“No,” Ben snapped. “I wouldn’t believe you. I wouldn’t believe you if you suddenly turned into a bat and flapped out of here. I wouldn’t believe you if you had pointy teeth and a black cape.”
Titus stared at him silently for a moment. “You’re a fool,” he said finally. “And I’m a bigger fool for thinking I could trust you.”
“I should go,” said Ben.
Titus nodded.
Ben turned around. The doorway of the shed was filled with the golden light of afternoon. Behind him, Titus stood in the shadows, surrounded by the jars of bees. For a moment, Ben almost went back to him. Then he walked forward, heading as quickly as he could for the light.
Chapter Twelve
Vampires. Ben laughed. How could Titus ever have thought he would believe such a story? It was ridiculous. And all that nonsense about the bees—what had that been about? What kind of twisted person stung himself with bees?
A freak, Ben told himself. That’s who.
He was in the library. Where he belonged, he reminded himself. He’d spent too much time away from the place in the past few days, too much time chasing after nothing. It was time he got back to his job.
“Hey, Mr. Hodge? Where would I find more of those Edward Eager books?” Steven Settles popped his head out from behind the bookshelf he was scanning. He’d come in an hour earlier, returning the books he’d checked out on his previous visit and anxious for more.
“In the second row,” Ben called out to him. “First shelf.”
Steven retreated into the children’s room, a moment later calling out, “I found them!”
So much for quiet, thought Ben. But he didn’t care. He was pleased to have Steven around, both because watching the boy’s interest in reading blossom was rewarding and also because it made the library feel less lonely.
“Which one should I read?” Steven asked him, coming up to the desk with three books in his hand. “Half Magic, The Time Garden, or Knight’s Castle?”
“Half Magic is my favorite,” Ben replied. “I’d take that one.”
Steven nodded. “I’ll put these back,” he said, leaving the chosen book on the counter and taking the others back to the children’s room.
Ben picked up the book. He’d first read Half Magic when he was about Steven’s age. He’d been enchanted by the story of four siblings who discovered a magic talisman that granted their wishes. The trick was that it only gave them half of what they wished for, so they had to figure out how to wish properly. Their bumbling attempts at mastering the art made the book a great read.
Back then, Ben had wished that he too could find a magic talisman. Now, though, the idea of magic made him uneasy. Even though he didn’t believe Titus’s tales of vampirism and bizarre cures, the notion of anything supernatural occurring in the world was unpleasant to think about.
“I hope this one’s as good as Magic By the Lake,” said Steven, coming back to sign out the book.
“It’s better,” Ben reassured him, taking the checkout card from the rear of the book and filing it away.
A honk sounded outside the library, and Steven looked toward the door. “That’s Darren,” he said.
“How come he never checks out any books?” Ben asked.
Steven blushed a little. “He says only fags read books,” he said.
“Oh, really?” said Ben. “Well, you tell him that only morons don’t read books.”
Steven laughed. “I’ll see you later,” he said happily, running for the door.
When he was gone, Ben went back to his office and sat at his desk. The box of books he’d brought up from the cellar still sat on the floor next to his chair. Reaching inside, he brought out Dreaming Demons. He flipped open the cover and looked at Wallace Blackwood’s photograph on the back flap. A handsome middle-aged face looked back at him. But how old would Blackwood have been at the time of publication? he wondered. Surely in his late 60s or early 70s. Yet the man in the photo looked a good twenty years younger than that.
“It’s probably just an old photo,” Ben said. He’d met more than one author whose appearance in person made his or her author photo look like it had been snipped from the pages of a high school yearbook. Most likely Wallace Blackwood had just been vain.
He put the book down and looked in the box again. This time he took out Haints and Haunts of the Ozarks. The title had intrigued him the first time he’d seen it, and he wanted to look at the book more closely. Opening it, he read part of the introduction.
“No region other than perhaps the Catskill Mountains of Washington Irving’s imagination have housed so many goblins as the Ozark Mountains,” he read. “Its woods and dells are home to spirits, imps, and beasts whose nightmarish countenances and evil intentions would rouse even Rip Van Winkle from his dreams, such is their power to inspire horror.”
Ben flipped through the book, looking at the chapter headings. The author, Sadie Filkins Ransome, had apparently collected every Ozark legend she could lay her hands on and detailed them in her book. She’d also gotten someone to illustrate it with black and white drawings, most of which featured people running from one strange creature or another.
Ben was going to put the book away when he flipped by an illustration that caught his eye. Locating it again, he looked at the drawing more closely. It depicted a hideous-looking creature standing in a cemetery. It was dressed in the remains of once-elegant clothes, the scraps hanging from its skeletal frame like ribbons. Its nails and hair were long and dirty, and its eyes were hollow and spectral. Its arms were raised in a crooked gesture.
He looked at the page opposite the drawing. “Some of the earliest reports of strange goings-on in the Ozarks came from early settlers, who reported that from time to time they would find graves disturbed and their inhabitants missing. Days, weeks, and even months later, loved ones of the missing would report receiving visits from the dead, who demanded that they be fed. When refused, the dead would become violent, often attacking the living and attempting to bite them. At least 17 fatalities in early communities were attributed to these creatures, which came to be known as Death Puppets due to their ungainly way of moving, as if they were being controlled by unseen hands that animated their limbs.”
Ben looked at the drawing again. The creature did indeed look as if it were engaged in some kind of gruesome dance. He could just imagine it twitching as it moved, its arms and legs thrashing about in mindless motions, like a spider in its death throes.
He continued to read. “The greatest number of deaths attributed to Death Puppets occurred in the remote community of Dunbart, in the northwest part of the state. There, a total of nine deaths were blamed on the creatures before they were eventually rounded up and destroyed in 1832, reportedly by setting them afire.
“While the parallels between the Death Puppets and the vampires of Old Europe are clear and obvious, it is interesting to note that residents of the area regarded the Death Puppets as being very different. Their resurrection and subsequent penchant for violence was believed not to be merely a thirst for blood but the result of some kind of curse on the afflicted families, a punishment for improper or impure behavior. Communities experiencing torment by a Death Puppet sometimes allegedly took revenge not only on the creature itself but on its family as well. Undocumented reports tell of men, women, and even children being killed by townspeople as penance, or perhaps as sacrifice, in an attempt at breaking the curse and bringing an end to the Death Puppet risings.”
Ben shut the book and pushed it away from him. “They’re all insane,” he said. “Every last one of them.”
He knew the book was simply a collection of folklore, and not a history book. Still, the fact that someone would come up with something as horrific as the Death Puppets was disturbing. Maybe Martha was right, he thought. Maybe I have landed in the middle of a bunch of crazies.
He picked the book up and dropped it unceremoniously into the box with the others, following it with Dreaming Demons. He was beginning to und
erstand why Martha had removed all of Wallace’s personal collection from the library shelves. The books were sick, filled with weird images and even weirder ideas. Heaven forbid someone should read them and believe the crap in them.
Someone like Titus, he thought. Yes, that was probably what had happened. Titus had read those books and dreamed up a whole story about vampires and curses and whatever the fuck else was rolling around inside his head. Maybe he and Wallace had been lovers, and this was his way of dealing with the man’s death.
But if Titus and Wallace had been lovers, he thought, Titus couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen at the time. Suddenly it all became clear to him. If Titus had been involved with Blackwood in that way, perhaps he’d seen the older man’s obsession with the dead boys from the 1932 killings as some kind of threat. Maybe he’d been angered by it, even angry enough to kill Wallace.
It made sense. If Titus had been the victim of a pedophile, he would likely have looked for a way to deal with what had happened to him. It was a classic response to abuse, inventing a far-fetched explanation to avoid dealing with what had really happened. Ben had read stories about such people, people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens, used in Satanic rituals, or even utilized in secret government experiments—anything to avoid confronting the horrible things that had been done to them.
Such people, he knew, were to be pitied. Yet sometimes their delusions simply spread their misery to others, infecting the people around them and continuing the hurt and pain. Sometimes, innocent people became caught in the snare of lies, people who paid dearly for stumbling into those traps.
He brushed the thought away. There was no time to entertain it. What mattered was that he had found the root of Titus Durham’s behavior. He was sure of it.
But what about the other boy? The question stopped him cold. What about Paul Mickerley?
Yes, what about Paul Mickerley? Who had killed him? And what about the name on the tombstone? Why had it matched Blackwood’s?
The answer to the second question escaped him. But the answer to the first was apparent and chilling. Had Titus killed Paul Mickerley? Is that why he’d told Ben to go to the funeral, as a way of confessing? Ben didn’t want to think so, but everything pointed to that as the answer. Paul had been a handsome young man. Perhaps Titus, seeing him somewhere, had become obsessed with him. Perhaps it had triggered memories of his own abuse at the hands of Wallace Blackwood, memories that had caused him to kill.
I had my chance. The words came back to Ben with chilling clarity. He could hear Titus speaking them, his voice heavy with regret. I could have done it then. Titus had said that his shame came from having entertained the thought of harming Ben. But now Ben saw that wasn’t true.
He was going to kill me, he thought.
Chapter Thirteen
Ben tried the knob for the third time. It was locked. He resisted trying it again and moved to the windows. Pushing the locks shut, he made sure they were secure. Then he drew the curtains over the panes, closing the house in. He went to the kitchen and did the same there, locking the back door and testing each window to make sure it couldn’t be opened. They could always be smashed, he thought with some small concern, but he would be sure to hear the noise.
Upstairs he went from room to room, first checking the closets and behind the doors and then shutting up the windows. He saved the bedroom for last. There, he left the windows open. It was too hot, for one thing. Besides, there were no trees or trellises outside for someone to climb up. A ladder would have to be used. Although he was certain he would hear someone attempting such a thing, he placed several empty glasses on the windowsill. If someone tried to enter, no matter how stealthily, the glasses would fall to the floor and shatter, giving him enough time to grab the baseball bat he’d placed next to the bed.
The last thing he did was shut and lock his own bedroom door. It had a sliding bolt on it, one that could only be opened from the inside, so there was no way an intruder could enter without using violent force. Once he was certain the house was as safe as he could make it, he got into bed. He hesitated a moment, then turned off the light. The moon, still bright, filled the room with enough light to see by. Pulling the sheet up, Ben stared at the door, as if at any moment he expected to hear fists pounding on it, demanding entry.
“Just relax,” he told himself. “He can’t get in.”
He didn’t really think that Titus would come after him. Still, he wasn’t taking any chances. If Titus had killed both Wallace Blackwood and Paul Mickerley—and more and more Ben was believing that he had—then he was likely capable of anything. Tomorrow, he told himself, he would go to the police and tell them what he knew.
He continued to watch the door until his eyes grew weary and his head began to nod against his chest. Several times he forced himself awake, but shortly after one o’clock he began to snore softly.
“Ben.”
The voice rippled across the surface of his dreams. Ben turned in his sleep.
“Ben.”
His eyes fluttered. Someone was calling him. He heard the voice as if through water, faint and distorted.
“Ben, wake up.”
Ben struggled to swim up from the depths of slumber. Someone was tapping at the door. No, someone was drumming his fingers on the door, the rhythmic motions filling the room with muffled retorts. Suddenly, the noise seemed to be coming from all around him.
Rain. The word came to him from somewhere inside his thoughts. It’s raining. He listened. Yes, that’s what it was. Rain was falling on the roof above his head. That was all. It was a reassuring sound, steady and gentle. Having declared that all was well with the world, sleep pulled heavily at his mind, trying to drag him under again.
But he resisted. Someone had called him. He’d heard it. Someone was in the room, speaking his name. It hadn’t been just the rain. He tried to get his dream-clouded eyes to open and focus on the world around him.
When he did, he saw that his bedroom door was open. Someone was standing in it, a black place in the shadows cast by the dresser and the bed. He sat up, suddenly frightened, and reached for the bat. His fingers searched, finding nothing.
“A storm is passing through.”
The figure detached itself from the shadows and moved forward into the light. As moonlight fell across its face, Ben felt his heart jump in his chest.
“Trey?” he said, his voice a whisper.
The figure walked to the window, looking out at the moon and the rain. Then it sat in the chair facing the bed. It certainly looked like Trey. Ben stared at him. There was the face he remembered so clearly, the soft eyes, the full mouth, and the nose, slightly turned up at the end. Trey smiled. “I’ve missed you,” he said.
Ben rubbed his eyes. Was he awake, or was this yet another dream? It seemed real enough. He could hear the rain, smell it on the breeze that came through the window. He could smell something else as well, the scent of earth or wood. He couldn’t quite place it.
“How are you here?” asked Ben.
Trey laughed, the rich sound rolling over Ben and making his skin prickle in recognition. How many times had Trey laughed like that with him? He’d missed that sound so much, longed to hear it so many times since Trey’s death.
“I brought you something,” said Trey.
Ben looked at the item that Trey held out in his hands. Trey was wearing a white T-shirt, and when he extended his hands Ben saw the scars on his wrists. He looked away.
“It’s all right,” said Trey. “I’m whole again.”
Ben looked into his face. Surely he was dreaming. But if he was, he hoped never to wake up. He looked down again. Trey was holding out a shoebox.
“This is for you,” he said.
Ben recognized the shoebox. It had sat for many months on the floor of their bedroom closet in New York. But Ben had thrown it out when he’d moved, tossed it along with some worn-out shoes and back issues of the New Yorker into the apartment’s trash chute, listened
as it slid down to the bowels of the basement and landed with a soft thud. He’d been glad to be rid of it.
“No.” He shook his head, staring at his lover in confusion.
“You need to remember,” Trey said gently. “For me.”
“I don’t want it,” Ben said.
“Remember,” Trey said, setting the box on the nightstand and getting out of the chair.
“Where are you going?” Ben asked.
“I can’t stay,” said Trey.
Ben tried to pull the sheets off of himself, but they had become entangled in his legs. He pulled at them frantically, attempting to get out of the bed.
“Goodbye, Ben,” Trey said.
Ben looked up. Trey was fading. Already Ben could see the pattern of the wallpaper behind him.
“No!” he cried. “No.”
Trey grew fainter and fainter, finally dissolving into nothingness just as Ben managed to free himself from the sheets and jump out of bed. At the last moment, Ben’s foot caught in the sheets again and he fell to the floor.
He awoke with a start, his head spinning and a throbbing pain in his side. He was on the floor, looking up at the ceiling. But how long had he been there? He wasn’t sure. Had he just woken up, and had Trey indeed been nothing but a trick of his imagination? Or had he lain there for some time, knocked out by the fall?
You were dreaming, he told himself. Of course you were dreaming. Trey wasn’t here.
He sat up. It was still night, and it was indeed raining. The rain was coming down harder now, striking the roof in a quick patter. The wind had changed direction, and some of the rain was being blown into the room. Ben could feel it hitting his skin, and there was a small damp patch on the floor beneath the window.
Standing up, he went and pulled the window closed. The rain tapped against the glass, protesting loudly. Ben straightened the curtains and turned to get back into bed.
Masters of Midnight Page 13
