The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

“No, it’s not that,” I said.

  Ann stuck out an accusing finger.

  “We know who you have working for you at night, who keeps coming and going through that little doggie door of yours.”

  He smiled.

  “Oh, yeah, the elves. Har, har, har. Well, just don’t tell Keebler. Har, har, har.”

  “They’ve eaten all the dogs and cats in the neighborhood and now they’ve started on the children.”

  His friendly grin was replaced with a look of concern. “Maybe we should step into the back and discuss this in private,” he said.

  He led us around behind the counter and through a door into the kitchen. There was a big mixer in the corner with a row of paddles and dough hooks hanging above. Along one wall by the door were several bins of ingredients and a shelf with small jars of spices. Along another wall was a pair of doors for a walk-in cooler and a freezer. But strangely, the big oven door was set only inches from the floor and the worktable was equally short-legged as if made for a baker the size of a small child. A stack of miniature pans on a tiny wheeled rack completed the ensemble as if the production line had been designed by the E-Z-Bake Company.

  I just stared at the equipment. Finally confronting the proof of my theories was even weirder than watching the self-opening doggie door the night before. But Ann continued her pitch.

  “You’ve got to stop using your elves or whatever they are. They’re too dangerous.”

  He shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, but they’re just too good. I’m making bank on this place. I could never get anyone who could bake as good as they can, and worse, then I’d have to start paying wages.”

  “But they’re killing people!”

  “Have you thought about going to the police?” He asked.

  “They won’t believe something like that.”

  He shook his head sadly.

  “True. And I’m not going to stop using them. So there’s nothing you can do about it. So, if you’ll excuse me I have work to do.” He turned and pulled a dough hook down from where it was hanging.

  “Maybe there is something we can do,” I said, reaching for my shoulder holster.

  But the pudgy baker was faster on the draw. He swung the big aluminum hook. There was a flash of pain behind my left ear and everything went dark.

  * * * *

  It was cold, really cold. And my head felt as if somebody had been using it to split firewood and left the axe sticking in it. I groaned and opened my eyes. Ann was looking down at me. Her face was upside down and had a slightly out of focus, worried look to it.

  “Are y-you all r-right? I w-was afraid he m-might have k-killed you.”

  I blinked my eyes and my vision cleared. I realized she was holding my head in her lap. While that was not an unwelcome place for it, this wasn’t the time for playing footsie. I sat up.

  My head told me it thought that was a bad idea. Looking around I saw we were inside a walk-in freezer. Piles of frozen baked goods lined the shelves. Ann was sitting next to a big white bucket labeled, ‘Eggs, Bulk, Five-gallons.’ Her arms were wrapped around herself and she was shivering.

  “After he c-clonked you in the head he took y-your g-gun and l-locked us in here. It’s so c-cold. I’m s-sure he m-means to f-freeze us to death.”

  I nodded, then thought better of the idea.

  “Yeah, he’ll be back tonight to dispose of the bodies.”

  “B-but what are w-we going to d-do?”

  “Don’t worry, Sweet-cakes. You’re with me, remember? I didn’t spend all that time working the night shift at that restaurant without learning a thing or two.”

  Standing was easier than I anticipated. Maybe my head was finally getting better. Or maybe it was the freezing air. Don’t they always say to put ice on an injury? Whatever.

  I tried the door. It was locked, just like she said. Then I turned back to the freezer unit it the back of the room. The fan was blowing an icy breeze.

  She stood and gestured at it.

  “Can you jam the fan blades?” She asked. “I t-tried but there’s a m-metal grille in front of them. F-frozen muffins aren’t exactly the best tools to try and break through something like that.”

  “Why bother?” I reached up alongside the unit and cranked the temperature setting all the way up. The blower shut off immediately. “It’s going to be his hard luck in the morning when all this stuff defrosts but we’re in no danger now.”

  “But w-what are we going to do w-when he comes back? He’s got your pistol.”

  I was going to shrug but figured my head would not approve. Instead I asked, “What have you got in that purse of yours?”

  I pulled out a handkerchief and laid my key ring and a handful of pocket change in it. Out of the female flotsam she had available I added some more change and a nail clipper. Then I tied the whole mess up inside the handkerchief.

  “What are you making?” She asked.

  I hefted it in one hand, dangling it menacingly.

  “I guess you’d call it a white-jack. I figured I’d return the favor for that dough hook. He ought to be back around midnight.” I glanced at my watch. “That’s maybe six hours from now.”

  “What’ll we do until then?” She asked with a little grin, snuggling close.

  I put my arms around her.

  “Just try to keep warm, I guess.”

  * * * *

  He was a little early but we were ready anyway. There was a rattle at the door as he removed the padlock, and then it swung open. My pistol in one hand, he peered inside looking for a pair of corpse-sickles. I hit him behind the right ear with my white-jack. It burst, scattering keys and coins. But the blow staggered him. I followed it up with an uppercut that knocked him back into the next room. We pushed out the door after him.

  He was laid out on the floor of the kitchen. I picked up my pistol.

  “Feed me,” a strange buzzing voice said.

  “Eh?” I looked up just as Ann screamed. Standing in the doorway to the storeroom was a little person about two feet tall. The head was disproportionately large for the body, like that of a baby and it had big, liquid eyes. It was almost cute.

  “Feed me,” it repeated in that same strange voice. Then it opened its mouth.

  The mouth was the width of its head and its jaw opened so wide you could almost see down its throat. It had three sets of teeth, each one inside the next, big teeth that narrowed down to points like those of a shark.

  “Feed me,” it repeated. Then it started moving toward us, little arms outstretched. That’s when I noticed the claws.

  It ran its tongue across its grotesque lips; the tongue dangled several inches outside its mouth. It was like watching a snake waving over a picket fence.

  My gun barked twice and it snapped its jaws shut, then chewed for a moment.

  “No metal,” it said. “Want Meeeeeet.”

  From the doorway to the storeroom came two more.

  “Want Meeeeeet,” they echoed.

  “Run,” I told her. I put another bullet into the closest one. It snapped its jaw, then spat the bullet onto the floor.

  “Meeeeeet.”

  Three more shambled through the door from the storeroom.

  “Meeeeeet.”

  “Meeeeeet.”

  “Meeeeeet.”

  The first one was almost upon us. Ann grabbed a box off the spice shelf.

  “No, you run,” she said. “I’ll cover our retreat.”

  She pulled open the little pour spout on the box and shook it out at the little monster.

  The creature gave a yelp and jumped back like she’d been using boiling water.

  “What’s that?”

  “Salt,” she replied. “It’s an old folklore remedy against evil spirits. Now run!”

  I turned and ran back into the front of the bakery past the display cases laden with sweets. But the front door was locked. The keys were probably back in the Muffin Man’s pockets.

  I grabbed a chair from the
stack where he’d brought in the outside tables when he closed for the day. I put it through the plate glass window. Behind me Ann ran out of the kitchen. She flung the depleted box of salt behind her as she ran. She didn’t even slow down, taking the window like a Olympic hurdler. I caught up to her in the parking lot. She still had her car keys and we laid rubber all the way to the road. I didn’t think that old Buick had it in it.

  This time we went to the police.

  We parked cross-wise in front and ran through the doors to the desk sergeant. He seemed distracted, with a phone in one ear.

  “Yeah, hacked to pieces, he says. Get some detectives out there, pronto.” Then he yelled across to someone back behind the partition, “Hey, who’s on call tonight from CSI? Tell ’em to get out to that bakery down on Dury Lane. There’s been a murder.”

  He hung up the phone and noticed us for the first time.

  “Yeah, what can I do for you?”

  “Uh, we couldn’t help but overhear. Who’s been murdered? It wasn’t the baker, was it?”

  “Yeah, the baker. Somebody hacked him all up. A patrol car just found him after somebody called in a complaint about kids hot-rodding in the parking lot. The front window was broken and when they went inside they found his body, or from what they said, maybe half of it, blood all over the place and little bitty foot prints. It’ll probably be all over the papers tomorrow morning if you want the details. But what can I help you with?”

  Before I could answer Ann asked, “Which way is the restroom?”

  He pointed and she stagger off that direction, tugging at my arm. I followed.

  “Why didn’t you tell him about those creatures?” I asked. “Now they’re going to keep terrorizing the neighborhood.”

  “No, now the Muffin Man is dead the creatures are no longer under his spell and they’ve dispersed back into the spirit world by now. And anyhow, you know the police wouldn’t believe us. We’d just end up being interrogated for the next two days about a murder we didn’t commit.”

  “Yeah, they’d never believe he was eaten by his own elves: Keebler’s revenge.”

  “I keep telling you, they’re not elves.”

  “Then what are they?”

  “Let me put it this way so you’ll know who I mean. Do you know why all his baked goods were so scrumptious?” She looked up at me with a mischievous grin.

  “Why?”

  “They’re magically delicious.”

  THE SILENT MAJORITY, by Stephen Woodworth

  And so tonight, to you—the great, silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.

  —Richard M. Nixon, November 3, 1969

  On the morning of the day the Apocalypse was due to commence, Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th President and late Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America, clawed his way out of his grave in the quaint formal gardens behind the memorial library that bore his name.

  Although the darkness was absolute inside his casket, Nixon knew where he was, what he was, and what he had to do. He rammed his flattened palms against the coffin’s satin-embossed roof—not from panic at the stifling confinement, which he had no reason to fear, but from a sense of urgent purpose, of a sacred duty he must perform.

  Divine authority must have coursed through his embalmed flesh, for the hinged cover began to give, allowing dust to whisper into the upholstered interior. At the time of his death at age eighty-one, he could hardly have budged the casket’s wooden lid, much less the hundreds of pounds of earth heaped upon it. He wondered whether the others would be as strong when they returned. If so, his mission was that much more crucial.

  Clumps of sod tumbled in beside him as he forced the gap wider, until the trickle of soil became a flood. Nixon let it swamp him; he was counting on the dirt to prop the lid open enough for him to worm his way out of the coffin. The ground had settled and become hard-packed during the nearly three decades since his interment, and he had to rend and plow the loam with the hooks of his arthritic fingers as he swam upward through the solid earth. Dirt filled the flared nostrils of his pointed nose, smothering him with an odor of mold and earthworms, and he spluttered in disgust. If he were like Mao or Lenin, placed on public display for reverent followers to file past, he could simply have cast aside the glass case that enclosed him and stood up, immaculately preserved and attired and ready for business.

  Never in his life had Dick Nixon so wished he’d been a Communist.

  At last, he thrust a hand through a final foot of cold sod and felt warm, open air. Pulling himself up, he broke through a mat of grass and found himself blinded by the almost unbearable brightness of a Southern California springtime.

  Almost as soon as he shut his eyes, however, he opened them again, savoring the wonder of vision. His eyes should have shriveled like raisins long ago, yet somehow they had been restored to him. He glanced down at his hands. They were gnarled with age, as they had been, the skin pallid and filthy, but they were neither desiccated nor skeletal. Though all the laws of Nature dictated the impossibility of the miracle, he had sight, he had strength, he had mind. Would the others—those who came after him—be as fortunate?

  A phrase—a verse—returned to him from his Quaker childhood, one read to him by his sainted mother:

  Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,

  In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.

  * * * *

  Incorruptible. Nixon wanted to laugh that such a word could apply to him, a man whose name had become synonymous with the Committee to Re-Elect the President and its dirty tricks, with enemies lists and wire-tapping, and ever and always, Watergate.

  Yet he’d been granted a second chance to prove himself and he needed to make the most of it. If only his voice worked as well as the rest of him…

  Nixon snorted dirt from his nose and surveyed the garden around him, redolent with the pleasant aroma of freshly mown grass. Somewhere, a war raged—there had to be a war involved, of that he was sure—and attendance at the Richard M. Nixon Library and Birthplace was sparse. Nevertheless, here in his hometown of Yorba Linda, in Orange County, the moribund heart of Republican conservatism, the disgraced President still counted some admirers, and at least one of them had come to pay her respects. A plump, silver-haired matron in a floral blouse and peacock-colored hat and skirt had propped herself on a walker outside the rectangle of foxgloves, roses, and shrubbery that bordered the burial plot. She’d frozen, aghast, as the lawn at her feet heaved and unfolded.

  Still sunk up to his chest in soil, Nixon extended an arm toward her. Ripping open the threads that sewed his mouth shut, he spat grit and cleared his throat. “’Scuse me, ma’am, but would you mind giving me a hand here?”

  The woman paled, the excess of rouge on her cheeks making her look if she’d been slapped. She shrieked and waddled away, practically vaulting over the walker in her haste.

  Nixon grunted. If you wanted anything done right…

  He dragged himself, hand-over-hand, free from the grave, stood, and brushed dust from his suit. Although he remembered this spot as well as if it were the Oval Office itself, he still took a moment to imbibe the memories it evoked. To his left, just over the low hedge of blooming flowers, was the refurbished white farmhouse where he’d been born, the equivalent of Abe Lincoln’s log cabin in the personal mythology he’d constructed for himself. Around him blossomed the fastidiously-manicured flora of the First Lady’s Garden, named for his darling Pat.

  Finally, his gaze fell upon her grave marker, the one next to his. He did not know if his new eyes were capable of tears, but his throat tightened as he read the inscription, the way it had the last time he’d seen it, on the day of her funeral: EVEN WHEN PEOPLE CAN’T SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE, THEY CAN TELL IF YOU HAVE LOVE IN YOUR HEART.

  How he wanted to wait right there, until she, too, sprouted from the ground
like the finest flower! He trembled as he imagined how he would drop to his knees in front of her to beg forgiveness for everything he’d put her through, to offer his unworthy thanks for loving him anyway.

  But Pat, like the others that followed him, might not be…intact. Dick couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her that way, and the image it conjured prodded him to get on with his mission. He had to get out of this place before its nostalgia buried him more completely than six feet of soil ever could.

  Straightening his stained tie, Dick Nixon lurched away from the burial plot without daring to read his own headstone. For if there was one thing the 37th President feared even after death, it was how humanity had labeled him.

  Climbing over the hedge, he stalked in the direction that the old lady with the walker had fled screaming: past the beds of roses, along the reflecting pool lined with palm trees, and into the Library’s main gallery with its peaked roof of red tile. His wobbling gait improved as his stiff limbs got used to walking again, and he paused to regard his reflection in the glass door. He wanted to enter with some dignity, so he picked a few lumps of mud from his hair, smoothed his lapels, and stepped inside with his head held high.

  The woman with the walker had plopped down on a padded bench in the lobby, where a bespectacled female docent attempted to calm her.

  “I tell you, I know what I saw!” the old matron insisted.

  “I’m sure you do,” the docent said in soothing tones, “and I promise you, we’ll investigate.” She indicated the diminutive, baby-faced guard beside her, one of those short men with the pugilistic posture of a bantam rooster.

  Nixon cut in. “Pardon me, ladies, but—”

  The matron gaped at him and pointed, hyperventilating. “That’s him! That’s the man from the garden!”

  She snatched up the walker again and made a break for the exit, leaving the startled docent to wonder whether to stop her or flee with her.

  The guard whipped the pistol out of his side holster with a Dirty Harry flourish. “Hold it right there!”

  Nixon brushed aside the command and advanced. “For God’s sake, son, put that thing away! I need to see the President on a matter of national security, and I need you to take me to him.”