Ben. Just trying something out.’

  ‘Well next time you want to try something out, make sure the wind’s blowing in the opposite direction.’

  I had to admit that Ben was right. As the powders crackled in the fires, they gave off swirls of thick, pungent smoke, and the smoke smelled of incinerated flesh, and hair, and scorched wool. It was what witches must have smelled like, when they were burned at the stake.

  After I had finished the invocation, I packed the bones and the powders back into the box and went back inside. I watched the fires for a while, in the gathering gloom of a winter’s afternoon, but eventually the wind began to rise, and scatter the yard with sparks and ashes.

  I had to go to Portland, Oregon, that weekend, to attend a convention of wood pulpers. As you can imagine, wood pulpers are not the most scintillating people you’ll ever meet. They’re very rich, most of them, I’ll grant you that. They’re deeply concerned about the environment, too – mainly because of the eye-watering fines they’re likely to incur if they don’t replant the acres of forest that they’ve turned into cardboard boxes. But when I wasn’t discussing the comparative profita
bility of different species of fir, or the joys of corrugated packaging, I retreated to my hotel room with the latest Michael Crichton novel and a large glass of Canadian Club.

  On the third evening, when I returned to my room, the red light on the phone was blinking. It was Jenny, and she had left me a voice message. ‘Something so weird has happened . . . it’s in the back yard. There’s grass growing, right up through the snow.’

  And so there was. By the time I got home, mid-morning on Monday, there were hundreds of thin green spears of grass rising at least three inches clear of the snow, all over the yard, and a few weeds, too. I knelt down and brushed the palm of my hand across them.

  ‘Grass doesn’t usually grow in November, does it?’ asked Jenny. ‘Not like this.’

  ‘No, not usually.’

  ‘There isn’t any grass growing in anybody else’s yard, only ours.’

  I stood up. ‘I know. I know there isn’t.’

  So it worked. The ritual performed by the Sad Dog River Satan actually worked. He had revived their wheat crop. He had been responsible for giving them a bumper harvest, and saving them all from starvation. Of course there was no rational scientific explanation for it. None of the powders had been sprinkled on the ground in sufficient quantity to act as a growth accelerant, even if any of them had been components of any recognized fertilizer, which they weren’t. You can’t make your cabbages grow bigger by showering them with crushed mirrors and frogs’ blood.

  I went back into the house, but I couldn’t resist looking out of the window from time to time, and each time I looked it seemed as if the grass was even taller, and even thicker.

  If this ritual worked, then I was going to be rich. No two ways about it. I could sell my services to every farm and forestry department in the country. Think of it. They would never risk losing a crop to drought or storms or diseases. They wouldn’t need nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium any more, only me. I would save them billions of dollars, and I could charge them millions.

  ‘You’re very quiet,’ said Jenny, over our spaghetti supper.