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

by Douglas Clegg

  “There was a woman from upcountry,” Nora Chance began, and upcountry was what the old-timers called anyone not from the sea. Stony was shocked, then, when he noticed that her backwoods dialect dropped away when she told her stories. “She and her man didn’t get along. She had a little boy, about your age, maybe a little younger. Maybe half your age plus two. And her man, he was beating on the boy, too, so she had to run and get away from him. It was winter, and fierce. She took the train and wanted to go all the way to Boston, maybe, or Springfield. But going through the hills to the west, the storm became a blizzard, and the train had to stop a little further on. It was in a small town, smaller than Stonehaven. The train was surrounded by ice and snow. She thought to sleep overnight in the depot with her boy, but the train company had fixed it up so passengers could go sleep in town in farmer’s homes. This was back in the days when that could be done, when you could sleep in a stranger’s house during an emergency.” As she spoke, Stony lay down with his black cat, stroking her still-damp fur, watching the embers between the slats of the great potbelly stove. “The people she stayed with were good country people. He, a retired farmer, and she, a woman who had mourned all her life for children she never had. They showed the lady, whose name I think was Ellen, and her son, to a small bedroom. Strange thing was,” and this was the point that Stony would learn was the departure from reality, the part that Nora Chance strung across her stories the way she strung a bright red thread through the grayness of a some bit of sewing. “Strange thing was, Ellen noticed the green and black flies all along the lights on the walls and ceiling of the little farmhouse. In the room, seven or eight of them flew along the ceiling. She fell asleep holding her son in her arms—her little boy that still had bruises on his face and neck from what his awful daddy had done to him just the night before.”

  “Is this gonna be a scary story?” young Stony had asked.

  “Don’t interrupt me,” Nora Chance chided him, “I don’t tell scary stories. All my stories are the truth, and they’re about human love. Human love comes in all forms. Like this mother, Ellen, who loved her little boy so much she ran from his daddy just to keep him safe. Now, there’s human love for you. So they slept all night, and she began to dream of flies. Flies all covering her and her little boy, flitting around his nose and mouth. Frightened, she woke up. It was early. It was almost dawn, but not yet. She glanced outside the window and saw the snow shining like broken glass on the farm. She got up, leaving her little boy wrapped up in the old quilt, and went to the hall.”

  “Why’d she do that?” Stony piped up.

  “I told you, don’t interrupt when I’m weaving a story,” Nora Chance said. “All will be revealed in the telling. As I was saying, she went into the hall because she was thirsty. And as she went to get a drink of water in the bathroom, she saw three small children standing half-naked in the darkness of the hallway. One was a girl of about eight or nine, and one a boy of five, and the littlest one, barely more than a baby, a little two-year-old. But they all wore cloth diapers.

  “And something even more shocking.

  “She noticed that at the edges of their mouths, thread had been sewn, and their eyes were closed, too, threads also, little black threads, and their ears and nostrils, all sewn shut. Ellen’s heart beat fast, and she clutched the bathroom door for support. She was unable to scream, and she wondered for a second if she were dreaming.

  “Then, the little girl reached up and drew the thread out from her mouth, humming sounds coming from her.

  “And as she drew the thread, and as her lips parted slightly...

  “A small green fly crawled to the edge of her lips. Spread its shiny wings and flew, and then another emerged from out her lips. And another. And another.”

  Here, Nora Chance fell silent.

  “Is that the whole story?” Stony asked, after a minute.

  Nora chuckled to herself. “No, but it’s enough for you now. Your cat’s dry now, and it’s getting dark soon. You two get off on home for your supper. I’ll tell you the rest another day.”

  And so it had gone for six years, since Stony had been nine-years-old, wandering with his cat out in the woods. That cat, Liberty, had gotten hit by a car by the time Stony was fifteen, but even she had become part of Nora Chance’s stories, woven into the tapestry of whatever tale had been begun the time before his last visit to her. He had begun getting her groceries for her when he was twelve and had the New London Day paper route for Stonehaven. He could ride his Schwinn around town, delivering papers, and make his first stop his last: the Watchman Goods and Package Store, where he’d pick up her orders of flour, sugar, ham, milk, and beans. Her diet rarely varied from this, other than the whiskey she drank—but she seemingly had a never-ending supply of this in her cellar.

  All this he’d told Lourdes by their third date, and had taken her to meet Nora. “But how did the story end?” was the first thing Lourdes asked when she sat on the threadbare rug by the potbelly stove.

  Chapter Five

  LEGENDS OF STONEHAVEN

  * * *

  1

  * * *

  “Which one you talkin’ about?” Nora asked, her nimble fingers still working around a needle and thread. “I got a million spins, some about Stonehaven, some about distant lands and fascinating folk.”

  “About the children with the mouths sewn shut,” she said, for Stony had never finished the story for her.

  “Oh, those children!” Nora said, and then quickly resumed a story that she’d actually left off telling years before. “Well, this woman named Ellen went back to her room to get her child. She was going to leave. She knew what kind of monstrous farmer and wife they were. The kind to torture little babies like that. Why, she was going to the police, she was going to find someone to take those poor children away from them. But the farmer told her the truth about it. See, he didn’t torture those children. ‘They been at their threads again,’ the farmer said. ‘Damn it, they ain’t supposed to tear at the threads.’ And Ellen, she is fit to be tied. She’s a ball of fury. The farmer tells her, ‘They got the minds of flies now,’ he says. ‘They need to let them out, lord, but that means I got to put them back.’ And Ellen slaps him one and says, ‘How dare you stand here self-righteous when you’re such a monster.’ And the farmer, he looks at her. He’s crying. ‘We love them babies,’ he tells her. ‘Only they ain’t ours. Mama, she cried for years for not having children of our own. I thought she’d like to die. What was I to do? What is a man to do? So I thought, other people have children. They die. They get put in the ground. They just get left there.’ So this farmer, see, he goes and digs up these three dead children. And he thinks: how does anyone know if someone’s alive or no? What makes us alive? And he figures, if you move, you’re alive. That’s the bottom line. And for most folk, it’s true. So he sews up these dead kids with maggots and such, and when the flies are born, they move. ‘But,’ he tells her, ‘they got the minds of flies, and sometimes they got to let them out. But Mama, she loves them kids. It’s love beyond choosing, lady, don’t you know that?’”

  “Oh, that’s terrible,” Lourdes said, shivering slightly.

  “Not done yet, so hold your horses,” Nora Chance said, no longer tolerant of interrupters. “So this woman and her little boy go to get on the train. The boy’s daddy is there, and he’s mad and he drags them back home. Months later, she returns to the farmhouse. She got her little boy in her arms. His daddy might have hurt him real bad. His mother, she loves her little boy too much to let Death take him. She tells the farmer, ‘Love beyond choosing, remember?’ and then the bundled-up little boy, he’s so still he might be dead, a spool of thread falls out of his little curled-up hand, unraveling as it rolls.” And here, Nora dropped the spool of black thread she held in her hands, and it rolled towards Stony.

  “Oh, my god,” Lourdes gasped.

  Stony clapped his hands. “See? She’s the best storyteller in the world.”

  “That’s a cool st
ory,” Lourdes agreed, leaning back on her elbows, looking up at Nora with awe. “Creepy but cool.”

  “I got a thousand and one,” Nora Chance grinned, her eyes never lowering. “Just like Scheherazade.” Then she grinned, and nodded. “Get on home now. It’s almost twilight; I can smell it in the air. Twilight’s no good ‘round the bogs.”

  And so it was that year, when Stony Crawford turned fifteen, that love came to him and swept him away, and Nora Chance, in telling the rest of her story from so long ago, had blessed the union of the teenagers.

  That had been the summer before.

  Autumn came in with the lobster trawlers, dumping its catch on the streets, the smell of brine and barnacle and seaweed across the crystal day. Stonehaven was lovely in the summer, but like all New England coastal towns, did not bloom until the leaves had begun turning.

  * * *

  2

  * * *

  Are there places like this anymore? Where summer seems to last nearly as long as the school year, where the houses all have neat lawns, are made of brick or clapboard, all neat neat neat; where all the neighbors’ children play together, play tackle football on summer afternoons down on the small beach by the cove, where there doesn’t seem to ever be an end to the days until the fireflies themselves appear in the nighttime veil of purple as it descends after nine at night? Then the days shorten, until dark comes by five, and the chill of fall sets in, with the scent of rotting blackberries and crisp leaf mold.

  Stonehaven, a small gem of a town, but a gem washed over by sea and years until it was smooth at its edges but sharp and prickly within, sat along a promontory of land that poked into the Avalon Islands Sound. Hurricanes in ‘38 and ‘60 swept the rooftops off the houses, and the town clock off the old Meeting Hall, but by the time Stony was fifteen, all had been replaced, all looked as it had when much of it was first built in the 1700s. Officer Dennehy joked that the roads had not been improved since then, either. He’d sit out at his patrol car sipping coffee from the donut shop out in Pawcatuck, and watch the slow pace of the village and then go back to the station in Mystic and tell his envious colleagues, “Well, again, the Village was quiet. I saw three pretty girls, one black Mercedes, and I got a free lunch at the Tea Shop just for checking the burglar alarm to make sure it was working.”

  His reports rarely deviated, except in the odd suicide or petty theft, and at fifty, Ben Dennehy was happy to lead such a peaceful existence as an officer of the law. The best he could say about Stonehaven folk was they were good God-fearing people; this was also the worst he could say about them. Down at the Water Street Barbershop, where most of the older men of town gathered of an afternoon, the stories of never-forgotten storms and wars passed around like the flu, and the tales coughed up got larger and grander images until they’d have had you believe that all Stonehaven was crushed by Hurricane Donna way back when, and that all the young men of Stonehaven single-handedly won World War II.

  The village had always continued, through history, through gossip, through neglect. Stonehaven was all white clapboard, dark shutters, weathered boards of the old abandoned houses out by the railroad tracks. It was filled with newly remodeled houses of the summer people, now ghost houses, too; its skyline consisted of the steeples of three churches, the rotunda of the two-room library, the flagpoles above the U.S. Post Office and the trees along the Common—the square emerald lawn of grass that occupied the imperfect center of the borough. It was a community just half an hour out of New Haven, but none of the children living in the town knew much about the great city an hour to the south, nor of Providence, an hour to the north, nor even New London, and much less of Mystic or Stonington, its nearest neighbors. Stonehaven was hardly even suburban, for the houses, houses with names, all had been built before the oldest man in town had been born. The Josiah Bishop House, the Nathanial Greaves House, the Sarah McLendon house, the Randall house with its ancient slave quarters, the Portuguese Holy Ghost Society, the Custom House, even the tiny Citizen’s Bank building (one teller, no ATM, and open one day a week, summers only) on Ocean and Water Streets had been built just after 1814, after the town had been under attack by the British troops. Many houses were nameless, and some had not been built until 1900, but they all were weathered and lovely and the clapboard flaked with bad paint jobs by the end of summer. The scraggling woods on its eastern edge, full of bogs and ancient cemeteries, before the road led to the highway which led to the interstate, it was like the wilderness had not quite been burned back far enough by the early settlers of the region. It seemed so far away sometimes, as if Stonehaven itself had not progressed since the late 1600s, when it was founded. The town, as summer turned to fall, stank of the overflowing lobster boats that consumed the harbor as they spilled their clawing catches onto the long docks to the south side of town. The lobster smell was so thick you could cut it, you could inhale and choke on it, and it would open up your pores and clog them with the red sea scum stink. Stonehaven, surrounded on three sides by water, a finger thrusting defiantly at the Isles of Avalon, all three, spotting the glass of sea where it beveled at the horizon. How many bare feet were pricked by thorns, how many hands and elbows stung by yellow jackets, how many faces eaten red by the powerful sun before Labor Day came and destroyed all devices of escape? And then, with fall, all the summer people left, and with them, the mansions out by the point became shells, dark at night, the luxury boats sat on stilts in the boatyard, the lunch and tea shops closed, and one boy felt buried alive, if it had not been for the intense love he had. The burning love that only the very young can understand.

  It was all Stony Crawford wanted at fifteen, his pure white T-shirt blotted with yesterday’s sweat, his swimming trunks waffling as he ran in his old torn-up sneakers, down the placid streets of Water to Seascape Terrace to Swan Drive then across the bridge at the cove, to the other side, to the other neighborhood beyond the cove. Wequetucket it was called, an old word that meant nothing other than freedom from the village to Stony. Wequetucket was beyond all the white people he had once believed were the only people in existence in his real world. It was the other side, where the apartments rose up, where the people who worked the lobster trawlers lived, where his heart seemed to beat faster and faster as he ran. Spanish and Portuguese and Indian and Black—the colors and tongues and legends were endless, just outside the borough. It was a world where things happened. Where love happened. Where Lourdes lived with her mother—the rows of garden apartments, the highway, a causeway between bays that connected Stonehaven to the outer world. To freedom. First down the streets of numbers, down alleys without names, across Barley Road and Myrtle Drive, to the Ninth Street Apartments. See him run like he’s a match trying desperately to catch fire.

  See him run.

  * * *

  3

  * * *

  “You,” her mother said at the door, but Lourdes Maria Castillo stood behind her, glancing over her shoulder. Her mother glanced back, glaring. “Lourdes, it’s that boy.” Her mother shut the door and turned to her daughter. She waggled a finger at her, keeping her voice down. “You must make them call you first. A boy should never drop in like this. It shows disrespect.”

  “Oh, Mom,” Lourdes said, exasperated, moving swiftly past her mother to open the door. The door creaked, as she pulled it back and she felt a slight embarrassment at the smell of the hallway—the fish, always the fish from the boatmen.

  Stony Crawford stood there, sweating, out of breath. His brown hair too long over his forehead, the shine of perspiration like glaze on his face. “I ran all the way,” he gasped. His grin was wide and goofy. He waved hello to her mother who had already padded into the kitchen. “Hello, Mrs. Castillo,” he said, and then he returned his look to Lourdes, who blushed at its intensity. “Want to go for walk? We can go to the confectionary. I got some money.”

  “You should call first.” Lourdes didn’t smile. She looked slightly cross. She did her best not to look him directly in the eye—otherwise, she�
��d have begun laughing at the charade.