Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense
Page 30
Stony tried to muster every ounce of strength, but he felt like he was dying. A tremendous battering in his head, a ringing and the sound of hammering, all came up when he tried to move.
“Don’t try to speak. Just rest. What you did must have taken a lot of your power. It may be years before you gain it back. But do not worry, you have something to live for, after all,” Fairclough said. “Lourdes is still alive, and your child within her is strong. You are the future, Stony. You and your son. We who are merely human are now part of a charming history.”
Alan Fairclough lifted Stony up from the mud, and carried him as he would carry a newborn across the muddy Common, past the smashed houses and fallen trees, out to the dock behind the Crown’s summer place, to a small motorboat in which lay the sac-encased Lourdes, her belly grown large with their son.
Epilogue
JOURNEY’S END
* * *
1
* * *
At a distance of twelve years, Stony Crawford reached to the ticking bomb and pressed the button near the timer. One minute to blast off, to kaboom, and he could not do it. He knew they should blow up into a million undying pieces, but he could not do it.
For Lourdes.
For our child.
Stony turned to his son Stephen and said, “He lied. How could I have put my trust in that human monster? You were born two months later, in winter, but I awoke one morning and found...what was left of...your mother.”
He closed his eyes, remembering the body, less a girl’s body than a cracked-open encasing for an incubator. Clear liquid had sluiced from between the burst stomach, and her face was all but obliterated by the glaze-like network of fatty tissue and veins.
“Fairclough had taken you, a newborn, in the night and left me on the island with just a small boat and provisions to last a week or so. I was still too weak, and I could not let what was inside me out again...I didn’t know what kind of bloodshed...I was like a walking bomb...By the time I returned to the mainland, I had no idea where to go, how to find you. And I had to survive. Ben Dennehy and his sister helped, they took care of me until I knew I had to run from them, too. Knew that the Moonfire in me could not be near full-blooded humans. I did things to survive that no man should ever have to do.”
“And then you found me.”
Stony nodded. “After all these years. Hunting, searching, trying to sniff out Fairclough’s trail wherever it might lead.”
“To kill me?”
“I thought so. Then. Not now.”
“I’m a monster,” the boy said.
“You and me, both,” Stony added.
“You stopped the bomb.”
“I don’t want you to die. Not for something you were no part of. You’re only a quarter of what my mother was. You’re half Lourdes, and a quarter Johnny Miracle, too.”
“But this house, it’s...it feels like it’s breathing,” his son said.
Stony glanced around. “It is. It’s what’s left of that Halloween night. The residue of her being.”
“We should end it all,” his son said. “After all that happened here, this place shouldn’t be standing, should it?”
“Right,” Stony grinned, feeling the melancholy of his memory seep through him. He touched the edge of the bomb, and the timer started up again. Ten minutes. Enough time to get a good ways away. “Let’s go.”
“Where?” Steve asked.
“Where no one will come after us. Where no one will worship us,” his father said.
* * *
2
* * *
The small boat that Stony had left the island on was still docked behind the Crowns’ house. They ran together down the landing, out onto the small dock.
* * *
3
* * *
“What are we going to do there?”
Stony shrugged, unable to predict the next few days, let alone the coming years. “I guess we’ll find out. I can come to shore for food and what we need to live on.”
“But it’s bound to come out in me some day. The Devil.”
“Maybe. And it’s not the Devil. It’s not Evil by itself. It’s Evil because it’s untamed. It’s evil the way the wind is evil or the lightning. It’s a force. But you have will.”
“If it does come out, what if—I mean, what if other people come and it gets loose?”
Stony glanced at his son, and saw Lourdes there in his eyes and his hair. Lourdes Maria Castillo, with the crooked grin. I love you because of your hair.
Your eyes.
Your muscles, she whispered.
Your voice.
Your heart.
You spirit.
Your love.
“I don’t mean to hurt people, but it seems to always happen around me,” the boy said.
“I’ll teach you how to let it out and still control it. We’ll find out what our purpose is for the future,” he said. His son grinned, a boy—only a boy, with his father, headed for the furthest of the three Isles of Avalon.
“Here,” Stony said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. It was loose-leaf paper with blue lines on it, and between the blue lines, a scrawl. Tattered and yellowed, it was still legible after all these years. “Your mother wrote this to me. I didn’t see it until after...until it was too late to save her...”
Stony read it aloud.
“I have heard that everyone has one GREAT LOVE in their lives. ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I didn’t know till I met you that I would have one. I thought I’d always feel alone and maybe get married and have kids someday but never really know REAL LOVE. I look at my mother and I think, THAT’S GOING TO BE ME IN TWENTY YEARS. Married with kids, cleaning, keeping my mouth shut, wishing something better for my kids. But when I saw you the first time, last spring, I knew just by looking in your eyes. I mean, I’d seen you before, you know that. But I had never really SEEN you. Did you know it too? It was like there was a chalk outline, or maybe a halo around you. When I looked in your eyes it was like looking into an ocean that was there just for the two of us. I knew that you were the one. I knew that there would be no others. You are my ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I don’t know if we will always be like this, but I know that I will never ever forget you. NEVER. I want it always to be like it is between us right now. ALWAYS. No matter what happens. And things do happen. I know that. I know that sometimes love is not enough of a miracle to cure everything. I just wanted you to know. What we did together is what I wanted. It was PERFECT AND RIGHT.”
When he finished, tears were in his eyes. The breeze picked up.
To the island. Not so very far from humankind, he thought.
Close, but not too close.
Far enough to learn together who we are. To set ourselves free and still control it.
Then, behind them, the sound of the explosion.
* * *
4
* * *
His son shouted, “Fire! It blew up! Holy—”
Stony didn’t look back. He closed his eyes, and saw nothing but darkness. Then an aura emerged, a glow of light in his mind, the orange and yellow Moonfire—and she was there.
She was there.
A being within him now—a being of Moonfire and cool green shadow.
Lourdes Maria. Her hands open as if accepting what he would offer up, accepting the gift he was about to return to the cosmos. He saw her within himself, within his son. Her eyes no longer dark, full of pain, but golden and warm...her voice smooth, sure, but still she was there, as she had been at fifteen, eternally young, eternally faithful.
And the gift, the gift both of them offered to the universe, to the momentum of mankind and all that would be in the future, there in their son. At war perhaps with his other nature. The Outcast that was within the Storm King. The weakness that was within the power.
But beyond that, she was there, as well.
Your voice.
Your face.
Your spirit.
Your heart.
>
Your purity.
* * *
5
* * *
The Isle of Avalon emerged through the dissipating haze and light misty rain of morning as a fiery sun grew along its low hills.
If I remember one thing, Stony Crawford thought as he watched the sunlight break like glass against the slate sea, it will be this. One thing from all that I was to all that I will be, this one thing burned into my memory, for Lourdes and me:
In the boat, his son watching the morning as it came. His son—his and Lourdes’ son—the light of creation within, but the human flesh and blood of his mother and father, too. Perhaps that was the strongest prison for divine fire that had ever been created.
Lourdes, see through my eyes. See him. See you within him.
Your purity.
Your heart.
Your soul.
Also by Douglas Clegg
Click here to discover more fiction by Douglas Clegg.
* * *
STAND-ALONE NOVEL
* * *
Afterlife
Breeder
The Children’s Hour
Dark of the Eye
Goat Dance
The Halloween Man
The Hour Before Dark
Mr. Darkness
Naomi
Neverland
You Come When I Call You
* * *
NOVELLAS & SHORT NOVELS
* * *
The Attraction
The Dark Game (Two Novelettes)
Dinner with the Cannibal Sisters
Isis
The Necromancer
Purity
The Words
* * *
SERIES
* * *
THE HARROW SERIES
* * *
Nightmare House, Book 1
Mischief, Book 2
The Infinite, Book 3
The Abandoned, Book 4
The Necromancer (Prequel Novella)
Isis(Prequel Novella)
* * *
THE CRIMINALLY INSANE SERIES
* * *
Bad Karma, Book 1
Red Angel, Book 2
Night Cage, Book 3
* * *
THE VAMPYRICON TRILOGY
* * *
The Priest of Blood, Book 1
The Lady of Serpents, Book 2
The Queen of Wolves, Book 3
* * *
THE CHRONICLES OF MORDRED
Mordred, Bastard Son (Book 1)
Mordred, Dragon Prince (Book 2)
* * *
COLLECTIONS
* * *
Lights Out: Collected Stories
Night Asylum
The Nightmare Chronicles
Wild Things
* * *
BOX SET BUNDLES
* * *
Bad Places (3 Novels)
Coming of Age (3 Dark Novellas)
Dark Rooms (3 Novels)
Criminally Insane: The Series (3 Novels)
Halloween Chillers
Harrow: Three Novels (Books 1-3)
Harrow: Four Novels (Books 1-4)
Haunts (8 Novel Box Set)
Lights Out (3 Collection Box Set)
Night Towns (3 Novels)
The Vampyricon Trilogy (3 Novels)
* * *
With more new novels, novellas and stories to come.
Contact Douglas Clegg
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Disclaimer
The Halloween Man is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright
Copyright 1998, 2014©Douglas Clegg
Published by Alkemara Press in the United States.
ISBN: 978-1-944668-02-0
Created with Vellum
Publication Credits
Cover art provided by:
Damonza.com
* * *
Formatting services provided by:
Robert Swartwood
About the Author
Douglas Clegg is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of Neverland, The Priest of Blood, Afterlife, and The Hour Before Dark, among many other novels, novellas and stories. His short story collection, The Machinery of Night, won a Shocker Award, and his first collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, won both the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work has been published by Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Berkley, Signet, Dorchester, Bantam Dell Doubleday, Cemetery Dance Publications, Subterranean Press, Alkemara Press and others.
* * *
A pioneer in the ebook world, his novel Naomi made international news when it was launched as the world’s first ebook serial in early 1999 and was called “the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace” by Publisher’s Weekly, covered in Time magazine, Business Week, Business 2.0, BBC Radio, NPR, USA Today and more; his book Purity was the first to go onto a mobile phone in the U.S. in early 2001.
* * *
He is married, and lives and writes in New England in a house called Villa Diodati.
Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction
“Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”
—Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.
* * *
“Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”
—Peter Straub, New York Times bestselling author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman
* * *
“Douglas Clegg is the best horror novelist of the post-Stephen King generation.”
— Bentley Little, bestselling author
* * *
“Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale…”
—The Daily News (New York)
Discover Douglas Clegg’s Fiction
Get book updates, exclusive offers, news of contests & special treats for readers—become a V.I.P. member of Douglas Clegg’s long-running free newsletter.
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Click here to sign up.
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Click here to explore more fiction by Douglas Clegg.
Want More?
Read Night Asylum, 18 Stories of Mystery & Horror.
Click here to learn more.
* * *
MEET THE INMATES
* * *
Mysterious children surrounded by houseflies; a strange woman in a small town stalked by a preacher; boys trying to survive a terrifying boot camp; fraternity brothers who find a deeper brotherhood during a wintry Hell Week; a boy named Charlie, who may have more up his sleeve than meets the eye; a cop named Paul who discovers a tenement that opens the door into a place of nightmares — or heaven; Nix — a patient in an asylum — who holds the key to the secret geometry of night itself…and more.
* * *
Get the Book
Author’s Note
Dear Reader,
I’ve been writing stories since I was just old enough to write and illustrate gothic tales of insects transformed to humans who wanted to love, mice that stood in for autobiography of my five-year-old self, and the moment when my very first official horror story arrived one night many years ago.
At the age of eight, in the month of March, we had a school assignment:
Write a Springtime-related story.
Given that St. Patrick’s Day was around the corner and I happened to love discovering snakes in the woods and fields, I decided to create a historical tale with mythological overtones mingled with action and adventure.
And horror.
* * *
Well, I doubt I thought all of that out.
It was
more intuitive on my part.
The story came together in a St. Patrick’s Day horror gothic in which Patrick had just finished driving the snakes out of Dublin’s fair city…but then the creatures returned once their holy nemesis had left town.
They wanted revenge, those snakes.
The streets of Dublin flowed in a river of blood as serpents grabbed citizens and dragged them away into the sewers, their fangs spewing venom.
Back in those days, teachers didn’t think you were odd if you wrote such a story.
And the other kids loved that kind of tale.
I remember the gold star I got for my literary effort.