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

by Douglas Clegg

  He took the radio, too, shut it off, finally, and dropped it in, kicked in the wormy lemon and some fish heads, and covered the whole mess up.

  Then he went into the kitchen, sat at the small glass table, and actually missed the sound of talk radio for once in his life. He went and turned on the little radio he’d bought for Patsy, the one she’d never used. He turned it to the talk radio station and kept the volume up.

  “I just loved that last call—didn’t you?” the Radio Lady said. “It’s a day brightener to hear something like that in these times. Imagine, rescuing a cat and someone’s grandmother in the same hour. Gosh, sometimes life is difficult, but it’s always fascinating, isn’t it?”

  Cal looked at the telephone hanging from the wall.

  At the radio.

  Wonder if Patsy ever called in.

  She wasn’t one for discussing her life.

  Miss her, even so.

  The Radio Lady announced the number to call in, and Cal went and dialed it.

  After seven rings, a man picked up, and Cal hung up quickly.

  Then he dialed again, got the man who mentioned he was screening calls, and asked Cal what his problem was.

  “It’s about my wife and kids. I have trouble, sometimes, taking care of them.”

  The man on the phone told him he’d be on in about two minutes.

  Two minutes turned to four, when the Radio Lady came on. Cal had to turn the radio down to hear her. “What can I help you with?”

  “Well,” he said, then thought he might hang up.

  “Don’t be shy,” she said.

  “I’ve been listening to you for a long time. Years.”

  “Well, I’ve been here four years so far, so thanks for the compliment.”

  “Hmm. I thought it was longer. Well, it’s about my wife and my kids.”

  “Is it good or bad?”

  “Neither. Just about life. What I’ve learned. I’m sixty-three, you know.”

  “Congratulations. Hey, isn’t it great that you people still call in?”

  “My wife, I miss her, and the kids. Most of the kids.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Nine.”

  “Holy cow, nine kids. And you raised them all?”

  “I cared for each and every last one of them to the best of my ability.”

  “Well, you deserve a pat on the back for that. These days, too many people are abandoning their children.”

  “That’s right,” Cal said, “most of my kids were like that. Foster kids. But my wife and I took them in. Loved them. Gave them a home. And I fulfilled my obligation to them, too.”

  “I wish I could meet a man like you,” the Radio Lady said. “I’ll bet a lot of women in my audience would. So what are you calling about, you catch?”

  Cal paused. “I’m tired of burying them. I miss them.”

  The Radio Lady said nothing.

  Cal said, “Oh, they live on, in things, in day-to-day objects, when I wash sometimes, I can smell their skin. Fresh. So fresh, the way only a child can smell.”

  The Radio Lady said nothing.

  And then Cal realized why.

  She was crying. “Oh, you poor wonderful man. God bless you, God bless you.”

  “Thank you,” Cal said, and hung up.

  He went and turned off the radio. He couldn’t cry anymore. Except for taking care of Vix, he had fulfilled his obligations. He just couldn’t take care of Vix, not yet.

  In the morning, the roses needed hosing down because he had been hoping it would rain and had left them dry for days. He washed with the sunken-eyed boy soap, and remembered the tight little curl to the child’s fingers (although he couldn’t for the life of him remember names much anymore). Then he went outside, turned the hose on, and sprayed down Vix while he flooded the roses. Ants came out from the soaked earth, and crawled up the garden wall. Fat Broad emerged in her yard wearing a muumuu and barbed-wire curlers with her Yorkshire terrier, getting the ball of stringy fur to yap, yap. Before he could take cover, she’d spotted him and called out, “Your wife—is she all right?”

  Cal pretended not to hear.

  She thinks I’m ancient, so being deaf isn’t much of a stretch.

  Fat Broad and her Yorkie toddled over to the wall, and he smiled and then dropped the smile.

  She said, “I don’t hear the radio. The talk shows.”

  “Radio broke. Wife won’t listen to any other radio. She’s a peculiar woman. Thirty-five years of marriage.”

  “I’m not surprised it broke. Good heavens, she played it night and day. You must be happy it broke.”

  He scrunched up his face angrily. “Not at all, woman. I was used to it.”

  “Well, it’s nice to have the quiet so I can hear my wind chimes.”

  “Doesn’t get too windy,” Cal said, stepping as far from the wall as he could without getting too muddy in the puddles he’d created with the garden hose. Vix put his forepaws up on the wall and began barking at Fat Broad and her Yorkie, so the neighbor retreated.

  He went and checked the bougainvillea, which hadn’t been growing well this year, although the trumpet vine was in full bloom, with hummingbirds darting in and out of its blossoms.

  I take care of my own. My family, my garden.

  My obligations.

  Oh, but he missed them, their kisses, their hands, their love.

  Even his mother, with that friendship of blood that transcended all others.

  It’s over, he thought. It’s done.

  Someone, in another yard, somewhere, he thought, just beyond Fat Broad’s, turned up their radio loud as if to fill the void left by Patsy’s blaster.

  He could faintly hear the Radio Lady say, “You’re on the air, caller? You’re on the air.” A child’s voice said, “Hi… um… I don’t know if I’m s’posed to call you … but I listen to you all the time.”

  The Radio Lady said something, although Cal couldn’t quite hear it.

  The boy said, “I ain’t—I mean, I guess, I haven’t ever called in. Not like this.”

  Another voice, a girl’s said, “Hello? Wow. This is cool. Hello? Is someone there?”

  “You’re talking with the Radio Lady,” the other voice said, and although faint, Cal recognized it. It was Patsy.

  He went and called Fat Broad back over to the wall. She came over, shuffling like she was all bound up inside that oversized dress, and curled up her nose at him like he stank.

  “You hear that?” he asked her.

  “What?”

  “Listen.” He held a finger to his lips.

  Fat Broad was silent for a moment, cocking her head to the side like she was trying to roll that last marble right out from her eardrum.

  Another boy, about six, said, “I scared.”

  The girl, the pig-tailly girl, Cal was sure, said, “Don’t be scared. We’re all taken care of. Aren’t we?”

  Fat Broad interrupted Cal’s listening. “I don’t hear nothing. Is it a siren or something? If you tell me what I’m listening for, maybe I can hear it.”

  Cal was angry that she was talking so much while the talk radio was going on. “No,” he said. “I won’t tell you. If you don’t hear it, I won’t.”

  “I hear things sometimes,” Fat Broad said, nodding. “Maybe you’re hearing a ghost.”

  Cal looked at her sharply. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I don’t mean that kind, I mean like on TV when you have a ghost image. Or now that your wife’s radio broke, you’re so used to hearing it that you still think it’s playing.” But the woman saw that Cal was paying no attention to her, so she tramped across her own pansy bed to reprimand her son for leaving his bicycle out in the driveway.

  Cal listened, and noticed that Vix, covered with mud in the garden, seemed to be listening, too.

  He couldn’t fall asleep. He went to Patsy’s room and rocked back and forth in the chair, smelling her smell. He pulled the curtains aside and looked out at the backyard. The
radio had gotten louder, just a bit, but still not to the volume it had been up to when Patsy had been around. He listened to each of his nine children talk with their mother, and he listened to her words of comfort, but he was still very sad.

  At least I have one comfort, he thought, at least I can hear them.

  And then, around three a.m., just as he was nodding off, he heard a voice on the radio that did not belong to any of his children, nor to his wife.

  It was a woman with such an impediment to her speech, it sounded like a toad was sitting beneath her tongue. “Ca-hoo, Ca-hoo, heh-up mee, Ca-hoo.”

  He got out of the rocker and went to the window. He rolled the side windows open wider.

  “Mother?” he asked, peering out into the dark.

  “Cay-uh, cay-uh,” she said, and then was lost in the static of the radio.

  She had said “care,” he was sure.

  Even though she wasn’t buried in the yard, but in a cemetery twenty-five miles away, she had traveled through the ground waves, through the sewage pipes of the dead, to speak to him.

  He knew why her voice was strange, because of what he’d had to do to her mouth.

  He wished now he hadn’t. He would like to understand her better, for she was a person of enormous wisdom.

  He watched the darkness, listening for her voice again on the radio, but all was silence.

  He drank several shots of whiskey, not his style at all, and slept late. He dreamed of the sound of machines roaring and dogs barking, and awoke at nine-thirty when someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  He smelled mud and flowers, and looked into the empty eyes of his mother, her face dripping with mud and sewage. She opened her scarred mouth, the one that had burned so well when he stretched the electric cord across her lips, between her teeth, and switched on the juice. The scars took the form of a star pattern, and when she parted her lips, dry leaves and dead grass dropped out.

  She took his hand and led him to the wood shop, where the sound of talk radio drowned out the other sounds, the sounds of the care one human being shows for another.

  The Hurting Season

  1

  The wind had a taste to it.

  Leona hung out the wash on the rope strung between the willow and the sapling, down by the river, with the smell of shad, dead on the water’s surface from running, and the clean of soap powder and bleach; the Sack was strung up and bounced with each windblow; and Mama was boiling meat in back before the flies would be up to bother her; and it was a rough wind, a March wind even in late April, coming ahead of a storm.

  The river was high, threatening flooding if the storms kept up, which they were wont to do, but Theron had done all the clearing, and the chairs and table from the levee were already in the springhouse, the old springhouse that no longer flooded, and he was almost to the shed now, because the horses were kicking at the stall.

  The sky was its own secret blue, unnatural, with blue clouds and blue winds and blue sun, all signaling a squall coming down from off-island.

  Theron could see the oyster boats rocking across the bay, two miles from the house, just like mosquito larvae wriggling, and he wondered how it was on Tangier, and what about that girl he met at Winter Festival—he was fourteen, and she was nearly seventeen, but he had seen it in her eyes, those flatland island dull eyes, a flicker of what could only have been fire when she had let him touch her the way Daddy touched Mama.

  The horses, prophesying storm, kicked the wood, and the shed trembled.

  Mama cried out at the noise, surprised, but Leona, in her earthly wisdom, just kept hanging sheets and shirts as if the impending storm mattered not one whit, for it would come and go quickly, a final rinse for the laundry. Theron kept buttoning his shirt; the screen door banged with the wind; the blue sky turned indigo and then gray, with flashes of lightning between. First drops of rain, sweet and cold.

  He ran like a horse himself, back to the shed, for he loved the horses and could not bear their distress. The ground was damp but not muddy, and he galloped across it barefoot in spite of the biting chill. He could feel the rain spitting at his back as he got there, to the door, which he drew back. The smells of the horses, the manure, the cats, too, for they roamed among the piles and hay for mice and snakes, strong but not unbearable.

  His father was there, at the mast that centered the shed, around which the horses were knocking and frenzied. The mast had a great length of chain hanging from it, and the leather strops of discipline, too, wrapped about its middle. Carved notches marked the days of the season, from Winter Festival to May Day, the days when Daddy did his penance, the hours of his atonement for a sin long ago forgotten. His father wore no shirt; his chest was covered with kudzu hair that sprawled across his shoulders and connected to his belly like inflamed moss; trousers were caked in filth; boots, too, with blood near the toes for they were tight and he would wear them all during the hurting season.

  “You got Naomi upset,” Theron said, not meaning to scold, but it was hard to avoid. Naomi was not yet a year, and needed gentleness; the old horse, her sire, Moses, was used to the season, the frantic pain that Daddy put himself through, but Naomi was barely more than a foal.

  His father’s eyes were not even upon him, but gazing through him, beyond him, to some richer meaning, listening to the words, but decoding them. The man’s face was yellow jaundice, and the hunger was showing in the sunken cheeks; the thin blond hair, cut short like a monk’s, Theron thought, was slick and shiny, the sweat, pearls of mania. “That’s not good,” his father said, “you take her out, then, take her out, boy.”

  Theron nodded, glad, and ran around the mast to grab Naomi’s bit. He tugged at her, but her eyes were still wild. Theron looked around the shed. “It’s the chain, Daddy,” he said, for he knew that a horse, unless tempered to a rope, would take fright at anything that resembled one; the silver chain swung lightly about the thick wood. On its end was a rusty hook, from one of the oyster trawlers that had dry-docked over in Tangier, and there was blood on it. He registered this for a moment, wondering what his father did with the hook that drew blood from him. It was frightening, sometimes, the hurting season, at least to him; he was sure it frightened Mama, too, for she was moody during those months; Leona, older than Daddy or Mama, didn’t seem to notice or care; and Milla, being so young, accepted it the way Theron had up until he’d become aware that it was only his daddy who did it, that when he went to Tangier, nobody else had a mast or the chain and strops, nobody else had a daddy that slept with the horses from February to May.

  The boy brought the horse out of the shed, into the slapping rain; the smell of bleach and soap stronger, and he looked up to see the wash swimming in the wind, but their stays holding tight to the rope; Naomi tugged away from him, but he kept his grip, watching for the horse’s teeth. He spoke to her, calmly, and led her over to the springhouse. It would be small for the horse, but she’d be safe and fairly dry, and the darkness of it would calm her.

  He tied her to the upturned patio chair and wiped at her forelock and nose with the red bandanna the girl over at the Festival had given him, smoothing down the horse’s mane and then her withers to settle her.

  The horse had the thick hair of the island horses—it was said that they could be traced back to the Spanish ships wrecking off the islands, and his father had told him that the harsh winters in the wild had developed the breed to the point of hardiness and hairiness. Something Theron had learned in school, too, a phrase, “survival of the fittest.” That had been the island horses, for they swam every spring around the time of May Day from Tangier over to Chite Island, which was here. Centuries of horses coming to mate on Chite in the spring, and to swim back in October when winter came too harsh here first.

  Chite was a small island, although the river that ran through it connected it through the wetlands to the Carolina Isthmus, so it had not been a real island since sometime long before Theron was born. Old Moses, he had been a Chiter, and his dam, a wild hor
se that had never been tamed on Tangier, had died and left the one foal, Naomi. The horse had a bad fetlock, the back left, and she raised it a little, so he squatted down beside her and massaged it. The wind through the cracks in the old gray wood bit around his ears, but the whistling sound it made seemed to steady his horse. “Good girl,” he said, and wrapped the bandanna around his neck the way the girl had. It smelled of horse now, and perfume, and fish, as all things on Tangier smelled of fish.

  Theron waited out the storm in the springhouse, and when it was over, in just a few minutes, he led the horse out to the rockpile road that spanned the wetlands to the west of the house, and took her at a canter.

  The horse slowed toward the middle of the rock pile, for it became less smooth here, and there were small gaps in the rocks. The sky cleared, but the sun was still not up in the middle of it, but back in the west, over Tangier. A red-winged blackbird flew up and out from the mesh of yellow reeds and dive-bombed at Theron’s hair.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Didn’t do nothin’ to you!”

  He flapped his hands at the descending bird, and dug his heels into Naomi’s side until she galloped some more. His butt was sore from the pounding, for he didn’t have his seat yet, at least not with Naomi, for she was an erratic bounder, but he rose fell rose fell with her, his leg muscles feeling stronger, and he tried to pretend that he and the horse were one animal, just like his daddy had taught him.

  The bird left him alone once he was out of its territory, and he guided Naomi down to some fresh water for a drink. He saw their reflection, the horse’s long neck, its thick shaggy mane hanging down, and then his own face in the cold brown water—the red bandanna tied smartly just under his chin, and some whiskers on his upper lip. He smiled at himself; she had liked him, that older girl in Tangier, the pretty one. She was brown eyed just like everybody else on the islands, and brown hair, and freckles. Her hands were like little brushes on his, for they scratched and tingled and smooth when she had slid them across his palms.