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

by Douglas Clegg

  But when he told the lines to one of the boys in Isthmus, the boy laughed and said he knew the Bible by heart and that wasn’t in it. But in the hide-covered Bible that Leona kept above the bread box, it was right there, in Genesis.

  The man on the ground began to stir, his hands twitching.

  “I’m gonna take him to the shed,” Theron said, pulling away from the warmth of his mother’s arms.

  4

  The man was heavy.

  Dragging him through the mud was made more difficult because of the way he was moving, for his legs kicked a bit, and Evan was groaning, but the blood had stopped from the wound on the top of his skull. Theron felt muscles in his arms and legs begin to plump with this effort. He was sore from riding, too, which didn’t help. He smelled the spice and meat from the stewpot and felt crazy hungry, but dinner would wait until after the important work.

  When he reached the shed, Evan looked up at him, although the glasses had fallen somewhere along the way. Theron could tell by the way he was squinting that he wasn’t seeing much right in front of his face.

  “It’s okay, mister,” the boy said, “don’t worry.”

  Evan, scrunching up his face, not quite sure where he was, coughed up some spit, which dribbled down the side of his chin. “Uh-awh,” was the noise he made.

  Theron rapped on the shed door, not wanting to let go of the man’s shoulder with his other hand.

  “Daddy,” he called, “open up, Daddy!”

  The door opened inward, and his father seemed to know what to do. He bent down on one knee, cradling Evan’s face between his hands. His father’s face was slick with greasy sweat, and there was blood around his eyes where he’d driven the fish hooks beneath the lids. He brought his face close to Evan’s and kissed the sputtering man on the lips.

  Theron knew then that he had done the right thing, for it would mean that Spring would come fast now, and that Daddy didn’t have to suffer through the hurting season alone. While he kissed the man, Daddy brought the oyster boat hook with its length of chain down beside their lips, and began pressing its rusty point into the man’s forehead to carve the X of their mark upon him so that the transfer of hurting could begin.

  5

  Laundry dried by three, with Leona taking it down, and laying it out across the basket.

  Milla was playing on the tire swing, head first through it, her small fingers clutching desperately at the black sides as she twirled around.

  Mama was napping, and the horses had calmed after the first wave of screeching.

  Theron sat out on the dock, twiddling his toes in the icy water, and soon, Daddy came and sat down beside him.

  “Give him some rest,” Daddy said, but the pain was gone from his eyes, for the first time since Winter Festival.

  “No more storms, I reckon,” Theron said, feeling the weight of his father’s arms around his shoulders. A bird was singing from one of the trees, and there were ducks bickering out on the river. Across the bay, the solitary Tangier, so close, so distant.

  “You may be right.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Boy?”

  “Why does it have to hurt?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This life. Why does there have to be a hurting season?”

  His father had no reply.

  That was what disturbed him about life, the very mystery of it, the deepness of its river, where on the surface all was visible, but beneath, something tugged and grabbed and drowned, and yet the current flowed, regardless.

  “Look there.” His father pointed off toward Tangier.

  Theron squinted but could see only the island and the emptiness beyond it.

  “The curvature of the earth,” his father said. “Why does it go in a circle? Who knows? It’s for God to decide. But we have our task here. We follow the rituals so the circle remains unbroken.”

  Theron was fourteen, a man now, he had been kissed, he had helped his father with the serious work of life, he had the mark, but he thought, looking at the eastern horizon, that one day he would go beyond Chite and Tangier and even Isthmus, and see the places that the Yankee had seen, in some yonder springtime.

  He would take what he knew of his task, of his mark, and show the world what it meant.

  I Am Infinite, I Contain Multitudes

  1

  First off, I’ll tell you, I saw both their files: Joe’s and the old man’s. I had to bribe a psych tech with all kinds of unpleasant favors, but I got to see their files.

  I want you to sit through my story, so I’ll only tell you half of what I found.

  It was about Joe. He had murdered, sure, but more than that, he had told his psychiatrist that he wanted only to help people.

  He wanted only to keep them from hurting themselves. He wanted to love.

  Remember this.

  It makes sense of everything I’ve been going through at Aurora.

  * * *

  Let me tell you something about Aurora, something that nobody seems to know but me: it is forsaken. Not just because of what you did to get there, or how haywire your brain is, but because it’s built over the old Aurora.

  Right underneath it, where we do the farming. I heard this from Steve Parkinson, right underneath it is the old Aurora. I saw pictures in an album they keep in Intake.

  It used to be a dusty wasteland.

  Yes, the old Aurora was smack dab underground. Back then they believed it was better, if you were like us, to never see the light of day, to be chained like animals and have your food shoved to you in a slot at the bottom of your door.

  Back then, they believed that nobody in the town outside the fence wanted to know that you were there. But that’s not why it’s forsaken.

  You will know soon enough.

  There was a town of Aurora once, too, but then it was bought out by Fort Salton, and ‘round about 1949 they did the first tests.

  I heard, from local legend, that there were fourteen men down there, just like in a bunker at the end of the war.

  They did the tests out at the mountain, but some people said that those men in Aurora, underground, got worse afterward.

  I heard a story from my bunkmate that one guy got zapped and fried right in front of an old-timer’s eyes. Like he was locked in on the wrong side of the microwave door.

  The old-timer, he’s still at Aurora; been there since he was nineteen, in ‘forty-six. Had a problem, they said, with people after the war.

  He was in the Pacific, and had come back more than shell-shocked.

  That’s all I ever knew about him, before I arrived. You can safely assume that he killed somebody or tried to kill himself or can’t live without wanting to kill somebody.

  It’s why we’re all here.

  He’s about as old as my father, but he doesn’t look it. Maybe Aurora’s kept him young.

  He was always over there, across the Yard. He knew everything about everyone. I knew something about him, too. Actually, we all pretty much knew it.

  He thought he was Father to us all. I don’t mean like my father, or the guy who knocked your mother up. I mean the Father, as in God The.

  In his mind, he created the very earth upon which we stood, his men, his sons.

  He could name each worm, each sowbug, each and every centipede that burrowed beneath the flagstone walk; the building was built of steel and concrete and had been erected upon the backs of laborers who had died within the walls of Aurora; the sky was anemic, the air dry and calm; he could glance in any direction at any given moment and know the inner workings of his men as we wandered the Yard, or know, in a heartbeat, no, the whisper of a heartbeat, where our next step would take us.

  There was no magic or deception to his knowledge.

  He was simply aware; call it, as he did, hyperawareness, from which had come his nickname, Hype.

  He was also criminally insane by a ruling of the courts of the state of California, as were most men in Aurora.

  I watched him some
times, standing there while we had our recreation time, or sitting upon the stoop to the infirmary, gazing across the sea of men.

  His army, he called them, his infantry: they would one day spread across the land like the fires of Armageddon.

  The week after Danny Boy got out was the first time he ever spoke to me.

  2

  “Hey,” he said, waving his hand. “Come on over here.”

  I glanced around. Me?

  I had been at Aurora for only four months, and I’d heard the legends of Hype. How he called on you only after watching you for years. How he could be silent for a year and then, in the span of a week, talk your head off.

  I couldn’t believe he was speaking to me. He nodded when he saw my confusion. I went over to him.

  “You’re the one,” he said, patting me on the back.

  You couldn’t help but look him in the eye, he was so magnetic, but all the guys had told me not to look him in the eye, not to stare straight at him at any point. They all warned me because they had failed at it. They had all been drawn to his presence at one time or another.

  He was pale white. He kept in the shack at all times. His hair was splotchy gray and white and longer than regulation. His eyes were nothing special: round and brown and maybe a little flecked with gold. (“He milks you with those eyes,” Joe had told me.) There were wrinkles on his face, just like with any old man, but his were thin and straight, as if he had not ever changed his expression since he’d been young.

  “I’m the one? The one,” I said, nodding as if I understood.

  I had a cigarette, left over from the previous week. I offered it to him.

  He took the cigarette, thrust it between his lips, and sucked on it.

  I glanced around for an orderly or psych tech, but we were alone together. I didn’t know how I was going to light the cigarette for him. They all called me Doer, which was short for Good-Doer, because I tended to light cigarettes when I could, shine shoes for one of the supervisors I’d ass-kiss, or sweep floors for the lady janitors.

  I did the good deeds because I’d always done them, all my life. Even when I murdered, I was respectful. But since there was no staff member around, I couldn’t get a light for the old man.

  Hype seemed content just to suck that cigarette, speaking through the side of his mouth.

  “Yeah, you know what it means, but you’re it. Danny Boy, he would’ve been it, but he had to pretend.”

  He drew the cigarette from his mouth and held it in his fingertips, “He is of a certain breed of sociopath, you must’ve recognized that. He had to perform for his doctor and the board. He studied Mitch over in B—the one who cries and moans all the time. Mitch with the tattoos?”

  I nodded.

  “He studied him for three years before perfecting his technique. Let me tell you about Danny Boy. He was bom in Barstow, which may just doom a man from the start. He began his career by murdering a classmate in second grade. It was a simple thing to do, for they played out in the desert often, and it was not unusual for children to go missing out there. He managed to get that murder blamed on a local sad little man. Later, dropping out of high school, he murdered a teacher, and then, when he killed three women in Laguna, he got caught. The boy could not cry. It was not in him to understand why anyone made a fuss at all over murder. It was as natural to him as is breathing to you.”

  He paused, and drew something from his breast pocket. He flicked his lighter up and lit the cigarette. Although we weren’t supposed to have lighters, it didn’t surprise me too much that Hype had one.

  As an old-timer he had special privileges, and as something of a seer, he was respected by the staff as well as by his men.

  It’s strange to think that I was suitably impressed by this, his having a lighter, but I was. It might as well have been a gold brick, or a gun.

  He continued, “Danny Boy is going to move in with one of the women who work in the cafeteria. She’s never had a lover, and certainly never dreamed of having one as handsome as Danny Boy. Within six weeks, he will kill her and keep her skin for a souvenir. Danny Boy would’ve been it, but he wasn’t a genuine person. You are. You know that, don’t you?”

  “What, I ‘cry,’ so that makes me real?”

  He shook his head, puffing away, trying to suppress a laugh.

  “No. But I know about you, kid. You shouldn’t even be here, only you come from a rich family who bought the best lawyer in L.A. I assume that in Court Ninety, he argued for your insanity and you played along ‘cause you thought it would go easier for you in Aurora or Atascadero than in Chino or Chuckawalla. Tell me I’m wrong. No? How long you been here?”

  “If you’re so smart, you already know.”

  “Sixteen weeks already.” He grinned, shaking his head. “Sixteen weeks of waking up in a cold sweat with Joe leaning over your bed. Sixteen weeks of playing baseball with men who would be happy to bash in your head just for the pleasure of it. Sixteen weeks hearing the screams, knowing about Cap and Eddie, knowing about how all they want is the taste of human flesh one more time before they die. And you, in their midst.”

  He seemed to be enjoying his own speech. “You’re not a sociopath, son, you’re just someone who happened to kill some people and now you wish you hadn’t, and maybe you wished you were in Chino getting bludgeoned and raped at night, but at least not having to deal with this zoo.”

  The bell rang.

  I saw Trish, the rec counselor, wave to us from over at the baseball diamond. She was pretty, and we all wanted her and we were all protective of her, too, even down to the last sociopath.

  “Looks like it’s time for phys ed,” Hype said. “She’s a fine piece of work, that one. Women are good for men. Don’t you think? Men can be good, too, sometimes, I guess. You’d know about that, I suppose.”

  “What am I ‘it’ for?” I asked, ignoring the implication of his comment.

  He dropped the cigarette in the dust. “You’re the one who’s getting out.”

  3

  I thought about what the old-timer’d said all day.

  In the late afternoon, I sat beside Joe on the leather chairs in the TV room after we got shrunk by our shrinks.

  I said, “I don’t get it. If Danny Boy wasn’t it, and ‘it’ means you get out, why the hell am I it?”

  Joe shrugged. “Maybe he means ‘you’re next.’ That old guy knows a shitload. He’s God.”

  Joe had spent his life in the system.

  First, at Juvy, then at Boys’ Camp in Chino, then Chino, and finally some judge figured out that you don’t systematically kill everyone from your old neighborhood unless you’re not quite right in the head. But Joe was a good egg behind the Aurora fence.

  He needed the system and the walls and the three hots and a cot just to stay on track.

  Maybe if he’d been in some strict religion or in the army, with all those rules, he never would’ve murdered anybody. He needed rules badly, and Aurora had plenty for him. He had always been gentle and decent with me, and was possibly my only friend at Aurora.

  I nudged him with my elbow. “Why would I be it?”

  “Maybe he’s gonna break you,” Joe whispered, checking the old lady at the desk to make sure she couldn’t hear him. “I heard he broke another guy out ten years ago, through the underground. That old man’s got a way to do it, if you go down in that rat nest far enough. I heard,” Joe grabbed my hand in his, his face inches from mine, “he knows where the way out is, and he only tells it if he thinks your destiny’s aligned with the universe.”

  I almost laughed at Joe’s seriousness. I drew back from him. “You got to be kidding.”

  Joe blinked. He didn’t like being made fun of.

  “Believe what you want. All’s I know is the old nan thinks you’re it. Can’t argue with that.”

  And then Joe kissed me gently, as he always did, or tried to do, when no one was looking, and I responded in kind.

  It was the closest thing to human warmth we had
in that place.

  I pulled away from him when a psych tech strolled in with one of the shrinks.

  4

  I wanted to believe that Hype could break me out of Aurora.

  I spent the rest of the day and most of the evening fantasizing about getting out, about walking out on the grass and dirt beyond the fence. Of getting on a bus and going up north where my brother lived.

  From there I would go up to Canada, maybe Alaska, and get lost somewhere in the wilderness where they wouldn’t come hunting for me.

  It was a dream I’d had since entering Aurora. A futile and useless dream, but I nurtured it day by day, hour by hour.

  I could close my eyes and suddenly be transported to a glassy river, surrounded by mountains of pure white, and air so fresh and cold it could stop your lungs; an eagle would scream as it dropped from the sky to grab its prey.

  But my eyes opened; the dream was gone.

  In its place, the dull green of the walls, the smell of alcohol and urine, the sounds of Cap and Eddie screeching from their restraints two doors down, the small slit of window with the bright lights of the Yard on all night.

  Only Joe kept me warm at night, and the smell of his hair as he scrunched in bed, snoring lightly beside me, kept alive any spirit that threatened to die inside me.

  I had never been interested in men on the Outside, but in Aurora, it had never seemed homosexual between us.

  It was survival.

  When you are in that kind of environment, you seek warmth and human affection if you are at all sane. Even if sanity is just a frayed thread.