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

by Douglas Clegg

  No, the story was told to prepare you for something.

  The Halloween Man...The bloodline...Sacred. Holy.

  The story went that they killed Imp, and buried him. But he rose from the dead, with a greater power within him. And he went on a bloody rampage.

  Or did he?

  Perhaps what the Crowninshields were, and what the Randalls, and all the other old families in the village were—-

  Evil.

  And the Halloween Man stopped their evil once. They found ways to revive it; they had discovered some great secret for their evil, their beliefs, some way to bring a supernature into Diana, into him, too.

  Nora’s words in his head:

  “The Halloween Man...He’s thousands of years old. He’s the King that’s been killed and his blood makes things grow. He’s the Magic One. You got to understand that everything we know now is as under a layer of dust. But one day, each one of us sees clearly...”

  As the sun rose, people came from their houses...even those who did not leave their houses could see the terrible handiwork of the Halloween Man:

  “Strung like pigs, by their legs, twelve men and women from the village, their throats slit, their blood dripping down, strung from two great oak trees, the ground soaked with their blood. And between the trees, a great cross had been erected, and on it, nailed with spikes, Old Man Crowninshield—his eyes and mouth sewn horribly shut, and his nightshirt torn open.

  “On his chest, the words:

  “I CAME TO SAVE YOU

  “...And it took one of my own people to do the work that would seal the Old One into that flesh until it returned to the damp earth and slept again...”

  “I’ve got to find Nora,” he said aloud.

  All this time she’s been trying to tell me who I am, to warn me.

  * * *

  5

  * * *

  Gerald and Angie Crawford were at it again, fighting like cats, unaware that if they had but moved from the kitchen into the living room, or even the narrow hallway, up the stairs, they would’ve seen the blood in the carpet and on the floor, and upstairs they would’ve found their dead and slightly mangled son, Van. But instead, Angie was shouting at Gerald who stank of fish, whiskey and another woman’s perfume; while Gerald was shouting at Angie because supper was late and the house stank and where the hell were the goddamn kids anyway; when the kitchen window burst wide, glass flying, and what Angie thought at first was a meteor brushed past her face, burning her skin slightly.

  Angie looked at Gerald, and he at her. Their eyes were wide, but Gerald’s took on a suspicious aspect as if he were about to blame her for this meteoric intrusion as well as everything else.

  The fiery ball burst upward in a column, and when Angie stared at it long enough—surely minutes went by, she told herself, surely it’s hypnotizing me in some way—she felt as if the room were spinning. She heard Gerald shouting from across the room, but the beautiful fire branched out like a tree and suddenly she was not in her house at all, but shot back nearly twenty years to when she worked her night shift at the Crowns’, checking to make sure old Mrs. Crown had her oxygen on right, taking her blood for tests, massaging her legs when they swelled up too much. Angie turned, and there was little Diana Crown, not more than three-years-old, a smear of blood on her face.

  “What happened to you, dear?” Angie asked.

  Diana, looking like the most perfectly made little girl doll in the world, looked up at her with those innocent eyes and said, “I just drank blood from Father Jim. He let me.”

  Angie stared at her, wondering if she should smile or laugh at the little girl’s joke.

  And then, behind Diana, Mr. Crown stood, dressed in a dark suit. “Hello, Angela,” he said, nodding. Then, he grabbed Diana’s arm. “Come on little moppet, we have to go to the ceremony.”

  “Someone getting married?” Angie asked.

  Angie heard a strangled sound from poor old Mrs. Crown from the bed, and she turned to look and see what was wrong.

  Mrs. Crown, who could no longer speak, opened her mouth slightly, and it reminded Angie of a fish pulled out of the water. Her eyes went wide with some kind of terror.

  Angie was sure that Mrs. Crown was mouthing the words,

  KILL ME.

  Then, this vision memory from the past burst into fire, as Angie heard Gerald screaming, and she was back in her kitchen, and red and yellow hornets circled around her husband.

  Then, he burst into flames, running to her, falling against her, tearing her flesh apart with his burning fingers and teeth.

  She fought him off as best she could, but the fire ran all around her, slicing into her, and when her eyes melted from the heat, she tasted the red-hot coal of death.

  What had been Diana, now Azriel Light, burned across the house, and from that house, burned through the grass to others, dancing wildly as rain began falling from the sky. As the light singed the doors and melted windows, screams along the village rose in the night, and strangely enough as the sounds carried across the water to Mystic and Stonington and other boroughs and towns along the coast, the screams took on the quality of hymns, as if an entire town were somewhere in the distance singing the praises of the Lord.

  * * *

  6

  * * *

  Stony went and looked down upon Lourdes, whose eyes fluttered open and closed as if some invisible current pushed her eyelids back and forth.

  “I love you, Lourdes. Somehow I’ll make sure you’re safe. I promise.”

  Then he ran as fast as he could, out of the bedroom, down the stairs. He thought he heard some kind of singing—but how could there be singing? —From another end of the mansion, but he didn’t stick around to find out. He ran out onto the porch, down the steps, and into his mother’s car. Starting it up, he drove down the gravel road. To his left, he saw what looked like houses burning out along Land’s End, but he didn’t care, he didn’t give a damn about what happened to anyone—

  All he cared about was Lourdes. Lourdes and why.

  Someone had to tell him the why.

  * * *

  7

  * * *

  Nora’s shack was dark and silent. He pushed through the front door, out of breath, and quickly grabbed one of her long matches, lighting the candle near the front door. When the feeble light came up, he carried it around to her bed and work area, but she was not there.

  But there, on the small table next to her bed, a note she’d begun, and then left off in mid-sentence. In a scribbled handwriting, the best that Nora had ever been able to do owing to her blindness:

  Stony,

  Forgive me. I wanted to

  He set the candle down on the note.

  He was beyond any feeling, as his mind seemed to push down on itself.

  After a minute, he left the shack, walking on foot through the dark woods, back to the station wagon.

  The screams from the village grew louder, and he knew that the thing that had been freed from Diana’s skin was taking its harvest from the village, and he cared less than he ever thought he would care about anything in all his life.

  He longed for sleep, and even death.

  Even death would be a relief now.

  But Lourdes.

  Your baby, too.

  I just want to die.

  He heard the wind push Nora’s door closed, and then open again. He turned at the sound, the candle went out in the breeze. Silhouetted against the moonlight, in the doorway, a stranger.

  “Stony,” the man said from the doorway, his accent clearly British. “Let’s go. It’s time for you to know who you are.” Then, “She needs you. Lourdes needs you. She won’t survive without you being there.”

  As if this were the most normal thing in the world to say, the man added, “Look it’s starting to rain. A storm is coming from out at sea. Let’s go, Stony. It’s time for you to meet your mother.”

  * * *

  8

  * * *

  Clouds gathered a
round the enormous harvest moon, and the scraggly trees grasped at its light. They walked along the old path, alongside the bogs, through the woods. The rain trickled down, the wind died for a brief while.

  Stony felt a great heaviness grow within. His urge to run had long passed; his urge to die was still there within him. Lourdes—his only thought. He would go back, and he would get her out of that place, that madhouse, this nightmare. He could not leave her there...

  The stranger walking beside him might’ve been fifty, thin, his hair silver and cut short, dressed in a white shirt that had mottled dark stains across it—the moonlight seemed to make him glow as if he were absorbing the night. “I know this all must be a shock. We should’ve prepared you better—”

  “Who are you?” Stony asked with no interest in his voice. He glanced down the dark trail, watching the way the moonlight jagged along the tree trunks and branches.

  “Alan Fairclough. I am the—”

  “I don’t give a damn.” Stony kept walking slightly ahead of him.

  “One day you will. Part of the ritual was not preparing you. If we had, you might not have mixed with us. You might not have created a child. Do you know what that means?”

  “You one of the devil’s own, too?”

  Alan Fairclough didn’t answer until they’d reached the edge of the woods, with the Crown mansion ahead of them. Several cars were parked in its driveway now, and the house was completely lit, its outside lights glaring. The wind picked up, and the rain began to come down faster.

  “Are you Satanists?” Stony asked, knowing that there probably were such things, but even when he asked it, he doubted any worshipper of Satan could be this terrible. He doubted anyone could be as evil as the people who had been inside this house.

  “We’re not of any devil,” Fairclough said. “You and your sister are part of something that will change the destiny of humanity. It will probably save us, too. Our future, anyway. There was the Age of the Father, and then the Age of the Son. Now, Stony, it is the time of the Holy Spirit. It is the fire from heaven that comes among us.”

  “Why did you do this to Lourdes?”

  “I didn’t. It was your child, growing in her that did it. If it makes any difference, the child has also protected her from death. You believe, don’t you?”

  Something went calm inside Stony. “Yes.”

  “She’s beyond any hurting. She’s in a beautiful dream, and when she wakes, she’ll be holding your child in her arms.”

  “This is all crazy, it’s—” Stony said.

  “You know deep inside it isn’t. Part of you knows that what your sister told you is true. You’ve never felt like part of the world, not like other boys did. You’ve always felt separate.”

  Stony kept his eyes on Lourdes’ face. “My brother said he killed her.”

  “He thought he did!” Fairclough shouted, raising his fists to the wind and rain like a madman. His voice became like a storm, as he cried out against the night, as the clouds covered the brilliant moon until a harsh grey shadow covered the earth. “It’s the beauty of it! It was a ritual, Stony! Rituals of sacrifice are nothing new, and after every sacrifice, a rebirth! Lourdes was reborn as the mother of your child the moment that your brother thought he had taken her life away. It was proof of your son’s divinity. If he’d been purely flesh, they both would’ve died, but they weren’t, he wasn’t, your baby, and his life created protection for his mother.”

  Stony took a long slow breath. “She doesn’t hurt?”

  “Not one bit.”

  More screams carried on the growing wind.

  “What’s that? More tricks?” Stony asked.

  The man shook his head. “No. It’s Diana. She’s on a rampage through the village. No one can stop her, not once she found release from flesh. She is like a ravening wolf among a flock of young lambs. She’s not like you Stony. They didn’t know the rituals when she was born. They didn’t know how to make the sacrifices. She is the shadow of what you are. The Azriel Light within her is darkened—”

  “Cut the bullshit.”

  Fairclough turned to Stony, and his grin seemed enormous in the shadowy light from the house. Then, he slammed his fist into the side of Stony’s face. Stony felt as if he were flying across the gravel, and when he fell, stinging pains blistered along his back and arms. Fairclough went over and lifted him up, kissing him on the forehead. Stony struggled to pull away, but Fairclough had a strong grip.

  Fairclough looked deep into Stony’s eyes and whispered, “I am the one who set the ritual at your conception. I am the one who coaxed your mother into a form for taking the seed of Johnny Miracle and carrying you for nearly eight months. If you wish to despise someone, despise the woman who raised you whose silence was bought cheap. Do not fuck with me little god, for I know the ancient words, I have the knowledge, I have gone through the portals of Hell and the smashed gates of Heaven just to bring you into this world. I have smashed the brains from boys twice your size. You have a power within you, but you are still trapped in flesh and blood, and I know a hundred ways to make boys like you suffer for their insolence.”

  Alan Fairclough set Stony down again, pushing him forward. Stony glanced back. Fairclough’s face was pale and shiny, like a worm’s, in the house lights.

  The man gestured forward. “Go, boy. You want to protect your girl, your baby, you want to know the mystery of all of what you are? It’s in there. I can show you. Mankind is dying out—you can see it. You can feel it everywhere. We’ve lost touch with the divine spark, the fire of creation, ancient savagery. We have lost it; we are destroying all that is fertile. Men used to walk with gods, Stony. Men used to sacrifice to the Almighty. Abraham took his son Isaac to be sacrificed to God. He did, in fact. Did you know that? But the words were changed to make it all nice and sweet so that God was no longer a force of the cosmos, but merely a nice father sitting in the clouds. When the Age of the Son began, we put ourselves higher than the Divine. We set ourselves up as gods. That is unnatural. That is blasphemy. No. Man is doomed as a species, but you, and your progeny. What I did—what I did with the Crowns—with what they sheltered—what I did was I brought the rituals. I brought the means of communication with the Divine. We midwifed the gods when we brought you into this world, and through you and your children, slowly, over time, mankind will be saved. Diana, she was brought forth in ignorance. These Crown people,” he said with contempt, “they have no respect for the rituals, they think they’re all just so much ancient history, but there’s a reason that religion, in all its forms exists, Stony, it exists to create a bridge to the gods, to God, to the divine fire—the ritual is the way of controlling the power rather than just setting it loose upon the world—”

  The screams from the village continued unabated.

  “Listen,” Alan Fairclough said, cocking his head to the side. “That is what she is. She is like electricity without a wire to conduct its flow. Her fire leaps from tree to tree, house to house, a wild talent of the gods, but without control, without conscience. But you, you were born with the rituals, with the respect for the power, with the old words and keys.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Stony said, now crying, not wanting to, feeling such great pain within him, as if his bones longed to pushed outward from his flesh, as if his blood wished to burst from its veins and arteries—

  “Ah, but you do not know what you know,” Alan Fairclough said. He threw his head back, opened his mouth and began ki-yiing like a wild dog, and through the howling sound, crazy words, “ya thaeia nue pari sothga” he sang into the rain. Stony’s ears began ringing as the words were intoned.

  Fairclough shut his mouth, nodding to Stony. “Within you, they mean things. They are the language of your spirit.”

  “No!” Stony shouted, thinking he might run, thinking—he had the knife, he still had the knife, thrust into his belt, he could draw it out—

  Fairclough pushed him toward the driveway, almost making his knees buckle. In the
driveway, so many cars, as if they’d begun a party inside the mansion. Stony recognized some of them—the Glastonburys’ Volvo, Mrs. Doane’s Buick Skylark, Tamara Curry’s Subaru—what were they all doing here? Why?

  Fairclough’s voice softened to an insinuating whisper as they stepped up on the porch. His words then came out rapid-fire, spittle flying from his mouth, “All Hallow’s, Stony. This isn’t just happening by chance. This is the harvest from the ancient days. It is the rite of passage for you. This is the night when the gods may walk with humans. It’s the space between the two worlds. The birth of Christ was not in December, Stony. And it wasn’t in midsummer, as many scholars seem to think. No, it was at the end of the harvest, and across thousands of miles, harvest kings like your Crown ancestors were being cut down with scythes in fields and resurrected within days at the same time the Nazarene cried from the cave in which his mother gave birth. Gods are never born in grand palaces, they are born in stone, they are cracked like egg yolks from the shell of rock, from the earth, from the place which is both beneath our feet and controls our lives. And she is at the heart of it. She is growing stronger after centuries of weakness in captivity.”

  “Diana?” Stony asked, entering the foyer, glancing briefly up the stairs, wanting to see Lourdes so badly, to hold her, to never let go of her.

  “Not your sister,” Fairclough said, coming up behind him. “Your mother.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  MOTHER

  * * *

  1

  * * *

  “In there,” Alan Fairclough nodded to the open door of the chapel.

  Over the arched doorway, Stony read the words, Bless the Fruit of her Womb. The door was open, and the sound of voices singing died almost immediately. The chapel was lit with dozens of candles. The smell of a dead animal permeated the place, mingling with the thick smoke from powerful incense.