Halloween Carnival, Volume 3

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  “Nothing you need to worry about, honey,” Thom whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

  —

  Despite her best efforts to remain quiet, Thom could hear his wife crying, even from the basement. In a way, he envied her ability to resign herself to the situation, but he wasn’t prepared to give up. They’d known when Jessie was born that there was a distinct possibility they’d be in this situation, and while he’d prayed every night that wouldn’t be the case, he’d spent every free moment during the last sixteen years trying to cobble together an alternate course of action. Unfortunately, he wasn’t nearly as confident as he pretended to be.

  He’d inherited the house from his grandfather, along with his life’s work, the sum total of which was affixed to the walls in this dank little room. Patrick had been the youngest of three boys born to Margaret and William Martin, a corporal in the Confederate Army who’d joined the westward migration after the South fell. The brick-walled, rectangular cellar that once served as cold storage was now plastered with topographical maps of the surrounding mountains, newspaper clippings, hand-written notes on brittle yellowed paper, and black-and-white photographs his grandfather had developed by hand in this very room.

  As a child, Thom had tried on countless occasions to imagine what secrets were contained inside this secret room with the padlock on the door, just as his own children surely did now. He hesitated to ponder what they must think of him, for until his grandfather brought him down here on the day Jessie was born, he’d honestly believed the room was filled with the stuffed carcasses of the animals his grandfather had trapped and tortured to death, not the obsession that just might help save his daughter’s life.

  Thom had known both of his great-uncles well enough, but until his grandfather brought him in here, he’d never even suspected that the three boys had once had a sister. Frances had been a good five years younger than Arvin and Leonard, and just as many years older than Thom’s grandfather. No one had ever spoken of her, nor was there a single photograph of her that he could find. Truth be told, he hadn’t initially believed his grandfather. The man was positively ancient and on the precipice of senility—and, as far as anyone knew, had a room full of dead animals in his basement. It wasn’t until he removed an old rag doll from a rusted ammunition case and told Thom that it was all he had left of his sister, who’d been like a mother to him after theirs succumbed to consumption, that he’d seen the glimmer of tears in the old man’s eyes and felt the truth of his words.

  Of course, Thom had heard rumors about the town’s curse—hell, every town in these mountains had a similar story—but he’d never believed them. They were cautionary tales told to children to keep them from fleeing the safety of the community and wallowing in the sins of the big city, like what he and Tammy assumed had happened to Cara West, who’d gone missing on Halloween their sophomore year. The rumor around school was that she’d been sacrificed to the devil, but she’d been a wild one and it was easier to believe she’d hooked up with a trucker at the roadhouse and was either rearing his brood in a trailer park or working East Colfax down in Denver, especially with as unconcerned as her parents had been.

  Same with Sarah Dodge, who’d gone missing ten years later. Thom really hadn’t known her, but he’d seen her around town. She had the look of a teacher’s pet, who undoubtedly wanted more for herself than Pine Springs could offer. It wouldn’t have surprised him to learn that she’d gone off to the University of Colorado and was some successful doctor or lawyer living in a mansion in Cherry Creek.

  Until his grandfather showed him this room and Thom realized that the danger to his family was every bit as real as it was terrifying.

  —

  There was no poverty in Pine Springs. The average income was nearly twice that of Vail or Breckenridge—heck, even Aspen, with its celebrity neighborhoods—and that was without relying on a ski resort and the annual influx of tourist cash. Thom had always thought of it as a magical place where the sense of family and community provided the foundation for its success. People were born here, lived their entire lives here, and died here. Few ever left. After all, what could the outside world offer that this beautiful valley couldn’t provide. All of the families had known one another for so long that it was like one big extended family.

  Or so Thom thought until his grandfather ripped back the veil and exposed the secrets of the town’s prosperity.

  He’d never wondered why there was no crime, rampant development, influx of immigrants, or drug abuse. Hell, he’d never even stopped to consider why the hills weren’t crawling with fishermen in the summer and hunters in the winter. After all, you could hardly drop a lure into the river without a cutthroat striking it or take a hike without bumping into a whitetail. The reason, as his grandfather explained, was that his own grandfather—Thom’s great-great-grandfather—and the other early settlers had made a deal with the devil. Or at least something a whole lot like him.

  —

  Thom’s grandfather had begun this project the day his own daughter—Thom’s aunt Mary—was born. He’d gathered topographical maps and marked them with the dates and locations where people claimed to have seen something inexplicable in the woods, going all the way back to the turn of the twentieth century. While the majority of the “sightings” were based on hearsay and the few anecdotal stories that made it into various local and supermarket newspapers, they formed a pattern that became increasingly distinct with each passing year as Thom added his own research.

  Pine Springs was nestled in a confluence of valleys and surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres of virgin wilderness too dense to log and too rugged to develop. There were a handful of well-used hiking trails but few roads outside of the established tracts. Most of the sightings were concentrated around the ridgeline above Highland Gorge, a surprising number of which involved complaints about someone not picking up after a dog that varying reports claimed must have been somewhere in size between a Great Dane and a horse. Thom knew the feces hadn’t come from a dog. He’d personally encountered several enormous mounds of the rich, black spoor and, like owl pellets in science class, had crumbled them apart to retrieve chunks of broken bone, fur, and hair. He’d even casted a footprint that reminded him of a cross between a man and a bear. And yet despite all of his countless hours of research and exploration into these mountains, he hadn’t found its lair.

  It had to be somewhere between the top of the gorge and Mount Isolation. Assuming it lived in a natural formation, if he concentrated his search to the granite escarpments near the timberline, maybe with a little luck he could still find it and kill it in time. And if he failed, there was always his backup plan, which, regrettably, was born of desperation more than careful planning.

  The hike would take a good four hours, especially in this weather, but only if he could get past the Roberts brothers and the other neighbors who’d be covertly watching his house to make sure he and his family didn’t try to make a run for it. Fortunately, his grandfather had planned for this contingency and constructed a way to hopefully evade his surveillance.

  Thom left a carefully worded note for his wife, grabbed his rifle, and hurried back down to the basement before he could talk himself out of it. He opened the coal chute and squirmed inside, where he’d stashed a backpack for this eventuality. Inside was everything he’d gathered through the years, including a flashlight. It was old and the battery was corroded, but it still worked just fine. The coal chute had been sealed from the surface shortly after World War II and the tunnel itself rerouted and extended another fifty feet beyond the tree line into the forest. Thom made the crawl once a month to make sure the tube remained patent and that the hatch on the other end didn’t rust shut. It had taken his grandfather a full seven years to carve following the birth of Thom’s aunt Mary, and without anyone so much as suspecting what he was doing.

  Thom had once asked the old man why he hadn’t just gone up into the mountains and killed the blasted beast, fortune and superstition
be damned, to which his grandfather had responded that he’d combed through every inch of that forest with a rifle in his hands and hadn’t caught so much as a whiff of it. Thom knew that wasn’t the entire truth, though. While his grandfather feared his daughter’s fate at the hands of whatever manner of creature stalked the dark forest, he feared the townspeople even more.

  —

  Getting out of the house had been easy. The hatch hadn’t made so much as a squeak, and the night had been so dark and snowy he could have walked right past Todd and he wouldn’t have so much as sensed his presence. The sun had risen more than an hour ago, staining the storm clouds blood red. While he welcomed the light to help navigate the thickets in the deep ravines, it dramatically increased his risk of being seen. Surely the entire town had heard that it was his turn to pay the devil’s due, which meant that if anyone found out he’d left his house—and it was only a matter of time before they did—it would likely mean the death penalty for the rest of his family. He prayed Tammy read his note and would follow his instructions to the letter. He needed her to sell the story that he had abandoned his family and fled town to save his own skin, or all was lost. If it wasn’t already.

  His were the only tracks in the accumulation. Even if something had passed through here during the last hour, its footprints had already been obliterated by the wind and the blowing snow. Not that Thom was a seasoned tracker by any means. He’d hunted deer and elk in these hills several times with his father, who’d attempted to teach him some of the tricks of the trade, but the experience hadn’t left much of an impression on him. He did, however, know how to shoot a rifle, which he figured was the whole reason he’d come out here in the first place.

  Thom crossed the bridge at Highland Gorge and used his scope to make sure there was no one on the hiking trail. The lake was frozen solid, save for an oblong gap in the center where a handful of geese were clustered, their heads tucked beneath their wings. He used it as a landmark and charted a course due west toward Mount Isolation, the upper reaches of which were shrouded by clouds.

  What was he doing? His entire plan was predicated on blindly stumbling into whatever creature was up here, one that had reduced a goat to bone and gristle and covered the distance from the center of town to his ranch in a matter of minutes. Maybe he was right and it was somewhere nearby at this very moment, but it had managed to avoid detection for more than a century and wasn’t likely to wander out into a clearing to give him a clear shot at it. He just didn’t know what else to do. Part of him wished he could be at home, holding his baby girl in his arms, while deep down he knew it would break his heart to see the expression of betrayal on her face when he handed her over to Stanton and Wallace, and in her final moments she saw him not as her daddy but as a coward.

  If the beast was up here, he was going to find it. And if not, he knew exactly where it was going to be at midnight.

  He wiped the frozen tears from his cheeks and pressed on with a renewed sense of determination. The branches of the skeletal aspens were frozen and clattered on the wind. They grew sparser until all that remained were the thin trunks of the lodgepole pines, the canopy of which nearly concealed the sky. Only occasionally did he catch a glimpse of the gray stone cliffs above timberline and the icy talus leading upward into the clouds.

  The slope grew steeper and exponentially more treacherous. Rocks rolled underfoot and threatened to turn his ankle. If he didn’t find anything by the time he broke the cover of the trees, he’d turn around and head back down through the bottom of the adjacent valley on the far side of the ridge. If he took advantage of the decline and accelerated his pace, he’d still have plenty of time to—

  Thom stopped dead in his tracks.

  He’d heard something. A faint howling noise. It didn’t sound like an animal. At least he didn’t think so. More like the wind blowing across the mouth of a hollow orifice.

  He shouldered his rifle and put his eye to the scope. The trees thinned out on the rocky crest above him, their trunks protruding at odd angles from the jagged granite formations. Everything was rimed with a layer of ice so thick it was almost opaque, but there was no sign of what could have produced the sound. He was about to lower his rifle when he heard the noise again and zeroed in on the source.

  Were it not for the sound, he never would have seen it. There was a triangular gap between two boulders, low to the ground. It looked like so many other burrows he’d seen along the way, only with one crucial difference. The loose stones near the mouth of the hole were darker than those around them. Even from this distance he could tell that some of them were actually on top of the windswept snow.

  He turned in a circle and listened for any sound that would betray its presence. If it was up here, it could very well be watching him at this very moment.

  Thom slid his finger through the trigger guard and walked slowly uphill in a shooter’s stance. The rush of blood in his ears made it impossible to hear anything else.

  —

  The hole was barely wider than his shoulders, which meant he had to leave his backpack outside. He’d hurled a dozen stones through the orifice in hopes of provoking whatever might have been hiding inside to stick its ugly face out of the opening, but as far as he could tell, nothing was home, although from the sounds the stones made as they careened deep into the mountain, the space inside was substantially larger than he would have guessed.

  It was definitely a burrow of some kind. There were grooves in the frozen ground and the surrounding rocks that appeared to have been made by claws. An animal smell grew stronger the deeper he crawled, a pheromonal scent that reminded him more of smegma than feces. The howl of the wind faded behind him and he started to sweat beneath his clothing. A sulfurous undercurrent reminded him that there were hot springs on the opposite side of the mountain, presumably fueled by the same geothermal sources that heated this cave.

  Thom traced the walls with his flashlight until they fell away and the beam diffused into a larger space. He braced his elbows against the tunnel walls and tried to use the scope, but he couldn’t see a blasted thing. The barrel guided him into a warren easily the size of his barn, although it wasn’t even tall enough for him to stand. There was a mound of desiccated leaves, weeds, pine needles, and humanlike long white hair to his left, piled higher around the sides and matted in the center. A nest. The flattened area was black with dried blood and reeked of death. The rear wall of the cave was honeycombed with shallow recesses, each of which housed a human skull of varying age, displayed as though part of a prized collection, rather than cast aside with the rest of the remains, which were heaped to the right in no apparent order. There were animal carcasses among them, and fecal matter the color and consistency of ash.

  This was where it brought them, although for what horrible purpose—

  Thom’s heart sank when he saw a shattered pelvis. And another. And another. The bones were fractured and disarticulated, the pubic bones snapped outward like the skin of a baked potato. Worse were their ankles, which had been broken nearly to the point of amputation.

  Hobbled.

  He had to look at something else—anything else—but everywhere he turned, there were only signs of suffering and brutality. He raised his eyes to the heavens and caught sight of the low roof. The bare granite was covered with designs painted with crumbling brown ocher. Not ocher, he realized. It was blood. Smeared into words. Words like Help Me and Mommy, and others like Please God and Kill Me. Scattered among the heartbreaking pleas were names, some of which he recognized. Sarah Dodge. Cara West. And others so old the blood had nearly disintegrated, including one that might or might not have been Frannie Martin, his grandfather’s sister.

  The cave seemed to spin around him. He choked back his gorge before it triggered his gag reflex. Closed his eyes and tried to control his breathing.

  Inoutinout.

  In-out. In-out.

  In. Out. In. Out.

  When he opened his eyes again, he concentrated on viewing
his surroundings with a measure of objectivity, for in here just might be the clue to saving Jessie’s life.

  It had brought them here, confined them in the darkness, physically made sure they couldn’t leave, and then violated them in horrific ways—

  This time there was no containing it. He threw up all over the ground and hurried back toward the tunnel to the surface, only now noticing for the first time the boulder beside the opening that could be rolled into the tunnel to seal it.

  He scrambled out into the frigid wind and propelled himself to his feet. Barely had the presence of mind to grab his backpack. Lost his balance. Tumbled down the slope. Skinned his palms and tore his jeans. Struggled back to his feet and ran downhill as fast as he could.

  The thought of his baby girl in that awful place was more than he could bear. He had to stop this before it was too late. And he was running out of time.

  —

  The descent was a thousand times easier, although considerably more perilous. He fell more times than he could count and was certain he’d broken the middle finger on his left hand. His lips were peeling so badly they’d started to bleed, and long-forgotten muscles ached something fierce, but he was grateful for the pain. It helped him focus on something other than what he’d seen in the cave and concentrate on enacting his backup plan.

  This monster could not be allowed to live a single minute longer. This had to end tonight, regardless of the consequences. Damn Stanton and Wallace. Damn the entire godforsaken town for going along with this madness.

  His grandfather had told him stories about the early days, when there were only a handful of families in this valley. They’d arrived in late September, unprepared for winter in the high country, and quickly realized that their dreams of crossing the Rocky Mountains to reach distant California would have to wait until after the thaw. Their covered wagons had been no match for the ceaseless barrage of snowstorms, and five men had died of pneumonia in the process of cutting lumber and building shelters for their families. In a matter of weeks, their number had diminished by a full third and those who survived to face the pangs of starvation envied those buried under the frozen ground.