The Children's Hour - A Novel of Horror (Vampires, Supernatural Thriller)

by Douglas Clegg

  Minnie Harper, who was seventy-eight, had always lived above Logan’s Market—she was a self-described spinster, and spent the early evenings at her window, dressed like a princess in a beaded gown and her hair all done up above her head, four strands of pearls around her neck, just watching the streets as if she owned them from above the market.

  Winston Alden was still sitting at his desk behind the glass storefront window of his office. The lettering on the glass read: W.H. Alden, Consultant. Beneath this: Opinions Expressed. He would sit there for another two hours; he had little business these days, but he had fallen into something of a second childhood after having been a preacher when he was younger, then a lawyer, and finally a walking shambles in a three-dollar suit—he spent most of the better part of the day reading old copies of Tales from the Crypt comics. He cherished his back issues of Weird Tales. His old friend, Dr. Cobb, usually showed up by nine for a glass of sherry and a cigar. They would exchange stories about the old days, when they had adventures, and remember the women they loved and the loves they’d lost and sometimes they talked about the not-so-great memories, too.

  Across the block from him, Jack LaPree closed his bookshop by six. George and Cally’s ValCo Gas stayed open ‘til eleven, but you could only get gas before dark, because Cally once had a gun stuck in her face by some out-of-town boy and she swore she’d never open her store’s door after dark again. The First Stone Valley Savings and Loan had closed by five, although the automatic teller kept going until midnight. Logan’s Market was open until nine. The Fauvier Art Gallery was closed, but Miles Fauvier was still inside finishing up on his accounts. Through the windows, you could see the large canvases with their pastoral landscapes of Virginia and West Virginia, a painting of the New River, and a portrait of a mining family from the old days. Three bars in town didn’t start up until about six or seven, and it was in one of these that Becky O’Keefe, formerly Becky Petersen, went to do her shift as waitress-bartender-consoler of lost souls.

  The place was called the Angel Wing Pub. Downstairs, it had several small round tables, and upstairs, the bar. Becky didn’t love her work, but it was one of the few jobs in town that allowed her to work four nights a week and still bring in enough money to spend time with her son, Tad, during his waking hours.

  And as she set up a boilermaker for Jack LaPree, who had his eye on a woman named Alice who, like Jack, came in every night until closing, Becky heard a voice. She looked up, and thought she saw a ghost.

  “I know you, don’t I?” she asked. “Joe? Joe Gardner?” She wasn’t exactly smiling, because you never do when you see what you think is a ghost, you only gasp and hope you’re imagining things.

  (Joe wasn’t about to admit this to himself, and maybe nobody was going to say it aloud, but it wasn’t like anybody wanted him back in town, in this town called Colony with its long memory of a girl who was voted most likely to succeed and most creative at Colony High, only to die one day while crossing a bridge.

  It wasn’t so much the girl’s death. Nobody blamed Joe; hell, he wasn’t even driving that day.

  It was what came after. The voices.

  When Joe thought he was going nuts after her death.

  What he heard, all through town, the sounds of human voices, the secrets, the whispers.

  So Becky was briefly praying it was only some creep who looked like Joe Gardner, like in the game she and Hopfrog used to play called facsimiles, where they’d pick out people in a crowd who look like other people, maybe famous people. She hoped this was a facsimile of Joe, not the genuine article.

  Because sometimes she thought she’d like to kill him for the way he had mentally tortured her ex-husband, “Hopfrog” Petersen, and set him on a path of obsession which had pretty much ruined their marriage.

  6.

  Certain routines and rituals were being followed in Colony, that night, also.

  Romeo Dancer, so named because he had proclaimed himself the greatest tap and toe dancer in three counties and the greatest lover in the world, was sitting on the stoop of his trailer out towards Happy Valley, jawing at his wife, Wilma, and she was jawing right back at him. He wore his black suit and his dancing boots. He was getting ready to go to the Creeker’s Roadhouse out on the Post Road, but he wasn’t about to take Wilma because, as he told her, “You get jealous too easy and I’m only dancin’, darlin’.” Wilma owned a pit bull and they lived in separate trailers, side by side, and sometimes, when she was angry, she and the pit bull looked like kin to him.

  “You go there tonight,” she said, “And you ain’t never comin’ back, I’m gonna set this house on fire, you old fart, and then we’re gonna see who does the dancin’ round here!”

  Their voices carried on the wind. They had become legends to teenagers making out down at the Paramount River in their father’s four-by-fours or in the backseats of old Chevys, who heard the caterwauling as it echoed loud and clear across the water and far banks.

  Uptown, near the Lyric movie theater, Miss Athena Cobb, Virgil’s niece, who was all of forty-eight and genteel as the day was long (and they were getting short, with winter coming on), was out walking her Doberman, Chelsea, and waiting for Melanie Dahlgren. Melanie was from Sweden and she made her living from her beefy arms—she was a masseuse, the legitimate kind, much to the disappointment of the local lechers. She had recently moved to Colony to paint and get away from cities. Melanie was older than Athena, nearly sixty, and wiser in the ways of the world. She had begun to show Athena a whole new side of life. Miss Dahlgren, as Athena addressed her, even after various intimacies, was usually walking her dachshund at the same hour. Athena didn’t want to miss running into her, and if anyone had told her that it was puppy love, Miss Athena Cobb would’ve probably agreed.

  The Lyric theater, itself, once a vaudeville stage, and now the most run-down green velvet curtained movie house that side of the Malabar Hills, was packed to capacity with what appeared to be every high schooler with five bucks in her or his pocket, popcorn butter-grease on chins. It was Horror Week, as the Lyric’s banner proudly proclaimed, in honor of Halloween, a twenty-four-hour marathon of The Haunting, Dr. Sardonicus, CandyMan, Carrie, The Fury, The Curse of the Cat People, Misery, Hellraiser Three: Hell on Earth, Halloween, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death, C.H.U.D., and the current feature, Scarecrows. On the screen, the face of a scarecrow in a field. Tenley McWhorter turned to her date, Noah Cristman and whispered, “I hate movies like this. I like movies about real people and real life. This wouldn’t ever happen. I don’t believe it at all. Wanna go for a drive or something?”

  Only the diehards would still be there by midnight, and by dawn, you could fairly predict that the place would still have a couple of pimply-faced kids having a blast.

  Winston Alden, sitting in his storefront office, with the lights off, lit up a Cuban cigar. He set out two brandy snifters. He filled one and took a sip. Then he reached beneath his desk and withdrew a dog-eared copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. He flicked on the desk lamp. He began reading, smoking, and sneaking a sip of Napoleon brandy while he waited for his guest to arrive.

  ***

  Nelda Chambers, Dale’s wife, had come across an old typewriter that she hadn’t seen in years and decided to resume an old habit. She put a fresh piece of erasable bond in the machine and began typing a letter to her husband:

  1 know what you did. You naughty, naughty man.

  There, she thought, keep the mystery alive, you whore-chaser, see if you have any conscience left in you.

  When she had finished typing, she put the typewriter back in the closet, took the letter, sealed it in one of Dale’s own envelopes, and set it under the front door. She went back to the kitchen, made some Celestial Seasonings Sleepy Time Tea, and went upstairs to her bedroom to watch television until she could fall asleep.

  ***

  John Feely, also known as Old Man Feely to just about anybody who had lived in Colony more than a few years, was unlocking the door to a ver
y private room in his farmhouse. He had a candle in his hand, and he leaned forward as best he could to light the other candles in the room. When this task was complete, he knelt down and clasped his hands together, looking up at a marble statue stolen long ago from an untended grave. The statue had no face.

  Beneath the floorboard, he heard the child kicking at the wall, trying to get out, and John Feely prayed harder and louder and longer to block out the noise.

  7.

  And even while all this was going on, Cathy Zane, who handled 911 in town, got a frantic call from Wendy Hoskins who said that her son, Billy, had run away from home, “And we thought he’d’a come back before tonight, maybe go to one of his little friends, he’s done it before, but, good Lord, nobody’s seen him, and I think something’s wrong, I think—” but then Wendy had begun sobbing, and her husband, Mike, had taken the phone, “Get that goddamned sheriff over here right now, you hear me, my boy’s disappeared, and you people better damn well find him.”

  8.

  As in any town in America at the end of the twentieth century, there was evil being perpetrated; in this case, in the form of what children often do to each other in their haphazard rites of passage. Although it was nightfall, and the light of the world was extinguishing at the farthest rim of the western hills, two boys were bullying another out at Watch Hill, the cemetery. They had come across the field, pursuing the boy—and he had only come to sit on the ground next to where his grandfather was buried before going home to dinner.

  His name was Tad Petersen, and his father had once been known as Hopfrog, his mother had once been known as Becky Petersen, but was now Becky O’Keefe. Since his parents’ divorce, he had withdrawn into books and videos and the drawings he sometimes made of a fantasy world—but he knew he was sensible and sane, and that the other kids in town were primarily idiots.

  This attitude may have accounted for their treatment of him.

  The boys who followed him, Hank and Elvis, were big for their age (twelve), and far too hairy. Their clothes were small, and they were from the Bonchance clan who lived by the river.

  And they had it in for Tad, always. No particular reason relating to Tad, other than, given the chance, he was an easy enough target: he kept to himself, he drew weird pictures, he read a lot, and he got too many good grades.

  As Tad stood up, next to his grandfather O’Keefe’s grave, he saw that Elvis Bonchance had a big old cat-o’-nine-tails in his hand. Tad knew that this was probably Mr. Bonchance’s, because Elvis’s father tended to be of the old school, and was fairly well thought of as a sadist in Colony.

  Hank snickered, “Hey, Peterbutt, what you doing out here? Boneyard’s for stiffs. You a stiff?”

  Tad, very solemnly, said, “No, but I play one on TV.”

  Hank glanced at Elvis, who chortled, “Trying to make a joke, is you? Well, you wussy-ass, we think you been bad.”

  “Yeah,” his brother said, “Real bad.”

  “Bad Tad,” Elvis laughed, cracking the cat out to the side.

  Tad said, “Shut up.”

  “Your mama’s a whore and your daddy’s a gimp.” Hank took another step closer to him.

  “Bite me,” Tad said. He started to walk away. There was only one light on at night at Watch Hill, and he was walking towards it when he felt something sting his shoulders. He spun around. Elvis had just brought the whip back. “Look, Elvis, why don’t you just admit that your dad beats the hell out of you and you can’t take it so you have to pick on kids my size just to feel like you’re better than everyone else.”

  Tad expected that the two brothers would actually redouble their efforts, so he cringed a little, ready for the next blow—knowing he would hightail it out of there if Elvis raised that whip another inch.

  Instead, Elvis screeched, “What the hell you talkin’? My daddy don’t beat me! I ain’t no pussy!” He began shaking; the cat-o’-nine-tails dropped from his hand.

  Hank grinned. “You stupid fuckface. We’re gonna put you where the sun don’t shine for that one.”

  Tad started to run, but he felt like his feet were stuck in molasses. He moved his feet, but, somehow, Hank and Elvis had managed to catch him fast. They bound him with some twine and carried him over to one of the vaults.

  “We’ll just see how you like spending the night with the bones, cracker,” Hank slobbered.

  Tad could not resist. “If anyone’s a cracker, you are.” For that, he got a whack across the face. When he awoke, he was down at the bottom of a freshly dug grave.

  “Guys?” he asked, choking back the fear as best he could. All he could smell was mud. “Hank? Elvis? Guys? I take it back! I am a wussy-ass! You’re right about my folks! Guys?”

  He could feel his heartbeat.

  Above him, it was completely dark, save for the stars.

  Tad began crying, knowing it was babyish of him, but he couldn’t stop. He knew that he would be stuck all night, that he’d probably die, that he would freeze, or worse ... he might be buried alive.

  “Hey!” he shouted until he was hoarse. “Hey!”

  Not long after, same college girls who claimed they were on a scavenger hunt lifted him out of the grave and untied him, giggling over him and brushing their fingers in his hair like he was a baby; as far as Tad was concerned they were angels.

  He brushed as much mud off of himself as he could, and then went directly back to his father’s house.

  But he didn’t tell anyone what he’d heard there, lying in that grave. The voices beneath the ground.

  Children’s voices, as if they were calling to him to come join them.

  He recognized one of the voices, a kid named Billy Hoskins—

  It can’t be. It was just my imagination. I know it. It was just me being scared and scaring myself.

  Billy Hoskins, beneath the grave, had said, “Tad, hey, Tad, hey, Tad, we’re coming to get you. All of us. Coming to get you.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  A BRIEF INTERLUDE:

  JOE AND MELISSA AND HOPFROG

  AND PATTY GLASS ARE KIDS

  AND THE FEELY BARN IS DARK

  1.

  In those days, more than twenty years before the disappearance of Billy Hoskins, the rain tasted clean and good. (Joe stuck his tongue out to catch a few drops. He closed his eyes.)

  “Come on.” Hopfrog’s crackly voice was insistent.

  Joe opened his eyes. He was standing beside Melissa Welles, whose light brown hair was plastered to the sides and top of her scalp from the downpour. She looked frightened, so he took her hand in his.

  “It’s Patty,” Hopfrog said, and pointed towards Old Man Feely’s barn.

  Melissa squeezed Joe’s hand. “Joey,” she whispered, and he could barely hear her, so he leaned into her, close to her face. “Joey, I’m scared. What if she got caught? What if he’s gonna do something bad to her.”

  Joe grinned, shaking his head. “Aw, nothing bad’s gonna happen. It can’t. We’re just lads.”

  “He had a gun,” Melissa said, “Even if he’s not supposed to use it. Maybe he shot her.”

  “Old Man Feely, he went inside,” Joe reassured her.

  Hopfrog waited at the edge of the gray barn. Three cracked and broken boards created a small opening into the barn. Hopfrog slid another board to the side, and glanced within.

  Joe was shivering. He told himself it was the cold. But it wasn’t the cold, and it wasn’t just because Patty Glass had cried out.

  It was because he was getting a feeling like he had maybe once before in his life (when a strange man looked at him funny at the Esso gas station when he was about six years old). It was a feeling that someone was talking to him, only he didn’t quite know who it was or where the voice was coming from. He didn’t like to think about this voice too much because he was afraid it meant he was nuts; and the voice had only spoken once before. Worse, the voice didn’t seem to say anything that Joe could understand. It just whispered.

  Suddenly Joe shouted, “Hop
frog, don’t go in there!”

  Hopfrog looked at him funny, and then went between the space in the old boards, into the barn.

  “Melissa,” Joe said, “Something bad’s in there. Something we’re not supposed to play with.”

  “Give me a break,” she said, and let go of his hand, following Hopfrog’s lead. “I’m not five. Patty may be hurt.”

  As Melissa Welles ducked beneath the rotting wood, she said, “I wish you weren’t so chicken sometimes, Joey.”

  That was it. Weird feeling or not, Joe ducked in and around the boards. When he stepped inside the barn the first thing he did was gasp. The second thing he did was wet his pants, but they were already soaked from the rain, so nobody was going to notice.

  2.

  “Holy,” Joe was about to say, “shit,” but it was a forbidden word, and even though he heard it enough from other kids, he wasn’t the kind to say it; but he could think it.

  The barn was dark, except for a ring of light which came from its center.

  Hopfrog was standing in the shadows, outside the light.

  Melissa hung back, waiting for Joe. She said, “What is it?”

  “It’s a well,” Hopfrog said. He picked up the cross that straddled the rim of the cylindrical opening. He looked at the cross as if he’d never seen one before, and then set it back down in its place.

  “That’s not a well,” Joe took a few steps forward. When he reached Melissa he was shivering so badly he didn’t want to touch her, lest he convey his fear (and he very quickly needed to prove to her that he was no chicken).