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

by Douglas Clegg

  Nora Chance made these candles, out at her little house in the woods. She’d been taught by her mother, who’d been taught by her grandmother, and so forth, back into unrecorded history.

  It was Lorraine who, that day, wanted some more of these, since her supply was running low, and she was worried that Nora might start to get better offers on the candles from one of the shops in nearby Mystic, and since Lorraine could sell them for ten dollars each when they costs her twenty-five cents a candle, this was not a profit she wished to lose.

  As soon as she knew the school buses had gotten back into town, she picked up her phone and called up the Crawford house, hoping to find Stony at home.

  * * *

  3

  * * *

  Which he was, having just run inside, thrown his books down, and heard the phone ringing. Stony raced to get it, and said, “Yallo.”

  “Stony? It’s me,” and Lorraine’s voice was so distinct, like a sharp clatter of silverware, that Stony didn’t need to ask. “I need you to ride over to Nora’s and see if she can get me twenty more candles by Monday. Also, tell her the Christmas shawls are not in yet, and they need to come in by November. Tell her I’ll raise the rate. Okay?”

  “Sure,” Stony said.

  “Good,” Lorraine said, “and when you’re back I’ll give you a tip. All right?”

  “Yeah,” Stony said, dropping the phone back in its cradle. He always needed the money, from lawn mowing, raking leaves, running errands for the shopkeepers, and sometimes even cleaning the sailboats for the rich summer folk when he could get the work.

  He glanced at his watch. Nearly four thirty. Nora would be having her afternoon tea.

  * * *

  4

  * * *

  These were the typical pursuits of a typical October day, but as with all life, and all towns, it was not all surfaces.

  Calvin Stowe, who ran a tourist boat in the summer, spent most of his afternoon down at the Fisherman’s Catch, down on Juniper Point, drinking himself under the table before getting into his Toyota and checking out to see if any schoolchildren were available to come over to his house to watch his special movies. Sophia Randall, a descendant of Jeptha Randall, who was one of four early Stonehaven families, waited desperately on the front porch of her Captain’s Walk home, a home built first in the early 1700s, then rebuilt after the town was burned in the War of 1812, and further rebuilt in 1901 after the Great Hurricane came through—a house and a two-acre lot with history...here she waited, wringing her small perfectly formed hands, her face glowing with fever, her normal beauty reduced to a labored moment of intense anguish. Then, a Harley-Davidson roared around the Common, and its rider parked it by the house. Rather than run out to greet him, Sophia retired within her home. The young man with the golden goatee jogged up the walk, leaping onto the porch, and only stopped once when he dropped what appeared to be a syringe and a small packet of white powder.

  Down at the loading dock, where the lobsters were dumped unceremoniously from the overflowing cornucopias of the trawlers, four men, all under thirty, decided the fate of the summer girl who had stayed past the season—the girl at the Crown place, out by Land’s End, the girl they’d watched from their trawlers, the girl who’d stood naked at her back window at five in the morning, watching the sea, as if she were just there for them to take.

  Lyndi Potter, who lived on Cold Spring Road, almost out of the borough, in the small clapboard house at the north edge of the cove, had already begun kicking at her five-year-old son, Rupert, when he didn’t clean up the dog piss in the front hallway. She raised her foot and aimed for his gut, and her son, who was wise in ways that most five-year-olds are not, remained silent and felt no pain.

  Out on the lobster trawler marked Angela’s Bounty, Gerald Crawford, Stony’s dad, nursed the last of his whiskey, and wished to hell he had never gotten trapped in the life he had, with kids and a wife and all the weight of the world on his bulky shoulders. All the weight of this damned gone-to-hell world.

  * * *

  5

  * * *

  Stony Crawford rode his black Schwinn bike past all this, ignorant of what lay beneath the anthill of town, and then veered off Cold Spring Road, onto the dirt path that led into the scraggly woods.

  The smell of a dead animal was nearby, a physical heat, as if the death of the creature created a larger life in odor. The woods stank also of the damp of the bog and marsh. He rode beside the ancient and crumbling stonewall that marked off the cemetery, and finally took the left fork of the path. As the withering grass grew higher here, and the leaves piled as if building new earth, he dropped his bike, walking the rest of the way.

  Going to Nora’s always made him feel like a kid again, no longer saddled with adolescence, but a more innocent and wonder-laden time. He felt the tug of adulthood at him most days, but he still enjoyed heading out into the musky woods to find her at her loom, or out washing her mountain of laundry.

  The tarpaper was falling in several places from Nora’s roof, and two-dozen candles dangled from the roof’s edge, setting. Her great black pot boiled over with soap and laundry, and there she stood, stirring the pot with a great thick staff. The smell of the soap could burn, but the breeze was going the other way, towards the bog.

  “Nora!” he called, waving his hand.

  Nora Chance turned slightly at the sound, nodding. When he reached her side, she said, “I knew you’d be coming along sometime soon. Your voice—I can’t get over it. Last year you were still my little boy, and now you sound like a man of the world.”

  * * *

  6

  * * *

  They sat in the front room, Stony on the floor with his legs crossed, his back to the warm potbelly stove, Nora in her rocking chair. In her lap, the freshly made candles. She rolled each candle into several squares of tissue paper while she spoke. “I got a October story for you, Stony. You know the story ‘bout the resurrection?”

  “You mean Jesus?” Stony asked almost sullenly.

  “No, not that one. I mean the resurrection right here in Stonehaven cemetery. Happened in 1746. My great-grandmother told me this story on her deathbed. She had heard it from her grandmother, who worked the Randall and Crowninshield places back then, and she was just a little girl when it happened.” Nora nodded to herself as if she were just being told the story for the first time. “Yes, that’s right. Something happened back then. Nobody liked to talk about it since, although you can bet some people in town like the Doanes and the Mainwarings and the Randalls and even the Slatterys know the story ‘cause no one forgets this story once it’s in their blood. It’s always in October, like now. You ever hear of the Reaper?”

  “Sure. The Grim Reaper.”

  “No, boy, I mean the Reaper who used to live out at Juniper Point. He owned most of the land out there, and he was called the Reaper because he looked like Mr. Death most of the time. Pasty white face, gaunt like a skeleton dug a hundred years after he was buried. He married a gal from up in Marblehead, brought her here back before the Revolution. She was a sickly thing, and they thought when she was gonna have her baby that she was gonna die. They spent three nights tending her while she gave birth, but that little baby near ripped that frail gal up and down like a bayonet, and they had to use knives—it was something awful. I heard that the folk in attendance fainted at the sight of what they did to that little gal just to get the baby out. Story was that a farm hand couldn’t take her screams no more, and came up to the bedroom like he was possessed and raised his scythe over her belly, just ripping her open and pulling that baby out. The baby was all twisted up and upside down, his head turned, his legs misshapen. His gal survived that night, stayed in bed from then after. And the baby—it was a little imp of a thing, and from its first day would only drink one thing from its mother’s breast, and it wasn’t milk, oh no. The stories are terrible, Stony. Terrible. You want to hear more?”

  Stony nodded. “Yeah.”

  “Good. Go
make us both cups of Cat’s Claw tea, and I’ll tell you the rest when it’s steeping.”

  Stony rose, and went to put on the tea. “How can someone live who’s been scythed open?”

  “It happens, boy,” Nora said, stretching her fingers in the air above her head. “I get so tired sometimes, working all day. Know how old I am?”

  “Sixty?” he ventured.

  Nora let out a big belly laugh. “No, not even close. Older than these woods sometimes. That’s what I feel like. You getting the jar of tea?”

  Stony glanced up at the crude wooden shelf, packed with jars full of jams and herbs and roots. He grabbed the Cat’s Claw jar, and dumped some of it in the clay pot that Nora used for tea.

  “How’s that gal of yours, anyway?” Nora asked.

  “She’s okay.”

  “That’s it? Okay?”

  “Yep.”

  “You still like her?”

  “Sure.”

  “You know about nature—and how to avoid it?” Nora asked.

  “You mean like birth control?”

  “I never said that,” Nora said, shaking her head. “I mean nature. It always gets you into trouble.”

  “Sure,” he said. When the tea was steeping, he brought her cup over to her. “Tell me about the baby.”

  “Oh, the Reaper’s baby? It was something fierce,” she said, her voice sinking into her familiar storytelling cadence. “That baby wasn’t satisfied with his mother’s milk, it had to suck her teat till blood ran out of it. It was an abomination more than it was a baby. The Reaperman accused her of sleeping with the Devil or some such nonsense, and took her to the tribunal over in Copper Ferry, which back then was called Copperfield. There she was, this gal who was always fainting and sick and practically no blood in her, and there was that Reaper, holding up his baby Reaper with its snarls and sharp little paws and the way it was suckled with blood. They dragged that gal off and hanged her up on Gallows Hill near Hartford, and the old Reaper went back to his house here in town and shot himself through the head with a little flintlock pistol. He didn’t die, but lived for a few more years. They said that he had wanted to kill the baby too, but something human in him hadn’t. They raised the baby out in these here backwoods, and nobody ever saw that baby again as far as townsfolk knew. And then, one October...Years later, when the Old Reaper was living up at the house on High Street, with his brother, a man came into Stonehaven. Well, it wasn’t really a man. It was a thing—not much taller than a six-year-old boy, and all hunched over, and it stank like the bog, and it half crawled and half walked. It came up to that old mansion, and there was Old Reaper, Old Mr. Crowninshield, sitting in a chair, half his own body frozen, his mind barely there. And he knew. He knew it was his son, come back for him. Come back to punish him for what he did to the boy’s mother. Come back for revenge. Reaper tried to cry out to his nurse, who was in the kitchen preparing a sandwich for him. This was in broad daylight, in the afternoon. People saw him, the young man. They say he had little horns on his head, but you can’t believe everything you hear. No, he may have been deformed, but he was a man. And he went up to his father. His father, shivering like he was seeing a ghost. And that young man, all hunched over,” Nora said, her eyes widening despite their milky whiteness, “that son of his threw his arms over his father’s shoulders and began weeping.

  “And his father, that awful Reaperman, grabbed the scythe, the very one he always kept by his side, the very one a farmhand had used to open up this boy’s mother—and that awful man brought it against his boy’s neck and slit his throat while the young man wept for finding his father.” Nora paused. She sighed, shaking her head. “Tea’s good, Stony.”

  “Jesus, did that really happen?”

  “As God is my witness,” Nora said. “The boy gave one cry to heaven and then died in his father’s arms. That evil, evil man. They buried that poor boy just outside the cemetery, which is always a mistake.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You don’t know?” Nora clicked her tongue. “This is all Pequot land, boy. You white folks jump off your ships a few hundred years ago, and you think you understand the land? This ain’t ordinary land. This is sacred.”

  “You mean like an Indian burial mound?”

  Nora cackled. “No, nothing as stupid as that. Our burial mounds are sacred, and maybe a curse or two’ll come out of them. Why do you think we let you people settle this land? Because of your guns? Because we were nice? No, boy, this land around Stonehaven wasn’t just sacred to us, Stony, it was magic. It was absolute magic. You can plant anything, and it will grow. Ever notice that? You plant corn here and it shoots up high. Now, we gave you white folks the cemetery for your dead and the land to the water for your borough, but we told you not to plant in this one area. We all know about it, we know where to plant and where not to. But you, you and your families all forgot that. That Mr. Crowninshield, he should’ve known. Hell, the entire borough back then should’ve known, but even then it was thirty years after Stonehaven got settled. But you don’t bury your dead where things grow. We never have.”

  “You mean like the deformed guy was buried in this magic place and he rose up alive again?” Stony asked, half in wonder and half in wondering if she really expected him to fall for this bullshit.

  “Nothing as asinine as that,” Nora said. She rose up from the rocking chair, the tissue-packed candles in her hands. Her full height was nearly six feet, and she towered almost to the low roof. “Don’t you know about what people brought to these shores?”

  Stony shook his head, half smiling, hoping she’d laugh or grin or do something to show she wasn’t getting angry. “No, ma’am. What’d we bring?”

  “The Devil,” she said. “And he took root here. He grew here just like the crops did. Never been the same since.”

  Chapter Twelve

  NORA’S STORY

  * * *

  1

  * * *

  This didn’t end with the Imp’s burial—for that’s what they called the young man that the slaves and hands had raised up. Imp. There was a woman in town named Mrs. Randall—she was a coarse-minded woman, who liked to create difficulties and intrigues. She made sure that Imp was buried in the bog, just thrown in, without ceremony. I heard she stood there, her cape across her shoulders, her old biddy white cap covering her hair. They said she didn’t even let them weigh his body down with stones, but just let it sink and then rise, and float again. Eventually, it caught under the low-hanging branches of a birch, covered with leeches sucking the last of his blood out of poor little Imp.

  And then, it sank again into the muddy water and lay in the silt.

  People in town didn’t much want to talk about Imp, or of what had happened. You know how people are—once a judgment is made, and a sentence carried out, we tend to find ways of agreeing with it, and we build up superstitious ideas around it. The summer went by, a swift and bountiful season. By the time the harvest moon came up, from sharp crescent to full, the maize and barley crops were doing good, and the sea’s harvest was plentiful, as well. Back in those days, Stonehaven still had the Harvest Festival on the Common, with music and even a little dancing—’course nothing like the party the hands and the slaves and the servants had. Our people were back in the woods here, dancing in the moonlight.

  And something else came out that night to dance.

  Something rose up from the bog, clothed in the slime and covered head to toe with leeches. In his hand, the rusty scythe that his father had used to kill him with. His face was no longer his own—it was a mask, bloated and pulled by water and leeches and insect larvae—it was a face without eyes in its sockets, and when he opened his mouth, water and leaves poured forth. Yellow jackets burst from the festering sore beneath his chin. He was no longer just Imp, the son of that Old Reaper bastard.

  He was the force of nature we knew about—we who knew about the magic land. But not just that force, but another, for he was borne from the seed that the white man
had brought to our land: the Devil was in him, the Devil as only my people could understand the Devil: an ancient god that you white people hold close to your bosom, not the opposite of your Heavenly Father, but a long-ago banished god, a god of the Harvest of Humans.

  There is a name for this god, but it is long forgotten.

  He is called by many names, Stony, but he is known by his actions.

  On All Hallow’s Eve, four hundred years ago, he first came from this bog.

  He was the god resurrected by the magic of the land. God always has got to die and get reborn before he has his true powers. Everybody knows that.

  He was the god of vengeance and the devourer of light.

  And he is still here in the land, in the water, outside the churchyards and beyond the reason of man.

  Waiting for his chance.

  After midnight, he came, crawling across the land with the scythe in his mouth.

  He is the father of scarecrows, come to reap the harvest of flesh!

  * * *

  2

  * * *

  Stony laughed when she screamed this last part.

  “What, you don’t believe me?” Her voice was slightly teasing. Her eyes were, as always, milky white. Sometimes he dreamed that they were the warm cinnamon she had always said they’d once been. She grinned. “It’s absolutely true. My great-great-great heard it from her great-great-great and so on and so forth.”

  “The father of scarecrows? That sounds goofy.”

  “You know what scarecrows are don’t you?”

  “Sure. Dummies on sticks to scare off birds.”

  Nora threw her head back, laughing. “You ever see a crow scared off by a dummy on a stick?”