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

by Douglas Clegg

  And we keep looking at her kitty, too, all our eyes drawn back to the unholies of unholy, “little pouty petals,” you called it. You were pretty adamant about getting your fingers up there, weren’t you, you horny son of a bitch? It was almost like a Portuguese man-of-war turned on its back.

  And finally, when it was over, all her dances, she took the party boy into the bedroom, and all I can say is, he didn’t come out for over an hour.

  In fact, by eleven-fifteen, he hadn’t come out at all, and that’s when you and I decided to storm the room.

  4

  Now, I had seen this room once before—it was your folks’ master bedroom, and it was a good size, with kind of a faggy bed, you were to ask me, lots of silk and brass; a nightstand that looked like it was out of Versailles; green-gold wallpaper, shiny and clean like they’d just had it put up the day before; a wall that was nothing but mirrors; and two walk-in closets, the sizes of my apartment in Westwood; a bathroom, all gold-plated fixtures, something I always thought was tacky about your folks—and I told you this a few times, too—with a big round Jacuzzi bath and a window so you could take a bath and watch your neighbors at the same time.

  The door is locked, of course, but you know how to take a dime and very simply unlock it. So we get in, and the bed is perfectly made; no sign of hooker or trick. You go into the bathroom to look for them, giggling as always, because we think we’re going to find the two of them with her ass bent over a sink and his schlong pumping in like an oil drill; I check out the walk-in closets, but there’s nothing but tons of Armani and Valentino and the smell of Red and L’Air du Temps.

  As I’m about to go into the second closet, the pimp comes running in, out of breath because it’s quite a hike up those stairs in your folks’ house. “What you boys doin’?”

  I cackle—sometimes, when I’m really bombed and in a party mood, I do this laugh that’s like “snort-cackle-pop,” and it sounds like I hurt myself or something.

  Then I notice he’s got his revolver out.

  Oh, shit, I’m thinking. I sober up real fast. “Looking for the party boy.”

  He just stares at me with the gun drawn, and that’s when I hear the girl in the bathroom, kind of moaning, and you, too, still giggling, and that wet sound like rubber and lubricant.

  And another sound, while the Irish pimp from hell is staring at me, a sound in the walk-in closet.

  My hand is on the door.

  But someone else’s hand is on the other side of the door.

  “Alec?” I ask the door.

  The sound that comes back isn’t entirely human, but it’s human enough. It sounds like the noises Alec used to make when he was doing like a feeb imitation: like his tongue got cut out and his lips are shredded. So I think maybe it’s some kind of setup and joke on me, so I give the door a good pull, and it opens.

  Dresses and coats, hanging, rustling, in a dark closet.

  The sound of slow dripping.

  I can smell the pimp’s breath: He’s real close to me.

  I can tell he’s a little scared, too, and he still has the gun out.

  He’s pointing it at the dresses, hanging.

  Something clear and dripping from the corner of a full length mink coat.

  I switch on the closet light, but the pimp very quickly switches it off again.

  But in that one second of light, I see something in the corner.

  Something that left a trail of slime and human waste in its path.

  Its ribs quivering.

  Open, and quivering, like the skeleton of a boat, a slaughterhouse boat with the flesh and innards of animals dripping from its deck.

  It’s always through the eyes that you know someone. I once took care of a friend’s dog when I was eight; and then, when I was nineteen, and had long before moved away from that friend, I was in New York, in Central Park, and I saw in the eyes of a dog an old friend, and sure enough, it was the dog I had known when I was eight, and in Orange County. It’s always there in the eyes, the person, the animal, the creature, not in the skin or voice or the movements: It’s in the eyes.

  So I had seen in the brief light, his eyes, Alec’s eyes, left in their sockets long after the skin had been torn from bone and skull to make the rest of him resemble a skinned possum.

  And when it registers on my brain that it’s Alec, that this girl did something to Alec, something inhuman, I hear your scream from the bathroom, and I turn and the pimp turns, and the girl screams, too, and there's the sound of breaking glass.

  The pimp gets to the bathroom first, before me, and I hear him fire two shots; I’m just behind him, and when I see you clutching your hand with all that blood coming out, I figure the pimp shot your fingers off. For just a second, I see her, too, not as she was, pretty and tall and sexy, but some small tentacled thing, like a sea urchin, dropped from between her legs, released from its empty and ragged socket, with a cut umbilical cord attached, loping on its wormlike feelers across the bathtub rim, out the broken window, into the night.

  The pimp yells, “Goddamn it, that fucking bitch,” then drops his gun, grabs me by the collar, “You bastards, you asked for it, you ain’t supposed to get her down there, that’s what she wants, you sons of bitches, you’re supposed to get head or a hand job, didn’t she tell you? She tricked you, and she was the best, you sons of whores!” He’s weeping, and I’m thinking, Christ, he’s in love with … that thing.

  “Is that a fucking alien?” I’m screaming. “You brought some fucking outer space—”

  But he cuts me off, spitting a wad of slime on my face. “I fished her out of the sea, asshole, down at Santa Monica pier, she got caught on my hook and she does things to you, she gets boys like you, but not like this, it’s up to you, your buddies wanting to put it there, but I told you that ain’t allowed! She’s the best, but you can’t touch her there, it’s so hard to trap her, and now, look what you done!”

  But you, you start screaming again and turning blue, so the pimp lets me go and goes running out of there in search of his escaped sea creature. That’s when I figure it’s time to call an ambulance.

  5

  So now I know it wasn’t the pimp shooting at you, but at that thing, that thing that you stuck your fingers up into.

  It was hell cleaning up the mess in the bathroom, getting rid of her skin.

  Funny thing about her skin and guts—they looked like they’d been spun with a fine silk, but they were all sticky.

  You were lucky to lose only your fingers.

  Think of what Alec lost, the night before he got married.

  Well, not that he ever did get married.

  He’s sort of a vegetable now, living off of machines at his folks’ house, and Luce got married to Billy Bucknell last year, that scheming son of a gun.

  You and me, we’re rooming together these days. My new nickname for you is Fingers.

  In the morning, when you bring me coffee, it’s kind of nice, just the two of us.

  We get by.

  I tried to do it with a girl again, after that, but what if she’s up inside there, what if that girl's just spun out of her silk, what if she’s waiting to take me to the Big O and rip my skin right off my back and end up like Alec Delbanco with wires and tubes all over him and his eyes all weird and sad, like he had it, that orgasm at the end of the universe, like maybe it was worth it, what she did to him, but I got to tell you, Fingers, I got to tell you:

  I’m never getting close to one of those things again as long as we both shall live.

  I keep seeing it in their faces, their eyes, the It that was the whore’s core, the creature in the flesh purse, and I feel like It’s coming for both of us, maybe to finish off the job. Alec, too, maybe even Billy Bucknell, and MoJo, and Pasco, and Ben Winter.

  Sometimes at night, when I can’t sleep, I hear Its sloppy wiping at the windows, and I pull the covers up over the two of us just to feel safe.

  You and me, we’ll take care of each other, we don’t have to go
out much, at least not till we get evicted, and then we can hide under the sewers or in the alleys.

  If we see her, if we still got legs, we can run, you and I.

  I will not abandon you to It, and I promise, for better or worse, good buddy.

  In sickness and in health.

  Only Connect

  1

  Watch the scenery awhile. It’ll take your mind off the pain. I’ll tell you all about him, if you’ll just listen. You must never breathe a word of this to anyone, but I can tell you’re an understanding sort. You won’t betray me.

  His name was Jim, and he worked at the train station taking tickets. He grew up in Hartford, but moved to Deerwich-On-Sparrow, called Deerwich by most, on the Connecticut coast—in his early twenties, the job had seemed good. He’d begun his career riding the rails taking tickets and cleaning the cars, but he’d moved up so that at twenty nine he could sit behind the glass and say, “Roundtrip to Boston leaves at 9:15. That’ll be $49.50.” His head often pounded when it rained, and he was prone to popping aspirin as if it were hard candy and just sucking on it until the headache went away. The sound of the train as it arrived in the station aggravated his condition, but Jim had begun to think of the headaches as normal. He’d long forgotten that they had never existed before he began working with the railroad.

  It was the train wreck that had begun his journey toward discovery. One night, fairly late for the train— which had been due in before midnight—there was an awful screeching, from some great distance along the track. The old timers knew what this meant, and they all ran out to see the spectacle. All except for Jim, who stayed back.

  He went to grab another bottle of aspirin from beneath his perch. He felt around, but all his fingers found was a completely empty bottle. He stood from his stool, stretching, yawning. Outside, he heard the scraping of metal—the train, he would later learn, went over an embankment, into the river, and some child somewhere would be blamed for playing quarters on the tracks—the shouts of onlookers as the train tossed like a restless sleeper from its bed—but Jim took the opportunity to walk across the street to the drugstore for aspirin.

  Inside the store, the fluorescent lights flickered. The old man who worked the pharmacy stood up on his platform behind the white counter, measuring his nostrums and philters. Jim walked the aisles, glancing briefly at the magazine covers and the greeting card displays. Finally, he turned the last aisle and saw the large bottles of aspirin.

  The fluorescent light above his head flickered in a dark way, as if it were just about to go out. As Jim reached for the aspirin bottle, he watched as his hand seemed to go through water and touch—not a bottle of aspirin, but a green tile on a bathroom wall. As the light flickered again, he sensed that he was no longer in a drugstore down near the train station in Old Deerwich, but in a small bathroom with lime green tiles and a large mirror above the toilet. He glanced in the mirror and for a moment thought he saw the aisles of the drugstore behind his reflection, but this faded, and all was green tile.

  He almost said something, as if someone stood near him, but he was most definitely alone.

  He turned about, facing a door. He pushed at the door, and it opened out onto a room that was all green and white and smelled of rubbing alcohol with an undersmell of urine. Flowers on the windowsill. The window looked out on a courtyard and garden, and there, as he went to look out it, were half a dozen or more patients. He knew they were patients by their bathrobes and by the nurses that pushed some of the wheelchairs, or stood beside a patient who used a walker or cane to get around. Across the courtyard, a silver metal building, probably precisely like the one he occupied at the moment.

  “Mrs. Earnshaw,” someone said at the door. British accent. He knew he was in a British hospital.

  Jim turned, sensing others’ presence in the room.

  The fluorescent lamp flickered a liquid green.

  Jim glanced up at the light overhead—a large brown water blotch spread like the profile of a face next to the ice tray lamps.

  “It’s terrible,” someone said as he glanced down again.

  He was in the drugstore, holding a bottle of aspirin in his hand. A woman looked up at him queerly.

  “I can’t imagine anyone survived.”

  Jim had to squint a moment to focus on his new environment. His head throbbed now. He calmed himself with the thought that the pain in his head had caused the brief and vivid hallucination of the hospital room.

  The little old woman, half bent over, reached for a box of arthritis pain reliever. “Did you see it?”

  “No,” Jim said. Then, “See what?”

  “The crash. I was in my car and driving down Water Street, and I heard it. It was terrible. It’s so unsafe.”

  “Yes.” Jim nodded.

  “Travel is always dangerous. To get there from here, one must risk one’s life these days,” she said, nodding as if they’d understood each other.

  Jim stood there a moment. Then, feverishly, he opened the jar of pills and grabbed three, tossing them down his throat.

  When he paid for the bottle, the pharmacist said, “Finally found what you wanted.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The aspirin. I saw you standing there reading labels for nearly half an hour.”

  “Half an hour?”

  “Bad headache, huh? You probably drink too much caffeine.”

  Jim walked out into the rain, feeling as if he still vibrated with his hallucination. He remembered his brief romance with peyote in college, and began to worry that this might be the flashback from that. He forgot about it for days—the hospital—and buried himself in work.

  The photographs in the local papers showed all angles of the train crash. It had fallen on its side, plunging seventy nine people into the river, all of whom died. Another two hundred and fifteen people were injured.

  What struck Jim most about the pictures of the fallen train was that it looked—if you squinted at the photos—like a sleeping person made entirely of metal, lying on a gray blanket.

  The flashes began a week or two later.

  The first time, when he tried to unlock his car, a small Honda Civic, and found that the lock was jammed. He twisted the key so hard that it broke off in his hand. Again, the headache kicked in, and he saw the aspirin bottle on the passenger seat inside the car. He felt angry suddenly—angry at the car for not opening, angry at his job for its dullness, angry at his parents for not really preparing him for the world in the way he’d wished.

  Then the flash—he thought it was heat lightning. In the same moment, he was in the hospital again. This time, he sat in a wheelchair in the courtyard as a light rain fell.

  “You all right, now?”

  “Yes,” he said, adapting quickly to his new environment. “It’s only a little rain.”

  “A little rain.” The pretty nurse beside him smiled. “Yes, that’s all it is. But all the others have gone inside.”

  He looked about the path through the garden with its iris and hibiscus, and saw that they were indeed alone. The silver of the buildings dulled in the gray rain, but he liked the fresh smell of it.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Nora,” she said, glancing up from her magazine. “Your reading’s going to get soaked,” he said, nodding.

  “I don’t mind. It’s only a little rain, after all.” She had a warm smile, and her eyes were a toasty brown. “Been feeling good today, then, have we?”

  “Very,” Jim said. “The pains are gone.”

  “A few days is what they said.”

  “Yes, and they were right,” Jim said.

  Then he bit his tongue slightly. “Where am I?”

  “Holyrood,” she said.

  “What town?”

  “Oh, you.” Nora laughed. “More tricks. Is this like that dream you told me about? The one where you’re a railroad man taking tickets in some little town in—where was it?”

  “Connecticut.”

  �
�That’s right Connecticut. The effects should’ve worn off by now,” Nora said, glancing at her watch. “You were only on the IV for two hours before ten. It’s nearly three.” Then she reached over, patting Jim’s hand. “All of this for just a little information. It does seem daft, doesn’t it? You holding up? No more weeping at midnight?”

  “No,” Jim said, feeling more lost and yet extremely comfortable. “Was it the aspirin?”

  “Or lack thereof,” Nora said. “Do you ever read these?” She held the magazine up. It was the London Telltale magazine. “All these royals and celebs knocking each other up. You’d think they’d have other things to occupy them, don’t you?”

  “What town are we in?” he asked.

  “Why,” Nora shook her head, glancing at the magazine, “just look at what the Prince is up to today.” Then, “What dear? Town? Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not supposed to tell too much. You know that more than anyone, Mrs. Earnshaw.”

  Jim felt a warm salty taste in the back of his throat. He glanced down at the hand that she had just finished patting. It was the hand of a middle-aged woman, and the hospital bracelet he wore read, “Catherine Earnshaw.”

  When the lightning flashed overhead and the rain began coming down in earnest, Nora said, “Oh, dear, let’s get the two of us in out of this nasty weather, shall we?” But then there was no Nora, and she faded, and all that was there was the Honda and the rain and his headache and a man who was not sure why he was going mad at the age of twenty-nine.