The Devil's Laughter

by William W. Johnstone

“Body parts are scattered all over the damn place,” Chief Deputy Gerard Lucas said, walking up. “Hi, Link. Wonderful way to start the day, huh?”

  “Yeah.” He had not seen the boy’s parents. “Where’s Jack Stern?”

  “Shreveport. They’ve been notified,” Ray said.

  Link looked around. “No blood anywhere.”

  “Yeah,” Gerard said. “The boy was killed and dismembered somewhere and then dumped out here. Whoever did this is one sick son of a bitch.”

  “Anybody inspected the boy’s room yet?” Link asked casually.

  “Not yet,” Ray replied, his eyes hard on Link. “Got something on your mind, Link?”

  “Just the rumor that he dabbled in the occult, is all.”

  “He did for a few months,” Gerard offered. “His girlfriend, Karen Broussard, made him quit. She told him either he straightened out his act or they were through. Shit!” he suddenly said. “Karen’s got to be told.”

  “I don’t want her to see him like this,” Ray said. “I don’t want anybody to see him like this.”

  “So he quit the occult?” Link asked.

  “From all I heard, he did,” Gerard replied.

  “And maybe he pissed off those others in the group,” Link said softly.

  “Possibility,” Ray agreed. “We’ve heard rumors for years about some devil worshiping going on in the parish. We’ve never been able to pin it down. It’s not against the law to worship the devil, so we didn’t really pay much attention to it.”

  “I put some heavy birdshot in that Matisse punk’s ass a few months back,” Link reminded the men. “When he was trying to steal some of my pets. That tell you anything about animal sacrifice?”

  “We don’t know for sure it was Jack’s boy,” Ray replied. “And I don’t know about any animal sacrifice.” He smiled, standing in the midst of various body parts. “However, Jack’s boy did mysteriously leave town for a couple of weeks the day after you reported the shooting.”

  “The very idea of shooting a human being over a damn animal ...” Dr. Bradshaw snorted. He was the parish coroner ... and also a very lousy doctor. “Especially a fine young man like Jason.”

  Link looked at the doctor and told him where he could put his opinions – sideways.

  Bradshaw flushed and shut his mouth.

  Because the crime was so heinous, Ray had asked for the state police to come in and look things over. They were just arriving.

  “I’d still like to give the Stern boy’s room a look,” Gerard said.

  Ray shook his head. “We asked the judge for a search warrant, Gerard. So we could do it while the parents were gone, and we wouldn’t upset them. We’ve been over this. He said no.”

  “Why would he refuse?” Link asked.

  Ray shrugged. “Who knows? We’ll ask the parents for permission when they get over the shock.”

  “By then it might be too late,” Gerard said.

  Link walked back to his Bronco, leaving the two top lawmen in the parish arguing. Strange that Judge Jackson would refuse to issue a search warrant, especially when taking into consideration the viciousness of the murder.

  From past experience, Suzanne knew better than to ask him any questions about what he had seen. He just said “Bad” and kept on walking.

  As Link drew nearer to town, with the window down on the driver’s side of his car, he could faintly hear the sounds of sirens. When he stopped to fill up with gas, he learned that the Stern residence had burned to the ground.

  * * *

  Link sat in his study, in a lounge chair. He remained there for a long time, lost in thought. The Stern boy had been involved in devil worship, then supposedly got out of it, and he was brutally and sadistically murdered. The judge refused to let the law search the boy’s room, and two hours after the refusal, the Stern house burned down.

  Coincidence?

  Link didn’t think so, and he doubted Ray and Gerard would believe it, either.

  And the barbed wire around the boy’s head bothered Link. It held some significance . . . but what was it? Something nudged at Link’s brain, struggling to be free. He couldn’t pin it down and bring it into the light of consciousness. With a sigh, he stood up and glanced at the clock. It was only eleven.

  He fixed a sandwich and a glass of milk, checked on his critters, then decided to go for a drive. Maybe it would help him think. He paused at the front door, thinking about the contents in his war chest – as he called it – sitting on the floor in the big walk-in closet in the master bedroom. He shook his head. He knew what had brought it on. He’d done stories on devil worship and knew how dangerous some of those people could be. The sight of the boy’s savaged body had brought it all back.

  “Come on, Link,” he muttered. “Don’t go paranoid on me now, boy. We’ll just be real careful. This is probably just a single isolated incident. It’s very doubtful this parish has a dangerous coven in it.”

  He kept telling himself that all the way to his Bronco.

  At the hardtop, he paused for a few moments, studying a map of the parish. It was one of the largest parishes in the state, with a lot of roads that were sparsely populated and a lot of roads that led nowhere, dead-ending around homes of people that could make a living by, take your choice: haunting graveyards, or winning prizes for being the most ignorant, intolerant, and suspicious people in the world.

  This was rolling hills and piney woods country, not flat-land delta. He laid the map on the seat beside him and turned north, away from town. He almost never drove up this way, so he decided to have a look see.

  About a mile and a half from his house, he saw a freshly painted sign bolted to two four-by-fours and recently concreted into the ground. BROOKS VETERINARIAN – ANIMAL HOSPITAL.

  “Whoa, now,” Link said. “Where’d this come from?”

  He stopped and backed up, turning into the drive. The chain link gates were closed. He walked to the gates and read the sign on the cardbox: Opening Soon. He looked up at the old Garrison place. It had been repainted and some minor carpentry work had been done. Place looked nice. Link got back behind the wheel.

  “Very good, Link,” he muttered. “You are a real super-spy, you are. You don’t even know what’s going on a mile from your own house. There could be fourteen murders and twelve public orgies going on, and you wouldn’t know it.”

  He drove on. A few miles later the road became rougher, the hardtop turning into gravel. Link knew no one who lived out this way – except for a few of the aforementioned sub-species of people.

  He slowed, then stopped as his eyes caught a gravel road leading off to the left. He hadn’t been down that road in years. Not since he was a boy. Romaire Industries – or what was left of it – was about two or three miles down that road.

  Back in 1929, Link’s father had told him, a group of investors from New Orleans, headed by a wealthy man named Romaire, had decided that this area would be just a dandy spot to raise cattle and hogs and build a huge processing plant. They did just that, dumping several million dollars into the plant alone – the land was already owned by Romaire, and as far as Link knew, it was still owned by his heirs. Then the great depression struck the nation and the plant was abandoned. The cattle and the hogs that didn’t run wild were soon eaten by hungry, unemployed people. Funny, Link thought, the offspring of some of those people were still unemployed, sixty years later, and still outlawing wild game and stealing cattle.

  The gate was standing open and Link couldn’t see any NO TRESPASSING signs, so he drove across the cattle guard and pointed the nose of the Bronco down the old rutted road. Why would the road be rutted? he wondered. It was privately owned land, and he remembered reading that the Romaire heirs were solidly opposed to any type of hunting. There were ABSOLUTELY NO HUNTING ALLOWED signs every five hundred or so feet.

  No doubt about it, the road was still being used by someone. He bounced on for another mile and suddenly the great old complex sprang into view. Link stopped and got out to l
ook at the old plant for a moment.

  Uneasy.

  He was suddenly very uneasy and wary. But why? And why the hell was it so quiet? There were no birds singing or even flying, for that matter. No chattering of squirrels. Nothing. It was eerie.

  A faint metallic sound reached his ears. Sounded like someone had dropped a wrench onto a concrete floor. And it came from the old processing plant. On the second level of the plant, the offices, he thought, an old drape or curtain flapped in the slight breeze, the ragged fabric waving silently through the glassless frame.

  Link leaned against the Bronco and lit one of his rare cigarettes, inhaling deeply to try and calm his shaky nerves. “Why are you so spooked, boy?” he murmured to himself. “This is not like you at all.”

  Link slowly smoked his cigarette and regained his usual calm. Most of it. He opened the door to the Bronco and punched open the console, taking out the. 380 and slipping it behind his belt. He stuck the two full clips into his jacket pocket.

  “It’s just a big ol’ deserted plant, boy,” he said aloud. “You used to play around here as a kid.”

  But although the old complex appeared the same-it had been rusty even when Link was a boy – he could not shake the feeling that it had somehow changed. He sighed. “Changed how?” he questioned.

  Evil.

  “What?” Link said as the word jumped into his brain. He stood in the middle of the old road. The image of that rusty piece of barbed wire around the Stern boy’s forehead came to him. “Rusty wire and evil,” he said, shaking his head. “Boy, you have been watching too many spooky movies.” He knew why he was speaking aloud: He wanted to hear the sound of a human voice.

  What does an inhuman voice sound like? he thought. Link got back into his Bronco and drove up to the front gate of the plant complex. He got out and made sure the doors were locked. He stood looking at the two-story main building.

  Looking back at him.

  “That’s impossible!” Link said. “Damn, get a hold of yourself, boy.”

  He stared at the rusting plant. Still, he got that feeling it was staring back at him. He stood for a moment, slowly turning his head, his eyes taking in everything within his sight. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just easy rolling hills and thick stands of pine. Too thick, really. This area had not been logged in more than half a century. The pines and the thick brush looked dark and . . .

  “And . . . what?” he spoke the words sarcastically.

  Evil.

  The word popped into his mind and refused to budge. “Crap,” he said, and walked to the gate, hanging open and askew on rusty and broken hinges. He stepped inside the fenced-in area, touching one gate as he did. The gate gave up its sixty years of hanging on and crashed to the cracked and weedy concrete walkway.

  Link jumped about a foot off the ground.

  His heart hammering, he waited for the dust to settle and his nerves to stop silently screaming. “Jesus,” he managed to croak.

  He could not ever remember being this jumpy. And he didn’t really understand why. This damn place sure was having a strange effect on him.

  He decided to walk around the three buildings and eyeball the place. His boot heels cracked and crunched against the crushed stone of the yard as he walked, and he could not shake the feeling of someone watching him.

  The breeze picked up, sighing and making strange noises as it whistled through the broken windows and around the corners of the buildings.

  Link sensed, rather than saw, something coming at him very fast. He dropped into a crouch, whirling around just as something filthy and stinking of the ages settled softly around him, blinding him. He heard someone laughing insanely.

  Chapter 3

  Realizing what had trapped him, Link flailed and cussed, feeling like a damned fool as he fought the old drape that had settled over him like a shroud. Throwing it aside in disgust, he looked up at the second level of the plant. The drape no longer waved from the paneless frame. The winds had finally torn the cloth loose and sent it drifting to the ground.

  But who – or what – had been laughing just as the curtain covered him?

  He was sure he’d heard laughter, and just as sure it had come from one of the buildings in the rusting complex. But it had been wild laughter, haunting and hollow-sounding. Strange laughter, like a clown gone crazy or a jester from hell.

  He continued his walk around the plant grounds.

  As he slowly meandered around the complex, Link wondered why he’d thought both who or what was behind the laughter. He shook his head and smiled. It wasn’t that many days past Halloween. Some kids had probably been out there with their dates and left some sort of mechanical thingamabob inside the plant. The winds caused it to laugh insanely.

  “Yeah, right, Link,” he muttered. “Keep reaching, boy. Pretty soon you’ll have yourself convinced of that.” In about a week or so, he silently added.

  He made his three-quarter circle of one building and stepped into the walkway. That’s when the smell hit him.

  Death.

  Dead, rotting, maggot-covered flesh.

  He stopped and listened, breathing shallowly. The smell was very strong. He walked to a dirty window and tried to peer inside. He could see nothing through the filth. He found a crack in a boarded-up window and sniffed. The smell was definitely coming from the middle building. He backtracked to the rear of the complex and found a metal door, trying the knob. Locked. The old dead bolt holding it firm.

  Link debated breaking a window and crawling in. Then he decided against it. It was probably an animal that had gotten in and could not find its way out, eventually starving to death.

  “Right,” he muttered.

  Link walked around the entire complex, stopping often to rub at the years-old dirt caked on the windows, trying to look inside. The equipment was still there rusting and useless after sixty years of decay.

  The smell of death was still strong.

  “Big dog,” he said aloud.

  He tried every door he found. They were all locked. He walked back to his Bronco and leaned against the vehicle, deep in thought. Not one door had been locked when he and Ray and Gerard used to ride bikes out when they were kids, playing around the old plant. The only doors that had been locked back then were the steel doors leading to the offices on the second level of the middle building. The three boys used to play – dangerous play – inside the processing plant. And all over the ground floors of the three buildings.

  Then he recalled something else from his youth: That old Garrison place, where the new vet’s office was located, had been rumored to be haunted.

  Now what had happened there? Link struggled to bring it back to him. Yeah. Now he made the connection. The Jackson family had bought and renovated that old plantation house just before the great depression struck the land. Shortly afterward, the entire family had been killed, hacked to death with axes. The murderer – or murderers – had never been caught.

  Judge Jackson was a great-nephew, or cousin twice removed, or some sort of relative of that murdered family. The house had sat empty for years. About twenty years, he recalled. Then, when Link was a kid, that young couple moved down from Ruston and bought the place.

  They hadn’t been in the house long when they just up and disappeared one night. Not a trace of them was ever found. Then when Link was in ’Nam, his mother had written him that another family had bought the place and stayed only a few weeks. They left, saying the place was haunted. They couldn’t sleep at night because of the voices coming out of thin air and the ghostly shapes walking about, calling out for revenge, moaning and weeping.

  Then Link put another peg in the mental board he was playing. Before the land was sectioned off and sold long before he was born, that plantation had been owned by the ...

  Romaire family. And Judge Jackson had married a Romaire. An outcast Romaire, according to rumor. Her family had disowned her and told her never to come back to their grand home outside of New Orleans.

  Why
had they disowned her? Link didn’t believe anyone had ever really known, or if they did, they kept it to themselves. Lynette Romaire. That was her name. Strange lady. Kept to herself most of the time, sometimes not leaving the mansion out in the country for months at a time. A wealthy woman, it was said. Judge Jackson was in his mid-fifties, his wife about the same age.

  Link wouldn’t know the woman if she walked up and spit in his eye.

  He watched as deer came out of the woods to graze on the clearing at the south side of the cleared land around the old industrial complex.

  For all his love of animals and all the humane organizations he belonged to, Link broke away from the norm when it came to hunting. He didn’t like hunting, but he was not completely against it, either. He was realist enough to see the need for some hunting in most areas. With the predators gone, such as the wolf and the panther – their demise due totally to the callousness, stupidity, blood lust, and greed of humankind – herds of deer, elk, and moose had to be culled to keep down disease and overpopulation.

  It was the so-called loudmouthed sport hunters who chapped his ass.

  Link unlocked his Bronco, returned the .380 to the console, and got behind the wheel. He cranked the engine and sat for a time, looking at the plant complex. He thought again about hearing laughter when that old drape had settled around him. Maybe it had just been the product of an overactive imagination. After all, Link had found no signs of human life around the old processing plant.

  But then, maybe that was the key to it all.

  No human life.

  He laughed aloud at the thought and headed back to town.

  * * *

  Link kept a P.O. box for business purposes. The superintendent of parish schools, Charlie Ford, was standing outside of the post office just as Link pulled into the parking slot. Link got out of his Bronco and spoke to the man.

  “Donovan,” Ford said. “Hold up. I want to talk to you.”

  Link smiled. He had a pretty good idea what was coming. The superintendent of schools was no friend of his. He’d made that clear many times. Ford was just one of those types who sucked up to the power people in the community. Link didn’t give a damn about the local power brokers, most of whom were types who felt a winning football team came before a quality education, and were nothing more than a bunch of hypocritical quasi-rednecks who got falling-down drunk at the local country club every Saturday night, played grab-ass with other men’s wives, and then went to church the next day, hung over to their toenails and loudly proclaiming what fine Christians they were.