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

by Douglas Clegg

  “You okay? Looked like you passed out. I don’t smell any alcohol...”

  Stony felt very arch. “Let’s just say I’m having a shitty morning.”

  “Hmm.” Dennehy cocked his head to the side, considering this. He popped a piece of the transparent hard candy into his mouth, crunching down on it. His back molar hurt, and he knew this probably meant another root canal for him.

  “Why’ve you been looking for me?”

  Dennehy brought out the picture of Lourdes. “This your girl?”

  Stony nodded. Then, “Something’s wrong?”

  Dennehy shrugged. “She’s missing. Know where she might be?”

  “You tried her home?” Concern in his voice. The teenager was worried. Dennehy could see right away that Stony had little to hide; but he did look like someone who hadn’t gotten any sleep for a few nights.

  Dennehy gave him a flat stare. Then, “Kid, you look like you’ve been through hell. What’s up?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “No, you really don’t.”

  “All right. So, tell me about you and Lourdes Castillo.”

  “She’s my girlfriend,” Stony said. “We were going to run away together this morning. We were gonna get married.”

  “So what happened?”

  “She never showed up.”

  “Tell me about you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Dennehy said. “Geez, kid, this village is full of you die-hard New England types. Get back into the world. I’m here to help. I’m here to find your girlfriend. I ain’t the enemy.”

  Then, both because Stony didn’t know what else to do and because something in him felt like he would burst, he opened his mouth and let the story out, beginning with the revelation from Nora, all the way to the encounter with Johnny Miracle and Father Jim.

  Afterwards, Dennehy said, “Holy shit. That is a mother of a morning, kid.”

  “Yeah,” Stony nodded, “it’s Halloween and I keep hoping it’s all a big joke on me.” His voice cracked, fragile. Dennehy had a sudden impulse to drive the kid the hell out of the borough, down to Mystic, pass him to his sister Irene to give him a big bowl of clam chowder and a sandwich, and tell him to wait down there till Dennehy could locate his girl. If half of what the teenager said was true, this was not exactly the best time for his girlfriend to go missing.

  Dennehy started up his patrol car. Voices from dispatch mumbled from his radio, but he turned it down. “Stony, tell you what. Let’s go out to her family’s place and maybe we can figure out where she might’ve gone. Okay?”

  Stony shook his head. “No way. If she’s not there, I don’t want to have to take bullshit from them, too. I need to find her.”

  Dennehy drove back up to High Street, taking the curve a little too fast, almost hitting a lazyass cat that stomped proudly into the street and then ran like hell when the police car was on it. Then, on impulse, he pulled over again. “Listen, you want to go take a nap or something? My sister’s got a spare room down in Mystic and you really look like you need a few hours of shut-eye.”

  Stony shrugged, his eyes blinking closed. “No, I’m fine, seriously.”

  “Yeah right,” Dennehy sighed, as he drove on out of the village, out to Route 1, down to old Mystic and the gray clapboard on Greenmantle Drive where Irene would already be making lunch.

  The teenager in the seat beside him was already asleep before he’d even gotten to Wequetucket.

  * * *

  2

  * * *

  Stony awoke in darkness.

  Sweat trickled down the back of his neck.

  He heard voices out in the hallway. A needle-thin shaft of light from beneath the door. For a moment he thought he was a little kid again, and his parents were fighting, but these voices were more soothing.

  “It’s only been four hours, let him sleep some more,” the woman said.

  “Yeah, but he’s got to go back, he can’t stay here,” it was Dennehy’s voice. “Besides, maybe his girl is looking for him.”

  “Why are you so concerned?”

  “I just am. He’s been through hell.”

  “That cockamamie story you mean,” the woman huffed. “He’s a teenager. Teenagers make up stories sometimes. You were like that.”

  “No, Irene, I know he was telling the truth. Nobody lies about that kind of stuff. And you know about those stories—”

  “Oh, good grief, and you believe them. A bunch of fundamentalists in Wequetucket spread a rumor nearly twenty years ago about devil worship in that village and—”

  “It’s my beat. It’s a weird town. I’ve seen a few things—”

  “And you’re a cop. You gonna tell me that you believe that a bunch of Satanists are living over there? The evil rich people who use the villagers for their sadistic black masses?”

  Silence. Stony stretched, sitting up on the feather bed. He swiped at the sleep in his eyes, and tasted the sourness of the last of some dream in his mouth.

  “You know I don’t believe that,” Dennehy said. He cleared his throat. “My point is, maybe this kid should never go back there. The situation with his family, with his—”

  “That’s not your business,” the woman said. “Remember the last time you tried that? What was her name? Natalie?”

  “Stop it. I did what I could for her.”

  “Yeah, and now she’s a ward of the state and probably will never be the same again.”

  “Well, they beat her. They probably would’ve killed her.”

  “Maybe. Maybe,” the woman’s voice softened. “You can’t save everyone, Ben. You just can’t. Whatever that boy is going through, you have to let him.”

  “It’s just that...”

  “Ben?”

  “It’s just that...I was there, Irene. I was there the day he was born.”

  “That boy?”

  Silence.

  “I was doing my rounds, just wandering, and I heard the mother screaming, and I went over...It was raining hard. It started raining so hard I couldn’t see straight, and when I got there, the priest was there, and others were there, too, the Crowns, and well, lots of people, maybe ten or twelve, and it was like they formed a protective circle around the mother and I swear, Irene, I really am positive I saw two babies. One, all bloody and the other all clean and not precisely a newborn and...”

  “Ben?”

  “Both of them were crying. Both of them were alive. But the priest, he—”

  “No!” The woman shouted, and then Stony heard a muffled cry.

  “I could not believe my eyes. I would not believe them. But now, with this kid, fifteen years old, Stony Crawford, and the story he told me. It all fits.”

  “They killed the baby? You’re sure?”

  “That’s the sad part. I’m not sure. The rain, it was so hard, and I couldn’t really see, and then later I asked somebody—maybe Marti Wight, or that woman with the cats, Curry—and they told me there was only one baby. That I’d imagined—”

  “And you’d been drinking,” the woman said, her voice softening again.

  “Yeah, that was before. My six-pack suicide badass cop breakfast. Back in the bad old days.”

  “Oh, Ben,” the woman said. “Oh my God. I’m sure this isn’t like that. Nothing is that bad. People aren’t that terrible.”

  Silence.

  Dennehy said, “Aren’t they?”

  Stony got up out of bed, and went to the window. He pulled the blinds up, and saw a little garden in the light of early evening. Beyond it, a pack of trick-or-treaters, all about three feet high, were walking along the sidewalk of the opposite street, one of their fathers guiding them with a pumpkin-head flashlight.

  Carefully and quietly, he lifted the window up, feeling the chill of night brush past him as he did so.

  * * *

  3

  * * *

  To get from Mystic to Stonehaven, even in the dark, was a five-mile hike,
but Stony grabbed the six-fifteen bus up Route 1, jumping off just beyond Stonington, and then walked the final two miles along the dark slender offshoot highway that went into the borough. He thought of going on up to Wequetucket to see if Lourdes had returned home, but decided that if she had, it might be good if she stayed there awhile.

  His blood was boiling, and he felt an anger surge through him that he hadn’t known before.

  There were lies and lies upon lies, and he felt a fury at his family, and at the village which had raised him up only to slap him hard when he’d nearly reached manhood.

  As always, Halloween night in the village rarely meant children trick-or-treating, it almost never meant anything other than darkened houses with their harvest displays out on front steps. The few kids that did trick-or-treat were usually taken up and down one block, but the neighborhoods tended to not open their doors, preferring instead to leave out bowls of candy for the little kids to grab up in their bags. Stony felt a breeze come up as he walked alongside the cove, over the bridge, into the village. The temperature had dropped several degrees in just a few minutes. He drew the hood of his sweatshirt up. He noticed that he stank, which came as no surprise since he hadn’t showered in twenty-four hours, and his exhaustion and anger seemed to come out of his pores. When he finally reached his house, it was nearly seven at night. It was silent, empty. His mother would still be on-shift at the hospital down the road, and his father would probably be drinking with his lobstering buddies down at the docks. Well, not really my mom and dad, he thought. The idea of it was vaguely comforting. Fuck ‘em all.

  He took the longest, hottest shower of his life, and felt like he was scrubbing the past off his hide, Ivory-soaping all the memories, rinsing the badness that had infected his life.

  He watched the filthy water run down the bathtub drain.

  After he dressed, he went downstairs, and tried calling Lourdes. Her mother answered.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Is Lourdes there?”

  “Stony” Mrs. Castillo asked, and the voice was one of suspicion. “That you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Is—”

  She cut him off. “What have you done with my daughter? Where is she? Why was she not home last night? What did you—”

  And then, the line went dead.

  Stony stared at the receiver, trying to make sense of what she’d said.

  Last night?

  Lourdes hadn’t even come home last night?

  Stony felt the presence of someone behind him, perhaps a slight sound had clued him in, perhaps it was the fetid breath...

  He turned.

  Van stood there, with the phone cord, unplugged from the jack, in his hand.

  “No calling out. Not right now. Not right now, Stony baby brother. I done something real nasty.” Van dropped the cord.

  In his other hand, his large hunting knife, unsheathed.

  * * *

  4

  * * *

  “You trying to call her? Ha! You ain’t never callin’ her again!” Van, his face barely recognizable beneath a mask of blood and torn flesh, stood before him in the living room. “I killed Lourdes. I killed her.”

  “Bullshit.” Stony felt his heart leap, felt something scratch at the back of his throat. His limbs felt heavy. This was pure hell, the day and now the night, this was pure hell, and he had somehow been plunked right down in the middle of it. His world had turned into a nightmare of questions and confusions, and now, this...

  “She’s at the Crown place. They put her in this bed. They’re sick fucks. Diana Crown is...is...she’s something fucked up, Stony. She got this thing in her eyes. She got this power!”

  Then Van drew something from his pocket.

  Passed it to Stony.

  It was the small purple flower that he’d given Lourdes, which she’d put in her hair. Last night. Standing in Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Put it into the Virgin’s hand, but Lourdes had laughed and said how Mary didn’t need it, and had put it in her hair. How beautiful the flower had looked in her dark hair.

  Only it was no longer purple.

  It was red and small and pulpy and smelled of blood. Three long strands of black hair were entwined around it as if they’d been pulled out violently at the roots.

  “What the—” Stony looked from the flower in his hands, to his brother.

  Van grinned, half his teeth rotted and yellow, his white hair almost on end. In his hand, his hunting knife. “You know you’re the one doing this to me. You are. I can feel you inside me making me do this!”

  Stony stepped back, sure that Van was going to plunge it into him.

  “I never fuckin’ liked you, baby brother,” Van giggled, and then thrust the knife into his gut, twisting and turning it as he brought it up to his throat.

  Van Crawford spilled across Stony’s shirt.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  1

  * * *

  “Jesus!” Stony cried out, falling back, wiping the blood off him, tearing his blue shirt off, pulling his soaked-jeans off. The blood seemed to go right into him, into his skin, into his throat. He felt the electricity of his brother’s life go through him.

  A bloody grin spread across Van’s face, and he drew the hunting knife out just as if he still was there, still inside that bloodied and chopped body, and he held the knife out to Stony—

  take it, a whisper within him said.

  take it. use it on them. I couldn’t. I’m not that strong. you’re the strong one.

  “No! Van!” Stony shouted, his skin soaked with his brother’s blood, watching the last of his brother shivering, falling like a marionette whose strings have just been cut, falling down in a heap of dark red-brown mess. Steam rose up from the body.

  Some wire overheated in Stony’s brain, he felt as if he were teetering on the edge of a chasm—

  It’s just a nightmare, none of this could be happening, none of it. All of it had to be a joke, a trick, a dream.

  Feeling a power surge through him he held his arms out and screamed at the top of his lungs. His voice echoed. The screams came back at him, multiple screams, all with his voice.

  Stony felt a strange rumbling inside him, as if a volcano within his own body threatened to erupt. I’m going crazy. I’m watching this going crazy. It can’t be happening. This shit doesn’t really happen. He held his hands to the side of his head. Don’t lose it now. Don’t lose it. Find Lourdes. Somehow you’ll find her. She can’t be dead. She has our baby.

  Then, a deep calm swept over him. The room shifted, as if cleaning something horrible from it. The body still lay there, the cheap blue carpeting soaking up the pour of blood.

  But Lourdes was his only thought.

  Stony went and grabbed clean clothes from the hangers in his closet. He put them on. Don’t think about this yet, some part of him instructed. Don’t think about what you just watched your brother do. Lourdes is the only thing you need to think about. If she’s in some trouble, if she’s at that house, then you need to find her.

  * * *

  2

  * * *

  He took his mother’s station wagon, the station wagon that had contained the mythic story of his birth, but not his—oh no—the birth was of some other Stephen Crawford, this one, this Stony was born in the Crown house. Every damn thing in his life happened at the Crown house, only he hadn’t known it, and now it was all so fucked up he didn’t know which way to turn. He had only driven a car once before, with his old friend Jack the previous spring, driving out on the dirt roads down in Wequetucket once, in Jack’s father’s car, just dirt roads, and he’d learned how to use the brakes and all the other fun stuff, but now he didn’t care if some cop pulled him over. Who the hell cared? HA HA HA, OFFICER DENNEHY MY BROTHER JUST DROVE HIS HUNTING KNIFE FROM HIS NAVE TO HIS CHOPS AND YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT ME DRIVING WITHOUT A LICENSE?

  Something had become so calm, so peaceful, as if his sense of—God? Was it God? Or was it just his sense of that nothin
g could be this bad, nothing could be worse than his brother driving his hunting knife into his own stomach and—(don’t think it, don’t conjure the image up, something inside is gonna erupt if you think too much about it)—

  The hunting knife was not on the car seat next to Stony. He couldn’t even remember taking it from his dying brother, he could barely remember thinking that he could use the knife. He barely could remember holding the knife in his hand...

  His sense of something he felt he must have always known, always felt inside, his differentness, his stranger in a strange land sense, his feeling that he was like the Storm King from another place, from another family—

  Johnny Miracle and—who?

  Who was his mother if not the woman named Angie Crawford? Who was she? Why couldn’t Nora tell him?

  He almost crashed into the black iron gate at the Crown driveway. Opening the car door, he got out and looked at the mansion. How could Lourdes be here? Dead or alive? Why would she be in this place where she knew no one and no one knew her?

  At the second-story window, Diana Crown pushed the curtain aside. She pulled the large window open, and the chilly October wind blew her hair back.

  * * *

  3

  * * *

  “Get out of my way,” he said to her as she greeted him at the front door. “Get the fuck out of my way.” He held the hunting knife up.

  “Stony, you don’t need to be upset,” Diana Crown said. “It can all be explained. It’s all set up to be—”

  “Just get the fuck out of my way,” he said. “I don’t even know you. Who are you people? Where’s the room? Where is she?”

  “Upstairs,” she said. “On the left. The first bedroom.”

  In a daze he walked up the stairs. It seemed to take forever to get to the landing. Once there, he turned left, counting the paces. This was too unreal. It was not really happening, but he would play along. It was just a big Halloween joke, it was just—