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

by Douglas Clegg

  “Not blind. She had no eyes. I felt she could see me, anyway. She was staring at me. She just had no eyes.”

  “And you went in there and no one was there …”

  “But the freezer. Why would it be going?”

  Helen shrugged. “I’m going to make a drink. You want something?”

  At five-thirty a.m., she and I had vodka martinis, and went and sat out on the fire escape as all of Manhattan awoke, as the sky turned several shades of violet before becoming the blank light of day.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said, sipping and feeling drunk very quickly. “I don’t believe that the dead can rise or any of that.”

  “What do you believe?”

  I watched a burly man lift crates out of the back of his truck down in the street. “I believe in what I see. I saw her. I really saw her.”

  “Assuming,” she said, “that it was Jenny. Assuming that the freezer was running on its own energy. Assuming you saw what you saw. Assuming all those things as givens, what does it mean?”

  “I have no idea. I thought at first maybe I was just crazy. If I hadn’t seen the frost on the freezer window, I don’t think I would’ve believed later on that it had been Jenny at all. Or anything but an hallucination.”

  Helen was obstinate. “But it’s got to mean something.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  I slept through the next day fairly peacefully, and when I awoke, Helen was gone. I watched television, then called a few friends to set up lunches and dinners for the following week.

  Helen walked through the door at six-thirty in the evening, and said, “Well, I found that alley again. I pulled back one of the boards.”

  When she said this, I felt impulsively defensive—it was my alley, it was my boarded-up restaurant, I felt, it was my hallucination. “You didn’t have to,” I told her.

  She halted my speech with her hands. “Hang on, hang on. Oliver, the windows are bricked up beneath the boards.”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “Yes,” she said, “they are. You couldn’t have gotten in there.”

  We argued this point; we were both terrific arguers. It struck me that she hadn’t found the right alley, or even the right Pallan Row. Perhaps there were two Pallan Rows in the city, near each other, perhaps even almost identical alleys. Perhaps there was the functional Pallan Row and the dysfunctional Pallan Row.

  This idea seemed to clutch at me, as if I had known it to be true even before I thought it consciously.

  The idea took hold, and that night, on the pretext of going to see a movie that Helen had already seen twice with friends, I took a cab over to Pallan Row.

  * * *

  It was colder on Pallan Row than in the rest of the city. While autumn was well upon us, and the weather had for weeks been fairly chilly, down the alley it was positively freezing. My curiosity and even fear took hold as I peeled back one of the window boards, the very one I had pulled down on my last visit. Helen had been right: the windows were bricked up beneath the boards. But then, I had to wonder, why the boards at all?

  I touched the bricks; had to draw my fingers back quickly, for they seemed like blocks of ice. I remembered the owner of the Chinese restaurant telling Jenny and me that it used to be an ice house. I touched the bricks again, and they were still bitingly cold—it hadn’t been my imagination.

  I walked around the alley but saw no way of getting into the buildings again, for all were bricked up.

  And then I heard it.

  A sound, a human sound, the sound of someone who was trapped inside that old icehouse, someone who had heard me pull the board loose and who needed help.

  I am no hero, and never will be. For all I knew, there were some punks on the other side of that wall torturing one of their own, and if I walked into the middle of it, I would not see the light of day again.

  And yet I could not help myself.

  I found that if I kicked at the bricks, they gave a little. The noise from within had ceased, but I battered at the bricks until I managed to knock one of them out. It seemed to be an old brick job, for the cement between the blocks was cracked and powdery. After an hour, I had managed to dislodge several.

  To my surprise and amazement, there was light on within the old restaurant. I looked through the sizable hole I’d made and saw the former proprietress of the Chinese restaurant standing behind the bar, dressed in a jade-colored silk gown, talking with her barman. A few people sat at the tables, eating, laughing. None of them had noticed my activity at the window.

  As I put my face to the hole, I breathed in air so cold that it seemed to stop my lungs up.

  I moved back and stood up. I was sure that this was a delusion; perhaps I needed some medication still, for immediately after Jenny’s death, I had begun taking tranquilizers to help blot out the memory of finding her dead. Perhaps I still needed some medical help and psychological counseling.

  I crouched down again to look through the opening and noticed that at one of the tables, facing the other way, was a woman who looked from the back very much like Jenny.

  I noticed the ice, too. It was a shiny glaze along the walls and tables; icicles hung down from the chocolate-patterned tin ceiling. I watched the people inside as if this were a television set. I lost my fear entirely. All my shivering came from the arctic breezes that stirred up occasionally from within.

  I thought I heard someone out in the alley behind me, and turned to look.

  * * *

  Helen stood there in a sweatshirt and pants, my old windbreaker around her shoulders; she held a sweater in her arms.

  “I figured you’d be here. Look, it’s getting chilly,” she passed the sweater down to where I sat on the pavement. She noticed the bricks beside me, and the light from within the building. “I see you’ve been doing construction. Or should I say deconstruction.”

  “Do you see the light?” I asked her.

  She squatted down beside me. “What light?”

  “I know you see it,” I said, but when I glanced again through the hole, the place within had gone dark.

  “What is it about this place for you?” she asked. “Even if you did see Jenny here, or her ghost, whatever—why here? You and she only came here once. Why would she come here?”

  “I think this is hell,” I said. “I think this is one of those corners of hell. I think Jenny’s in hell. And she wants something from me. Maybe a favor.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  I nodded. “Don’t ask me why. There is no why. I think this is a corner of hell that maybe shows through sometimes to some people. I don’t even think maybe. I know that’s what this is.”

  “You may be right,” Helen said. She stood up, stretched, and offered me her hand to help me get up. I took it. Her hand was warm, and I felt a rush of blood in the palm of my hand as if she had managed to transfer some warmth to me.

  And then, the sound again.

  A human voice, indistinct, from within the walls.

  Helen looked at me.

  “You heard it too,” I said.

  * * *

  “It’s a cat,” she said. “It’s a cat inside there.”

  I shook my head. “You heard it. It’s not just me. Maybe Jenny can only show herself to me. Maybe hell can only show itself to me, but you heard it.”

  “Wouldn’t Jenny’s ghost be in your old apartment where she died?” Something like fear trembled in Helen’s voice. She was beginning to believe something that might be dreadful. It made me feel less alone.

  “No. I don’t think it’s her ghost. A ghost is spiritual residue or something. I think she is in here, it’s really her, in the flesh, and I think there are others in here. I need to go back in and find out what exactly she wants from me.”

  The noise again, almost sounding like a woman weeping.

  “Don’t go in there,” Helen said. “It may not be anything. It may be something awful. It may be somebody waiting in there the way somebody waited fo
r Jenny.”

  I took her face in my hands and kissed her eyelids. When I drew back from her face, I whispered, “I love you, Helen. But I have to find out if I’m crazy. I have to find out.”

  We went and sat in an all-night coffee shop talking about love and belief and insanity. Because I was beginning to convince myself that Pallan Row was a corner of hell, I waited until the sun came up to investigate further within its walls. Helen returned with me, and between the two of us, we managed to break enough bricks apart and away from the wall so that the hole grew to an almost-window-sized entrance.

  I asked her to wait outside for me, and if anything happened, to go get help. I went in through the window, scraping my head a bit. The room on the other side was empty and dark, but that unnatural ice breath was still there, and, through the kitchen portal window, there came a feeble and distant light.

  Helen asked every few seconds, “You okay, Oliver? I can’t see you.”

  “I’m fine,” I reassured her as often as she asked.

  I walked slowly to the kitchen door, looked through the round windowpane. The light emanated from the freezer at the other end of the long kitchen. I pushed the door open (informing Helen that this was my direction so that she wouldn’t worry if I didn’t respond to her queries every few minutes) and walked more swiftly to the walk-in freezer.

  The freezer door was unlocked. I opened it, too, and stepped inside.

  The light was blue and as cold as the air.

  * * *

  Through the arctic fog I could make out the shapes of human beings, hanging from meat hooks, their faces indistinct, their bodies slowly turning as if they had but little energy left within them. I did not look directly at any of these bodies, for my terror was becoming stronger—and I knew that if I were to remain sane as I walked through this icehouse of death, I would need to rein in my fear.

  Finally, I found her.

  Jenny.

  Ice across her eyeless face, her hair, strands of thin, pearl necklace icicles.

  She hung naked from a hook, her head drooping, her arms apparently lifeless at her side.

  Her belly had been ripped open as if torn at with pincers, the skin peeled back and frost-burnt.

  I stopped breathing for a full minute, and was sure that I was going to die right there.

  I was sure the door to that freezer, that butcher shop of the damned, would slide shut and trap me forever.

  But it did not.

  Instead, I heard that human sound again, closer, more distinct.

  I heard my heart beating; my breathing resumed.

  The sound came from beyond the whitest cloth of fog, and I waved my hands across it to dissipate the mist.

  There, lying on a metal shelf, wrapped in the clothes that Jenny had been buried in, was our baby, his small fingers reaching for me as he began to wail even louder.

  I lifted him, held him in my arms, and wiped the chill from his forehead.

  Someone was there, among the hanging bodies, watching me. I couldn’t tell who, for the fog had not cleared, neither had the blue light increased in intensity. I could not see to see. I felt someone’s presence, though, and thanked that someone silently. I thanked whoever or whatever had suckled my child, had warmed his blood, had met his needs. The place no longer frightened me. Whatever energy the freezer ran on, whatever power inspired it, had kept my child safe.

  I took my son out into the bright and shining morning.

  “This was why I was haunted,” I told Helen upon emerging from the open window. “This is what Jenny wanted to give me.”

  I can only describe Helen’s expression, through her eyes, as one approaching dread. She said, “I think you should put it back where it belongs.”

  “Babies aren’t ‘its,’” I said, and recalled saying this to Jenny once, too, at this very place. Or had Jenny said it to me? We had been so close that sometimes when she said things, I felt I’d said them too. I glanced down at my boy, so beautiful as he watched the sky and his father, breathing the vivid air.

  Across his forehead, I saw a marking, a birthmark, a port-wine stain, perhaps, which spread across his skin like fire until he became something other than what might be called flesh.

  White Chapel

  1

  “You are a saint,” the leper said, reaching her hand out to clutch the saffron-dyed robe of the great man of Calcutta, known from his miracle workings in America to his world fame as a holy man throughout the world.

  The sick woman said, in perfect English, “My name is Jane. I need a miracle. I can’t hold it any longer. It is eating away at me. They are.”

  She labored to breathe with each word she spoke.

  “Who?” the man asked.

  “The lovers. Oh, God, two years keeping them from escaping. Imprisoned inside me.”

  “You’re possessed by demons?”

  She smiled and he saw a glimmer of humanity in the torn skin.

  “Chose me because I was good at it. At suffering. That is whom the gods choose. I escaped but had no money, my friends were dead. Where could I go? I became a home for every manner of disease.”

  “My child,” the saint said, leaning forward to draw the rags away from the leper’s face. “May God shine His countenance upon you.”

  “Don’t look at me, then. My life is nearly over,” the leper said, but the great man had already brought his face near hers. It was too late. Involuntarily, the leper pressed her face against the saint’s, lips bursting with fire heat. An attendant of the saint’s came over and pulled the leper away, swatting the beggar on the shoulder.

  The great man drew back, wiping his lips with his sleeve.

  The leper grinned, her teeth shiny with droplets of blood.

  “The taste of purity,” she said, her dark hair falling to the side of her face. “Forgive me. I could not resist the pain. Too much.”

  The saint continued down the narrow alley, back into the marketplace of what was called the City of Joy, as the smell of fires and dung and decay came up in dry gusts against the yellow sky.

  The leper woman leaned against the stone wall and began to ease out of the cage of her flesh.

  The memory of this body, like a book, written upon the nerves and sinews, the pathways of blood and bone, opened for a moment, and the saint felt it, too, as the leper lay dying, my name is Jane, a brief memory of identity, but had no other past to recall, her breath stopped, the saint reached up to feel the edge of his lips, his face, and wondered what had touched him.

  What could cause the arousal he felt.

  2

  “He rescued five children from the pit, only to flay them alive, slowly. They said he savored every moment, and kept them breathing for as long as he was able. He initialed them. Kept their faces.”

  This was overheard at a party in London, five years before Jane Boone would ever go to White Chapel, but it aroused her journalist’s curiosity for it was not spoken with a sense of dread but with something approaching awe and wonder, too.

  The man of whom it was spoken had already become a legend.

  Then, a few months before the entire idea sparked in her mind, she saw an item in the Bangkok Post about the woman whose face had been scraped off with what appeared to be a sort of makeshift scouring pad.

  Written upon her back, the name Meritt.

  This woman also suffered from amnesia concerning everything that had occurred to her prior to losing the outer skin of her face; she was like a blank slate.

  Jane had a friend in Thailand, a professor at the university, and she called him to find out if there was anything he could add to the story of the faceless woman.

  “Not much, I’m afraid,” he said, aware of her passion for the bizarre story. “They sold tickets to see her, you know. I assume she’s a fraud, playing off the myth of the white devil that traveled to India, collecting skins as he went. Don’t waste your time on this one. Poor bastards are so desperate to eat they’ll do anything to themselves to put something in the
ir stomachs. You know the most unbelievable part of her story?”

  Jane shook her head.

  He continued, “This woman, face scraped off, nothing human left to her features, claimed that she was thankful that it had happened. She not only forgave him, she said, she blessed him. If it had really happened as she said, who would possibly bless this man? How could one find forgiveness for such a cruel act? And the other thing, too. Not in the papers. Other parts of her, mutilated. She didn’t hold a grudge on that count either.”

  * * *

  In wartime, men will often commit atrocities they would cringe at in their everyday life. Jane Boone knew about this dark side to the male animal, but she still weathered the journey to White Chapel, because she wanted the whole story from the mouth of the very man who had committed what was known, in the latter part of the century, as the most unconscionable crime, without remorse.

  If the man did indeed live among the Khou-dali at the farthest point along the great dark river, it was said that perhaps he sought to atone for his past. White Chapel was neither white nor a chapel, but a brutal outpost that had been conquered and destroyed from one century to the next since before recorded history. Always to self-resurrect from its own ashes, only to be destroyed again.

  The British had Anglicized the name at some sober point in their rule, although the original name, Y-Cha-Pa when translated, was Monkey God Night, referring to the ancient temple and celebration of the divine possession on certain nights of the dry season when the god needed to inhabit the faithful.

  The temple had mostly been reduced to ashes and fallen stone, although the ruins of its gates still stood to the southeast.

  Jane had already written a book about the camps to the north, with their starvation and torture, although she had not been well reviewed Stateside.

  Still, she intended to follow the trail of Nathan Meritt, the man who had deserted his men at the height of the famous massacre.