The Nightmare Girl

by Jonathan Janz

  Playing with fire has never been more dangerous.

  When family man Joe Crawford confronts a young mother abusing her toddler, he has no idea of the chain reaction he’s setting in motion. How could he suspect the young mother is part of an ancient fire cult, a sinister group of killers that will destroy anyone who threatens one of its members? When the little boy is placed in a foster home, the fanatics begin their mission of terror.

  Soon the cult leaders will summon their deadliest hunters—and a ferocious supernatural evil—to make Joe pay for what he’s done. They want Joe’s blood and the blood of his family. And they want their child back.

  The Nightmare Girl

  Jonathan Janz

  Acknowledgements

  The first person I want to thank is Mr. Joe R. Lansdale. He influenced this book, and his writing continues to influence me. He tells a story like nobody’s business, and he also happens to be an uncannily generous human being. If you enjoy this book, you’ll enjoy a Lansdale book. If you hate this book, you’ll enjoy a Lansdale book. He’s a national treasure who will be read a hundred years from now. So read him. And thank you, Joe, for doing what you do.

  My agent, Louise Fury, and my editor, Don D’Auria, have done wonders for my career. Louise gives me support and guidance, and her faith in me has been a big part of my growth as a writer. Don D’Auria continues to allow me the artistic freedom to write the kind of books I want to write. Yes, The Nightmare Girl is a horror novel, but it’s a very different kind of horror novel than I’ve ever done. But Don has never wavered in his support of me and my diverse interests, and because of that, this book turned out better than I ever would have dreamed. Don also made major contributions early on in the brainstorming process, particularly to the novel’s structure.

  Some fellow authors I want to thank include Brian Keene, Hunter Shea, Bryan Smith, Jack Ketchum, Brian Moreland, Kristopher Rufty, Mark Justice, Kelli Owen, Chris Kosarich, Stephen King, Tim Waggoner, Mick Ridgewell, Russell James, John Everson, Tom Monteleone, Kevin Lucia, Jack Campisi, Matthew Scott Baker, Matt Manochio, and Mary Sangiovanni. I also want to thank Amanda Hicks, Mackenzie Walton, Jacob Hammer, Chrissie Brashear, and Angela Waters from Samhain Publishing. Thanks to my grandparents, my mom, Tim S., Mark Sieber, Duane Mincel, Erin El-Mehairi, Ron Clinton, Andrew Monge, Rhonda Rettig, Tish Neyhart, Jon Recluse, Pierre Mathieu, Amy Gislason, Joe Hempel, Fred Godsmark, Renae Rude, Mark Brown, Colum McKnight, Meli Hooker, Melissa Herman, Gef Fox, Blu Gilliand, Dave Brechbiel, Donna L., Maria M., Kimberly Y., Julie S-P, Meghan S-H, Lineris Z.O.P., Jake McGill, Wanda Forrest, Louann Smith, Tristan Thorne, John Seibert, Tod Clark, Mike Lombardo, and Randy Hames for various contributions to my sanity.

  Lastly, I want to thank my family. My wife, Monica, endures this strange writing addiction and does a great job of bringing me back into the real world with love and patience. My children (Jack, Juliet, and Evana) fill my world with laughter and joy. I don’t know where I’d be without you four, but I thank God every day I get to be with you. Thanks for all your love, and please always know how much I love you back.

  Dedication

  This one’s for you, Evana. You’ve only been alive for three years, but in that time you have made every one of my days happier. You’ve completed our family with your joyfulness, your laughter, your caring heart, and your love. I’m proud to be your daddy, Peach, and I’ll love you forever.

  “Fire being the seed of all existing things, to which they must in time again return, has suggested to generations of pyromaniacs the alarming idea that if humanity could only be consumed entire then it must, as a matter of course, arise from the flames renewed and purified.”

  Richard Cavendish

  Man, Myth & Magic

  Part One

  The Torch and the Tinder

  Chapter One

  “If I didn’t know you better,” Joe said, “I’d think you were calling me out.”

  Michelle wouldn’t look at him. “It’s not calling you out, honey. It’s constructive criticism.”

  “Doesn’t feel much like it to me. Feels like you think you married a loser.”

  Michelle did glance at him then, a finger to her lips to warn him off rousing Lily.

  “It’d take a sonic boom to wake her up,” Joe said, but he threw a look in the rearview just to make sure. Their two-year-old daughter was conked, her mouth open and her face turned sideways, a spill of long black hair tumbling down her cheek.

  “Let’s just drop it,” Michelle said.

  “You’re the one brought it up.”

  She sighed. “Well, it was frustrating, Joe. Aren’t I allowed to feel frustrated?”

  He willed his voice to stay even, but it took an effort. “You don’t think I’m mad about it, honey? Maybe I should shout some cuss words, smash a few beer bottles over my head so you know I’m agitated.”

  “Smartass.”

  “I wanted that contract more than anybody. I work for two months with a client and those Wilson jerkoffs come in at the last minute and undercut me?”

  Some of Michelle’s angst seemed to dissipate. “I know you’re disappointed, dear.” She shook her head, tapped her fingers on her legs. “Maybe it’s the name.”

  Joe felt the skin at his temples tighten. “It’s not the name.”

  “Joe Crawford Construction just sounds so…”

  “Accurate?”

  “Boring.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “It’s not catchy.”

  “And Azure Horizons is?”

  She shrugged. “You have to admit Azure Horizons sounds more interesting than Joe Crawford Construction.”

  “Azure Horizons sounds like an airline company,” Joe said. “Or a Latino porn star. Take your pick.”

  She made a pained face. “The Wilson Brothers are no better at building houses than you are.”

  “They’re idiots.”

  “But this is the third time in as many months they’ve outbid you.”

  “Underbid, honey. There’s a big difference.”

  “So lower your bids.”

  He clenched his jaw, forced himself to pay attention to the road. They were nearing town, the Marathon gas station up there on the left. His eyes flicked to the fuel gauge. Nearly empty. They’d have to stop.

  “I’ve explained this, honey,” he said, taking care to keep his tone low. They’d have to wake Lily when they got home, but it was usually best to let her sleep as long as possible. When she didn’t nap, she was more frightening than a terrorist on crystal meth. He went on. “If I put forth a lowball bid and the client accepts it, what happens when the project gets going and the costs start to rise?”

  “You do what every other contractor does and raise the price.”

  “I don’t do business that way.”

  “You won’t do business at all unless you adapt.”

  It hit him like a punch to the gut. Michelle was seldom this way to him, but he’d made the mistake of dreaming aloud of the new car he’d buy her once the contracts on this deal were signed. The ragged edge in her voice was her unvarnished disappointment talking. But that didn’t make it sit any easier.

  She sighed. “Sorry for being selfish.”

  “Are you?” he asked without looking at her. The gas station was a hundred yards up.

  “You know I am.”

  “I can be like everybody else and overcharge for materials and drag my feet to inflate my labor fee, but I’m not going to do that.” He signaled a left turn. The gas station looked busy. All the pumps but one were occupied. He said, “What you
’re talking about, that’s dishonest. I tell people the price, and I try to steer clear of overages. If that makes me some kind of chump, then so be it.”

  She smiled wanly. “It’s like I’m sitting here with my dad.”

  He pulled into the station and sidled their black Tundra next to the vacant pump. Cutting the engine, he turned to her and said, “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  Michelle’s smile grew a little brighter.

  Joe rolled down the windows and climbed out. He didn’t like the gasoline fumes wafting in toward Lily, but he liked the prospect of her and her mother baking in the unseasonably hot early April afternoon even less. He left the door ajar, swiped his card, and chose the cheapest grade of gas. As he waited for the all-clear to start fueling, his gaze wandered over to a maroon van parked on the other side of the pump. There was a blond woman pumping gas and another blond sitting behind the wheel. He saw what looked like a kid’s car seat behind the passenger’s seat.

  Joe’s pump said “Please proceed” in a pleasant female voice, so he did, inhaling the gas fumes as he pulled the trigger and braced it to remain on until the tank was full. He felt a pang of guilt at enjoying the fumes so much—his mom had always warned that sniffing them would kill brain cells—but he couldn’t help it. He’d always loved the smell.

  A plaintive cry tore at his ears, a child’s cry, and for a moment, Joe thought Lily had awakened. But when he glanced to his right, he saw his daughter still snoozing peacefully and realized it was the kid in the maroon van doing the bawling. He took a sideways step and saw that, yes, there was a little boy in the car seat, and he was indeed wailing. Little fella couldn’t have been more than a year old and had hair the color of bleached straw. He noticed, too, the pretty girl in the driver’s seat was glaring up in the mirror at her boy with a grim look on her face. She didn’t look so pretty anymore. Or very old, for that matter. She couldn’t have been much over twenty.

  Joe’s eyes shifted to the lady at the gas pump and saw how it was more clearly. The little boy belonged to the younger girl. The woman at the pump was the grandma—the very young grandma. Probably forty-three or forty-four, just a couple years older than Joe. Of course, from the way the grandma was dressed, she didn’t much like the thought of growing older. The denim shorty shorts and the tight white top showed so much leg and midriff that the lady could’ve posed for a nudie magazine with minimal fuss. The shorts were so tight Joe worried her female parts might suffer from oxygen deprivation. But she wore them well, there was no doubt about that. Grandma looked thirty or so, until you got to the face. And though it wasn’t a bad face and might even been called attractive, there was a hardness there, a fierceness that suggested she’d seen much of life and wouldn’t put up with anybody else messing her over.

  The little boy in the van continued to wail.

  Joe saw the look on the young mother’s face and felt a ripple of misgiving sweep through him. The young mom, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, was staring daggers at the kid in the overhead mirror now. Joe glanced at the young grandma at the pump and thought, Hurry, lady. Your daughter’s at the end of her fuse. I’ve got a feeling the toddler in the backseat isn’t a stranger to fussing like this, which means his momma’s nerves are as frayed as old wires.

  “You gonna stand out there all day?” Michelle’s voice called.

  Joe blinked, returning to himself, and glanced at the gas pump. Stepping over and leaning into the open doorway of the pickup, he said, “It’s three-quarters full. Can we get Lily home and into her crib without waking her up?”

  “It’s probably better if she does get up,” Michelle said, checking her watch. “It’s five now. If she doesn’t wake soon, she’ll be up all night.”

  Joe nodded. “You’re right. She’ll be cranky th—“

  A flat, solid sound popped in the spring air. Joe felt his guts squirm. Michelle’s face paled. She was staring at something beyond him. He knew what it was even before he turned, knew it yet hoped against hope it wasn’t true. But when he did crane his neck around and peered through the windshield and saw what was happening, it was as though Joe’s internal organs turned to mush and settled in the pit of his stomach.

  “Joe,” Michelle said in a small, breathless voice.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. Jesus Christ.

  The young mother stood in the van’s open side doorway. She raised her hand again, her face twisted in a snarl. She was spitting sibilant words at the little boy through bared teeth. Her eyes were enraged and full of white.

  His whole body numb and shaking, Joe pushed himself away from the pickup, and his view was momentarily washed out by the late afternoon sun glare boiling off the van’s windshield. But he still saw a flash of brown skin as the young woman’s arm whipped down, still heard the sickening, meaty smack of bony fingers on tender pink flesh. His heart thumping, his gorge a bursting mass of heat, Joe stumbled over the concrete island on legs he couldn’t feel. He was distantly aware of the young grandma’s eyes on him as he drifted around the corner of the van. The scene that awaited him was worse than he ever would’ve imagined:

  The young mother, athletic and curvy and all brown skin. Her right palm rearing back like a sledgehammer, her eyes ringed with hideous white coronas, her gleaming teeth those of a Rottweiler with all the gentleness conditioned out of it, who only knows how to lash out, who only knows how to rip and maim.

  Beyond her were the faces of several bystanders. Though Joe wasn’t looking at them, he could make out their faces in the background. Like horrified constellations they stared at the hideous scene, but not one of them moved. Women. Men. A couple children of maybe four and seven. The faces gaped, but they were frozen in that tableau. Some modernized version of a Bosch painting come to life.

  But the worst of it, by an inestimably vast margin, was the sight of the little boy, too young to know exactly what was happening or to understand the injustice of his situation, but old enough to know he didn’t want to be hit again. Old enough to cry and writhe in his seat while the snot and saliva formed bloody whorls on his lips and his chin. The collar of his baby blue T-shirt, Joe saw, was purpled with sweat and other fluids Joe didn’t want to think about.

  The woman was beginning her striking motion again when Joe reached her. Until this moment he’d known people like this existed, but perhaps he’d deluded himself into believing their crimes really couldn’t be as detestable as the papers described. A mother really couldn’t willingly harm her child.

  What he did do was catch her by the wrist. So powerful was her downward swing that her arm descended another few inches anyway, but Joe was a good deal stronger, and he had enough adrenaline sluicing through his body to stay her slap before it landed on the toddler’s already swelling face. For a split second, it seemed she would relent. Her white, deranged horse’s eyes flicked to his and registered what might have been astonishment.

  Then her left hand curled up in a claw and tore ribbons from the side of his neck to the shelf of his jaw. The pain was incredible, but the instinct for self-preservation won out. Before she could get at him again—and she was already retracting her scythe-like talons for another vicious swipe—Joe jerked her sideways, away from the squalling toddler and his heartbreaking tears. She staggered, nearly fell, and Joe almost came down on top of her. There was someone batting at his shoulders, a voice shrilling at him to Let Angie go! Let Angie go! But Joe’s only thoughts were of preventing more abuse to the child in the van and of saving what was left of his own looks by immobilizing those lethal fingernails.

  They were halfway between the pumps and the gas station. A car had stopped about ten feet shy of running them over and sat there idling impatiently. The girl was thrashing in his grip and spouting obscenities at him, words like cocksucker and motherfucker and other things so foul he didn’t even know what they meant. Beyond the shrieking harpy he could make out the pink, full moon faces of onlook
ers who’d stepped out of the gas station to spectate. On their right flank, the crowd from the small parking lot had closed in, perhaps to get a better look at Joe’s bloody neck.

  The girl—Angie, the grandma had called her—reared back and let loose with a gob of spit that slapped him in the cheek. Meanwhile, the grandma was tearing at his arms, his shirt, now interposing herself between him and Angie to pry loose his fingers.

  “Let my girl go, damn you!” Grandma whacked him across the chest, the shoulder. “Let…her…go!”

  Joe threw her a look. “Tell her to stop carving me up with those nails of hers and I will.”

  The grandma seemed not to hear him. She hauled off and swatted him across the bridge of the nose, and goddammit, did that hurt. Angie was still flailing about, her arms like electrified nunchucks, and now she was kicking at his legs, rearing back like an NFL placekicker and booting him with all her strength in the left shin.

  Joe stifled a cry of pain and gave her a shake. “Stop it, damn you, and I’ll let you go!”

  Angie aimed a knee at his crotch and only barely missed neutering him.

  For the love of God, Joe thought. I’m in the middle of a sordid daytime talk show, the kind where guys hump their sisters and the bodyguards have to work overtime.

  He spun Angie away from Grandma so he could avoid the older woman’s bruising slaps, but she kept at it, revolving with him in an unceasing attempt to disengage him from her daughter. A gas station attendant, a young guy with longish brown hair, had finally exited the building and was now just a few feet away from the scrum. The young guy’s face was etched in a disbelieving mask, but he looked like he could be an ally if he’d snap out of his stupor.

  “Help me,” Joe managed in a strangled growl. The young guy gave him a reluctant nod and ventured to put his hands on the grandma, but no sooner had he made contact than the woman whirled and slugged him in the mouth. The dull thud of her knuckles on the young guy’s teeth would’ve made Joe wince under ordinary circumstances. But these were not ordinary circumstances. The Twilight Zone has landed in Northern Indiana, he thought. Forget about ordinary.