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

by Douglas Clegg

  “Who the fuck is that?” he heard Rich ask, but Van was already transported—his heart beat fast, his tongue shriveled, and his dick seemed to ache with a longing he didn’t know a body part could have.

  She had nearly blond hair, to her shoulders, and eyes like blue stones, and a set of thick lips, juicy lips, and confidence—a sexual confidence, he could tell just by the way she walked, the way her head stayed high, the way her posture was relaxed but perfect. Her lips made him want to fuck her. There was no other reason for lips like that.

  She had legs that were near perfection, and where her waist was narrow, her hips were wide. She looked like a sexual thoroughbred. To him, she looked like the whore bitch of the universe, the one who could take in all of him, drink him in, and he would never be tired of it.

  “Jesus, look at her,” Del gasped.

  Van actually dropped to his knees, holding the beer can in both hands like a holy relic. “Oh sweet Mother of God,” he said. “Bless the fruit of your womb. Jesus. Jesus.” He grabbed his balls with one hand, looking up. “Man, I want some of that.”

  She was a stranger to town, probably a tourist. A day tourist. Someone from New York. A model, maybe. No, better than a model: a wet dream with legs. “Who the fuck is she?” Van asked.

  “She’s a Crown I think,” Del said. “I never saw her much, but when I was a kid, remember? Didn’t you ever see her and her weirdo family out on their boat?”

  Van shrugged. “A rich bitch too. Cool.”

  His buddy Rich whispered, “Man, she’s trouble. Leave her alone. She’s a Crown. They’re bad.”

  “Yeah, fuck you,” Van muttered.

  And then she stopped, watching the boys.

  Van closed his eyes, almost embarrassed.

  When he opened them, she smiled at him. It was a blessing, all right.

  She smiled and nodded, as if she knew what he was thinking.

  As if she knew what he was thinking, and it was all right with her.

  He got up, dusting off his jeans, passed the beer to his buddies, and trotted off across the street.

  * * *

  3

  * * *

  Picture this:

  You’re a horny seventeen-year-old boy and you are used to the dregs of teen girldom, of girls that lie deathlike on soiled mattresses while you slobber and push into them, of girls who smell like the docks, of girls whose make-up smears and beneath it you see the chapped lips, the small eyes, the skin not quite mottled not quite smooth...

  Girls like Brenda Whitley with her uneven boobs, and her barnacle taste, and her way of whining when you get to third base...

  And then you see a girl who looks as if she just stepped out of a Hollywood movie, with a perfect body nearly, with sexual confidence, with an aura about her that’s like fire from the moon. Hormone is her perfume and what lies at that goal there, that place you want to get into, is nothing less than the garden of paradise.

  You think: maybe she will get me out of this miserable existence.

  * * *

  4

  * * *

  “What’s your name?”

  “Diana.”

  “Diana what?”

  “Crown.”

  “Yeah, I guessed that.”

  “You know my people?”

  Van almost laughed. The way she said, “You know my people?” It was as if she was talking about a tribe rather than a family. Rich people were so different. All the summer people were. They weren’t from the same world as Van and his family and other families who lived in town year-round. They occupied the same world, but they weren’t from it. Summer people were always like that. They were from New York or Washington or even England sometimes. They didn’t have boats; they had sloops. They didn’t have maids; they had servants. They didn’t have money; they had wealth. And they didn’t have a home, but homes. Homes everywhere. One for work, one for summer, one for winter. The Crowns were like that—the Crowns were rich. A Crown had once stolen money from a railroad in the north in the late 1800s, and then another Crown had bootlegged liquor from Canada, and another Crown had even funded part of the Nazi party in the ‘30s. There had once been a picture of Frederic Crown in Life magazine, standing with Adolph and Eva, and the caption read: “The Crown Prince spends Easter with the Fuehrer.” This had been meant to discredit the Crowns, but in fact, it barely touched their lives. They profited from the war, they profited from the peace. The Crowns even set up a Jewish Refugee Fund in 1945, and then in 1960, Michael Crown reopened the textile factories on the Monangetowga River in Pennsylvania, and produced the popular Crown Cotton Shirt in no time. They were different than the rest—everyone in Stonehaven knew it. They were a family with a power beyond the ordinary doings of mankind. They owned property all over. Van heard that they owned half the shops on Water Street, maybe all of them.

  And here, Diana Crown, in all her moneyed glory, her hair swept by pearl and her breasts raised in cups of gold. He could barely see anything that resembled a real girl to him, since the girls he was used to didn’t have the shine to their faces, or the hips that begged to be squeezed in his filthy hands. She looked like she knew why God had given her this body, those tits, the lips, and the fire he saw in her eyes.

  Van had had poor girls and middle-class girls before, many of them—he was used to seducing all the local girls. He’d been unsuccessful more times than not, but there were always a few, the Brendas and Mary Lynns of the world he knew. He had never gotten into the panties of girls like Diana Crown. As far as he knew, there were no other girls in his limited knowledge of the world that were anything like this Diana. This earthy vision, with the purity of good genes and some inner intelligence, all bound up in a package of hormonal vampirism. That’s what she was: a vampire. He sensed it. She wanted what boys like him could give a girl, not money, not prestige, but the flesh heat that Van dreamed of giving her.

  And here she was, presenting herself to him. So easy. So available. So fuckable.

  “I worked for your father one summer.” His voice deepened, and he showed his appreciation for her beauty by looking down to her feet and then back up to her face. There were only two places he cared about, and they both looked delicious.

  “You did,” she said.

  “I thought your family left after Labor Day.”

  “Some of us did. Some of us stayed. What’s your name?”

  “Van Crawford.”

  “Van Crawfish?”

  “Funny. You’re funny, Miz Crown.”

  “Don’t call me that,” she said, stopping. “Diana. Call me Diana.”

  “Sure, Diana. Sure. How’s the house?”

  “Fine.”

  “You going to stay through the winter?”

  “No,” she said. “Just till November First.”

  “Sure,” he said, “Just till it gets cold. You summer people.”

  “Yes,” she said with a formality that irked him. He wanted to throw her down right then and there and tear her summer dress off, covering her face, and expose her thighs, just holding them apart with his hands. He would squeeze silver coins from her loins.

  “You’re thinking something, aren’t you?” she asked. “I like a boy who thinks. How old are you, Van Crawfish?”

  “Seventeen. Almost eighteen. Eighteen in two months. December Third.”

  “That’s a magic age,” Diana Crown said. “How old do you think I am?”

  “Maybe twenty?”

  “I could be,” she said. “Here, let’s go to my car. I’ll need help with the groceries. Mind if I hire you for an hour or two?”

  Van shrugged.

  “I’ll pay you twenty-five dollars,” she said, later, much later, after the trip to the grocery store, after a glass or two of wine, when she had brought him on to the screen porch of her family’s summer house, and as he looked out over the water, “No, make it thirty dollars, if you’ll take your shirt off for me.”

  He felt cold when she said it.

  He felt
October in his heart.

  He began unbuttoning his shirt.

  * * *

  5

  * * *

  Later, when he began bucking into her, uncontrollably as if she were milking him, as if he were a cow that she was drawing some strength from—but he didn’t want to think this, not while his senses were frayed and spitting electric juice from his pores—later, when his sweat stung along his chest as they bonded together, he felt as if there was something that she was taking away from him. Some indefinable piece of him, the virginity of a part of Van Crawford that he had never been able to name. A hidden corner of his consciousness, a sprig of life, pressed into her ice-glazed fingers that aroused him still even while he lay against her, spent.

  “I want you,” she whispered.

  “You got me,” he said, drawing back to look at her sweaty beauty, the curl of her hips, and the gentle curves of her small belly, the breasts that all but cried out for his lips. “You got me.”

  Chapter Eleven

  VILLAGE LIFE, AUTUMN

  * * *

  1

  * * *

  The threat of winter so soon, not in great frozen breaths of air, but in the fists of wind. It was October coming in, the chill increased, the townsfolk moved a little more slowly, but not so much as to be perceptible to an outsider. If it wasn’t rain, it would be wind; if not wind, then snow; and if not snow, then an overhanging misery. Once winter announced its coming, there was no retreat. Other autumns might be mild clear through Thanksgiving, but this was not to be one of those seasons. Guff Hanlon, with his furniture business, shut the shop down for the winter; his sons would take the rest of the inventory down to shops in Greenwich and Rye for the winter, selling them off at half-price to the dealers. Guff then went to his winter job, as assistant librarian at the Stonehaven Free Library, which was all of two small rooms beneath a dome at the edge of the town Common. Guff was probably the tallest man in Stonehaven, at least for the months after Labor Day and before Memorial Day. He was six foot four, and strapping, even at forty-six, a barrel chest and a constitution like an ox, that’s what Doc Railsback always said. “You’ll live till you’re a hundred and three, just like your grandfather,” Doc would say, and Guff would wonder how that might be, since his grandfather had been down at Yale-New Haven hospital on machines for the last twenty years off his life. Guff’s father had been lucky—cut down in his prime, hit by a bus in front of Grand Central Station in New York in 1961, a healthy man, gone at fifty. That was the way to go.

  But Guff knew in his heart he’d end up like his grandfather, for his life was without event. He worked in his woodshed building furniture, he worked at the library because he loved books so much, he worked at home with his wife on keeping her calm through all the things she worried about, and he worked keeping his sons, both in their twenties, employed and active so they didn’t go run off and be lazy good-for-nothings the way Guff had for a good ten years before he straightened himself out.

  “Well, good afternoon, Guff,” Fiona McAllister nodded to him, from behind the front desk at the library, as he slammed the screen door behind him, then shut the thick oak door against the slight wind.

  Guff nodded. “Fi, good to see you.”

  “How’s Marcy?”

  “Just good. And Alec?”

  “Just good, too,” Fiona said.

  “I guess I need to go down and clean up the stacks,” Guff said, matter-of-factly, his folksy New England way of speaking sneaking out as if this were a hook for a fish.

  “Yes,” Fiona nodded. Then, she removed her wedding ring, setting it inside a small card catalog file.

  She always did this when she followed him down to that dark musty room below, where they made love as passionately as they could before he had to clean up, and she had to return to help someone check out a book.

  * * *

  2

  * * *

  James and Alice Everest sat in front of the Everest Bakery, on the small green bench. She had a small rhinestone-studded calculator on her lap, and was totaling the week’s grosses, while James, his white hair covering half his face, smoked his pipe and noticed that the shingles on the barbershop across the street were falling loose, and he noticed that kids just didn’t play football in the streets the way they had last year. Their afternoons were ones of boredom, and James often felt as white and unnatural as the flour that powdered his apron and shirt. The barber, David Smith, known as Cutter, busily sawed at the thick tresses of a Mike “The Mule” Mueller, getting him down to a military buzz because Mike wanted to go to the Coast Guard Academy down in New London in another year, and he wanted to start looking the part.

  The Railsback Butcher Shop, on the corner was probably the liveliest place, because before five, the business was as fast and furious as at the Package Store down the other end of the street. Housewives and the unemployed lined up on the sidewalk—it was Friday, and Butch Railsback, cousin to Doc Railsback, who was also second cousin once removed to Stony Crawford’s mother, Angie, was all decked out in his bright white t-shirt, and old ship’s cook’s white pants, but his huge apron that covered him thigh-to-neck, was already bloodied in the battle of meat.

  His great arms were muscled like a stevedore in overdrive, and he wielded the cleaver freely across the chopping board, turning a once crimson steak into the thinnest of slices for Mrs. Partridge’s Steak Diane that she was making for Father Rammer for Friday night dinner at her house with the Prayer Meeting Group. Butch was thirty-six and gorgeous to the town’s women, as only a muscled and cocky hunk can be, and perhaps it was the spraying blood of the meat, or the gentle way he took their orders—for his voice never rose higher than a masculine whisper when he asked, “And what would ya like wit’ dat, Mrs. Partridge?” He had the good looks from his Polish mother, who had been a blond and ravishing beauty, trucked over from Albany by his father sometime in the 1950s, and Butch was a poster boy for meat and dairy consumption—even his one lazy eye, the left eye, with its milky blueness, could melt the heart of most of the women and some of the men who stood in the line. Chop! Chop! The cleaver to the block, the meat laid out, or pounded down with his mallet, making the chicken soft, the meat tender, and the pork edible.

  When Angie Crawford made it to the front of the line, she said, “Is there any good lamb this week?” She held her purse in front of her, demurely, and tried not to glance at the pretty-boy face. When she did, she remembered her own husband, dead for nearly a decade now, but eternally young to her. And Butch here, too, was eternally young, for the image of who he was at this moment, this crossroads, was burned deeply and painfully into all who beheld him.

  Butch leaned forward, tipping his white cap, scratching just beneath the shock of strawberry blond hair that fell across his forehead. “You want good lamb, huh? I maybe might have a little, yeah, sure,” he said, his accent thick and sharp, he sounded like a thug from Boston. “How much you want? I got a good side in da back.”

  “Oh,” Angie said, “Nothing that big, maybe...maybe a shoulder and a good leg.”

  “Sure,” he said, but it was always “Sho-ah,” and it never seemed a word with him, but an expression of an ox pawing the ground. “Hold dat t’ought,” he held his finger up, and then went over and grabbed a clean blade from his rack. Turning his back to his audience, Butch opened up the walk-in refrigerator, and then walked down a hallway. He opened another door, but this was as far as Angie, or any of the others waiting in line, could see. Butch Railsback did not exist beyond the front counter.

  When he returned to the front of his shop, he had a shoulder all wrapped up. “Don’t got no leg right now. Might try back on Tuesday.”

  “A shoulder’s fine,” Angie said, opening her purse to root around for her cash. “Just fine.”

  “How’re dem boys a yours?” Butch made small talk as he rung up the order on the register.

  “Van is thinking of UConn next year” she said, fully believing the lie. “Stony’s okay. He gets in
some trouble sometimes.”

  “You can’t be a boy wit’ out gettin’ in trouble, Miz Crawford, ‘specially when dey’re young like dat. Dey’re like spring lambs, all hoppin’ around,” Butch nodded, passing the package across the curved counter to her. “You send him ‘round ‘ere if he needs some toughenin’ up. Next!”

  The Doane sisters, Alice and Mary, were out in their garden digging up bulbs and gathering up the broken clamshells that the seagulls dropped onto the paved walkway. Their backyard ended abruptly at the seawall, and the inlet, still calm and glassy, was packed with cormorants and seagulls floating lazily on its surface. Alice Doane had a little used-bookshop at the front of their shared dwelling, but it was always closed after Labor Day—still, the occasional book fancier bothered them into opening it up for a few minutes.

  Down the other end of the shops, was the Ye Olde Shoppe, which was mainly for the summer tourists, but stayed open through December, because it sold Christmas decorations and spices and old-fashioned candles. Lorraine Puglia ran it with her son, Guiliano, but most days she ran it by herself while Guiliano sat in a corner of the shop, brooding. One display case, over next to the potpourri bags, all neatly tied up with ribbons, held thirty-six beautiful one-of-a-kind candles. The Kind, the small card beneath them announced, That the Early Colonists of the Area Made and Which Cannot Be Found Anywhere North of Williamsburg, Virginia or South of Stonehaven.

  This was an out-and-out lie on more than one count, but Lorraine was in it to sell to the last of the tourists, stragglers who go lost off old Route One and came across the village accidentally, charmed by its old houses and shops.

  The candles were long like thin fingers, and the dappled wax over-dripped layer upon layer across itself as it formed around the wick.