Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense

by Douglas Clegg

  Even the Doane sisters’ border collie’s death was an event worth talking about. “He went out to the dock on the cove lookin’ for Alice’s old boat, and then he gave one last ki-yi and dropped down to the wood planks. He was gone. That fine dog was gone. It is a mystery to us why he went so soon. But he called to us one last time. As if to say, ‘God take me!’ “

  Angels visited the dying; Jesus came to those who wept; even Fiona McAllister swore up and down on a stack of Bibles that she’d seen a vision of Mary, the Mother of God, when she came down with pneumonia one winter.

  Legends and belief intermingled, and from them grew a small village’s identity within itself. The mythology of Stonehaven was as thick with significance as anything Homer had ever sung about.

  Stony Crawford’s birth was no exception.

  With all the stories surrounding his birth, you would’ve thought Stony Crawford was the Second Coming, that’s what mean old Tamara Curry said, her of the twenty cats and the prodigious breasts who covered them so well they looked like great pumpkins beneath her many scarves. She swatted Stony whenever she saw him, and she’d tell him, as she wiped down the counter at her ice cream store, that if he’d been born a second sooner he’d have hit the pavement and gotten brained and that would’ve been the end of his stealing candy from beneath her nose. “I wasn’t there, mind you, but I heard plenty. I heard you were ugly and looked like a demon out of hell and all hairy, disgusting that good women like your mother would want to bring you into this world, Stony Crawford.”

  His real name was Stephen, after his maternal grandfather, but even at birth, they called him Stony because it was in the Borough that he first cried with life, laid out on the cobblestone walk. Being small-town New Englanders, and sea folk, and in a borough all but isolated from the rest of the Connecticut coast, they seldom mentioned how they felt about anything other than weather, work, and scandal. They had a history of silence, since 1698, when the borough was officially founded by a small group that included the Crowninshields, the Randalls, the Clements, and the Glastonburys, back when all of Stonehaven was literally a stone haven, from the rocky point to the granite of its quarries. The village was born in silence, and only later would it tell its secrets. As he grew up, no one ever mentioned that he was born on the same day that Daniel Madigan threw himself off the top of the Land’s End lighthouse because of his unreturned love for Jenny Lee Baker, daughter of the owner of Baker’s Dozen Bakery. Or that the Crown family had come early that year to their palatial summer home out on the Point the night before, and that their five-year-old daughter had bruises all over her body that no one thought to question. The summer people were different than the locals. They had different ways, different means. A bruised little girl from the big summerhouse on the Point was just a phantom as her family drove through town in the early evening. No one mentioned that Book Ends Books & Cards would be set on fire later on in the day, after the rain, when Alexandra Shoal dropped her cigarette in the wastebasket, and then her cocker spaniel had knocked the basket over. Some later might’ve mentioned that this was Alexandra’s way of collecting insurance, others might’ve said that it was her way of clearing her unsold stock of books in one fell swoop. And the cries of hundreds of birds, as if all of the swans on the cove had flown at once up into the air and had been silenced also at once—like a miraculous ascension. All was forgotten later, even his own mother, Angie Crawford, didn’t tell him the other thing that happened that day.

  The only thing his grandfather would tell him about his birth was, “It was special. I saw a dozen shooting stars the night before, and I knew you were going to be someone I’d want to get to know.”

  They talked about the storm, and Johnny Miracle, and the beer, and the priest—whenever they talked about the day he was born.

  Angie Crawford was on her way to the Package Store down on Water Street to get the weekend’s beers when she felt the jolt within her. “I had been watching the Holy Brigade on Channel 9 just the night before, and they’re all talkin’ about how the Antichrist was comin’ and me thinkin’, with my big belly, oh Lord why bring another child into the world if it’s going to hell so fast? And then, not ten hours later I hear you knockin’ to get out. I was wearing my whites,” his mother told him, “because I was still on call even though I was eight months along.” She dropped her purse right at the doorstep to the store, and clutched the edge of the doorframe. She tried to call out to someone for help, but the pain hit her fast. Her young son, Van, looked up at her and asked, “Mommy? What’s wrong?” She managed to whack him on the behind with her free hand and told him to shut up because his little brother or sister was about to make an entry into the world. She looked out at the street, and saw people sitting in the tea shop across the way, all lost in their conversations. The rain was light even while the sky darkened with clouds. “I thought maybe there’d be time if I just held you in,” Angie told him more than once, “Because I know you were happy when you were inside me. You didn’t kick the way your brother did. And oh, I was worried that we’d have those complications like I had with Van—he was blue when he came out, and all kinds of things had to be done. So I thought: I better get to the hospital and fast!”

  His father was still out on the trawler working the lobster cages by the Isles of Avalon, his grandfather knocked out from the previous night’s medication, so his mother was pretty much on her own. After taking another sip from a Budweiser can, she left her little one, Van, with Martha Wight at the Package Store. The only man available to drive her to the hospital down in New London was Johnny Miracle. “He had been an idiot in search of a village, and he found it in Stonehaven, of course,” she’d laughed when she recalled the day. Johnny was a less a half-wit than a three-quarters-wit who could do two things and two things alone: drive, and quote scripture. He also had a proclivity for setting trashcans on fire around town, so he was as much a nuisance as he was a fixture. Since no one ever trusted him with their car, nobody was really sure about the first thing, but the scripture rang in their ears when Johnny went on his shouting sprees. And at least once in everyone’s lives, they had to put out one of his little fires. Other than that, he occasionally swept the streets, but was not much of a sweeper. Johnny Miracle was not true to his name, either. Usually whenever he touched things, they had a habit of never working again. “He is the Anti-Miracle,” Stony’s mother would laugh. Angie Crawford should’ve known better than to entrust the birth of her second son to Johnny’s aid.

  As soon as Johnny got behind the wheel of her station wagon, the car refused to start. Angie’s water broke right there in the backseat. “It hurt, but I just forced my knees together. You wanted to come out, and I wanted to keep you in, at least for another half hour.” Between that and the storm that began, seemingly out of nowhere (at least that’s how his mother always told him the story) raining down in buckets, Johnny didn’t know what to do. So he got out of the car and began shouting for help. Not a hell of a lot of help around Stonehaven Borough, midday in spring when half the shops had not yet opened for the summer trade, and most folk worked in neighboring towns. The idle were there, as the idle always are, but they did what the idle are best at and just watched as the woman in the backseat of the green station wagon began screaming.

  Still, one person came to help. From across the town square, Father Jim Laughlin had heard Johnny’s bleating call and Angie Crawford’s cries. Some said it was the only time they’d ever seen a Catholic priest sprint across the Common with his white collar coming undone and only one shoe on. “He was a handsome figure,” Martha Wight once told Stony, “he was only about twenty-three, a full thick head of dark hair, a strong body from all that jogging he did and you know he used to coach basketball at the Parish back in the summertime. I once watched him take his shirt off at the beach, and my oh my, Stony, if I weren’t a good Baptist and he weren’t a good Catholic priest, I might have had a notion or two.”

  Father Jim was able to calm Angie Crawford in the
last few moments as her newborn emerged, already bloodied and somewhat battered from the birth passage. Angie downed a couple of beers while the pain subsided, and later told her son that it had been one of the easiest of her births. “Of course, both you and me was stone drunk by the time it was over,” she laughed. The young priest wept when he held the baby in his arms. Johnny Miracle, it is said, looked up to the heavens and the downpour of rain and cried out, “It’s the bloodiest baby I ever saw in my life! It’s the goddamnedest bloodiest baby I ever saw! I never seen so much goddamn blood!”

  As Stony grew up in the village, he was often told details of this story by various townsfolk who claimed to have been glancing out their windows, or sitting in the Blue Dog Tea Shop across the way. “Johnny Miracle is good luck ‘cause God watches over drunks, babies, and idiots—and all three of them were there.” Stony also grew up knowing that his mother was the one known as the drunk. He found out much later what no one, including his mother, would tell him—

  That the nurse’s uniform his mother wore was soaked red before the morning was over. That she stayed in the hospital for four months after his birth.

  That when he was just beginning to breathe the air of the brave new world he had entered, his mother’s body was ragged and torn and his own father would not touch him for the first year of his life from blaming him for it. His father would never touch his mother again, either.

  But the crying newborn could not know this, nor would anyone tell him.

  Someone else was there, too, that day, at his birth.

  A woman, who was not watching him, at least not watching him in the traditional sense. She sensed his birth more than anything. She sensed something about the baby that had just come into the world as she sat on the little bench under the granite eaves of the Stonehaven Free Library, the rain pouring hard. But her senses were sharp, and above the storm, she heard the baby’s first cries as it entered the world. She turned to her older sister, and whispered, “It hurts to hear the way that baby cries, doesn’t it? It just brings out the pain of living to hear it go on. It’s like he knows he’s come from a better place and now he’s stuck here for the time being and can’t do a damn thing about it.”

  Her sister, sitting next to her, took her hand. “Nora,” her sister said. “Let’s go on home now.”

  “No,” the other woman said, reaching up to her face to pull the dark glasses from her eyes. “I want to hear him. I like the way he’s crying. It’s like a song, isn’t it? He’s telling us about the journey he’s been on. He’s saying that he knows where he’s been and now he’s moved on to us with the news.”

  Later, when they met, she would tell Stony about hearing him cry at his birth.

  Later, she would make him feel as if just by being born he had done something remarkable for the world.

  Only when he was fifteen, and fell in love for the first time, did he feel that the world had done something remarkable for him.

  * * *

  5

  * * *

  But until fifteen, Stony’s life was like a shadow room. His first actual memory at home was when he was three. His brother Van grabbed his hand in the hall and drew him into the bathroom. “Shh,” Van put his hand over Stony’s mouth.

  Then Stony felt the vibration in the door, as if some great force were shaking the house.

  The stomp of a giant’s footsteps.

  Then, the shouting, his father’s voice, in the hall, “Damn it, Angie! I’m sick of all this. I know the bastard’s not mine!”

  “Stop that, he’s here,” his mother’s voice was smoother. “Just stop it!”

  “I am so sick of workin’ damn hard all the time and coming home to this mess—and Van with his bike in the driveway, and you gettin’ fat and sloppy and that bastard eatin’ the food I work hard for! Wearing clothes I pay for! It ain’t what I dreamed for us, Angie. Not when we started out. Not when we met, you damn...”

  Then, his mother’s voice raised to a pitch. “Walter Crawford, you just shut your yap, you drunk old fool! I work hard too, and he is your son as much as he’s mine, and just because he doesn’t look like your trash family doesn’t mean he isn’t from you, you ignorant son of a bitch!”

  Stony, at three, could not possibly know these words, but he knew that his parents were angry, and he knew that the bathroom door vibrated whenever his father shouted.

  He looked up at Van.

  Van whispered, “I wish you’d never been born.”

  * * *

  6

  * * *

  His next earliest memory was crawling under his parents’ bed during yet another fight of theirs, this time over paying the mortgage. As he shivered, trying to crawl as far under the bed as he could, listening to their screams—

  He came across a small metal box. It opened easily, and in it, he saw all kinds of money. He was nearly four, and knew well what money could buy (candy and toys). As he sat there looking at paper money, piles of it, rubber bands wrapped around it, he wondered why his parents were fighting about paying for the house when it looked like a lot of money was right there in the room.

  He was thinking of bringing it out from under the bed. The box was his mother’s—it had her name scrawled on the top. She had probably forgotten where she put it. He could stop their fighting right there.

  But his father’s voice, booming across the room, and then the sounds of the slaps, and then his mother got so quiet it scared Stony.

  He stayed beneath the bed until long after his father had stormed out of the house.

  This was not all of his life. There were happy times, and times when his father was wonderful to all of them. His grandfather, on his good days, would walk with Stony out to the lighthouse and tell him old stories of the sea and of the village. All the stories were sweet, and tinged with a sadness that the world changed with time. “It’s not the same place I grew up in,” his grandfather would say. “It was once—not innocent, Stony, not that—but it was once undisturbed.” Then, he’d raise his fist as the summer homes, “Those summer people coming down here with their money and city ways. I don’t care who owns this village. I don’t care. It’s ruining itself. But you—you my boy—you will get out of here someday. Do the one thing that my daughter—your mother—was never smart enough to do. When you get older, get out, go see the world, don’t let this village stunt your growth.”

  “Daddy says,” Stony began.

  “Don’t ever listen to him,” his grandfather interrupted him. “Don’t even pay attention. He’s a bitter, unhappy man, and he loves you, but he is not capable of showing it. He and your mother crawled into a bottle a long time ago, and they don’t seem to want to get out. Just let them be. You keep your joy within you, Stony, keep your candle burning even while all around you, they snuff theirs out.”

  Then, his grandfather’s tone turned grave. “You’re too young to know about a lot of things, Stony. But when you get a little older, when you become a man, you’ll find out things about your mother and father, and you won’t like those things. You’ll find out about what this village is all about. If I was in better health, I’d get out of here, and take you with me, something I should’ve done long ago before your mother got rooted here. We tie ourselves down, Stony, but we don’t have to. Someday, you’ll know why your father is so awful and why your mother is the way she is. But for now, trust that it will all come out all right, will you do that?”

  Stony nodded, never understanding him. As the old man’s mind seemed to be erasing itself, within months his grandfather didn’t even recognize him anymore.

  After his grandfather died, there were still good things. Christmas was always beautiful and magical. Summer was usually peaceful. Sometimes he thought it was perfectly normal that his dad sometimes hit his mother. Only sometimes; other times he thought he lived in a crazy house. But his mother didn’t seem to mind all that much. Usually, he didn’t like it, but did nothing about it. He knew his parents loved each other, though, because of the way
they looked at each other over the dinner table, or because of the flowers his father would bring home after a night of shouting. Once, he’d come home early from school in third grade, and his father was just getting in from the trawlers. Dressed in the heavy fisherman’s mackintosh coat, his rusty beard spattered with bits of his lunch, his father gestured for Stony to come over to him. His father placed his arm over his son’s shoulder, his breath thick with beer, and said, “You’re a good kid, you know that, Stony? You’re a damned sight better’n I was at your age.” These were the only kind words his father had ever said to him, but they were enough to keep him warm during the more difficult times in the Crawford household. Other times, he’d sit up with his mother to watch her favorite TV show, The Holy Brigade. The man with the glasses reminded him of his grandfather, and he’d shout out about scripture and gospel and raise his hand up and call to Stony and his mother—it seemed like he reached right out of the television—to make them send in a donation. When the man on The Holy Brigade looked right at Stony and said, “We are raising a generation of vipers! It’s true! Look all around! We have false messiahs, and you! What will you do about it?”—Stony was sure the man could see him as he picked his nose.