A Book of Horrors Read online

  Tuboise: a seventeen-house community – just forty-one folks in what pretty much amounts to a dormitory – sitting astride Route 1 and barely a long spit on the coast-side of I-95, so close to the Atlantic you can sometimes see the ocean’s white-caps and taste the salt on the sea breeze.

  But they get rain here, and then some.

  Hugh Ritter looked across at his wife, Angie, and gently rubbed her knee, the only part of her – aside from her forehead – that was exposed.

  ‘Almost there, baby,’ he said, his voice gentle. ‘Almost home.’

  Angie stretched and yawned, pulled her coat tighter as she emerged from beneath it and peered out the window.

  ‘Whoa!’ Hugh said. ‘What’s this?’

  Just as they made to turn right, the familiar figure of Sheriff’s Deputy Maude Angstrom tugged a ROAD CLOSED sawhorse into place.

  Hugh rolled to a halt just in front of the sawhorse and the slickered deputy scooted around to his window.

  ‘Hey, Maude,’ Hugh said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Hey, Hugh. Hey, Angie.’

  ‘Hey yourself, Maudie. You aiming to Trick or Treat us?’ Angie leaned so far over in order that she could see Maude Angstrom’s expression that she was almost face down on her husband’s lap and she felt her cheeks redden momentarily.

  ‘I wish,’ the deputy said, shouting above the rain and the wind as she pulled her slicker tighter around her neck. ‘Road ahead’s getting pretty washed out and we’re gonna end up with vehicles in the ditch. Frank says to turn folks back here. I’m just getting myself set up. Only thing you can do is turn on back and make a left up to Wheeler’s Point. Park your vehicle there and walk on across Archie Goodlowe’s field into town.’

  ‘Shoot!’ Hugh shouted back at her. ‘We got a trunk full of bags, Maude … all our clothes … other stuff.’

  ‘You been away someplace, Hugh?’

  Hugh nodded. ‘Been staying with Angie’s sister Nan and her boy other side of Boston. I just do not relish the idea of having to schlep a mile and then some carrying them all. There no way you can let us on through and put the sawhorses up when we’re on our way?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Hugh. Frank was pretty firm about this.’ Maude shrugged and looked first from Hugh to Angie and then back to Hugh. She smiled and, just for a moment, Hugh wished she hadn’t. The smile was more of a rictus grin, the bottom lip pulling back and exposing teeth discoloured at the base and gums that were bruised a deep blue.

  ‘We’d sure ’preciate that, Maudie,’ Angie added for good measure.

  ‘Oh, what the hell,’ Maude Angstrom said, hitching up her pants through her slicker before wiping her face with her gloved hand. ‘I’d kind of figured I was done, but two more won’t hurt.’ She hefted the sawhorses back out of the way. ‘You go on – ain’t like you’re gonna be going anyplace once you get there.’ She chuckled at that with a wheezy cough. ‘Mind you drive careful, now,’ she shouted as Hugh closed his window.

  ‘We won’t say anything to Frank if we see him,’ Hugh shouted.

  ‘Oh, he’ll already know,’ Maude Angstrom shouted after them. ‘But I’ll have to mention it to him anyways.’

  When they were past Maude’s cruiser, Hugh said, ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘What’s odd? Seems sensible to me. You go easy with that right foot of yours – we end up in a gully and Frank’ll go ape-shit at us … and at Maudie for lettin’ us through.’

  ‘No, not that,’ Hugh said, staring intently at his mirror. ‘Where’s she gone?’

  Without answering, Angie pulled down her mirror. Hugh was right. The deputy had disappeared. ‘Probably ducked into her cruiser, telling Frank she let us through.’ Angie turned around in her seat. ‘Come on, sweetie – when did she ever do anything without an okay from Frank?’ And then, more to herself than to her husband, ‘She can’t have disappeared.’

  Hugh slowed right down. ‘Well, she’s sure as hell not there.’ He rolled to a stop and shifted into PARK. When he got out of the car and looked back, Hugh could see the sawhorses – all lined up like little soldiers, neat as all get-out – and there was Maude’s cruiser. But no Maude.

  Behind him, the car was beep-beeping.

  ‘Push the door to, sweetie, we’re gonna get washed out.’

  Hugh closed the door and started back.

  Angie shouted, ‘Leave it be, sweetie. Maybe she went to the bathroom.’

  ‘You mean for a pee, honey. If you mean she’s taking a pee then say so.’ But yeah, that could be it. She’d looked kind of anxious, now that he thought about it. And the last thing she would want him to do was stroll up while she had her pants down. He turned back and jogged to the car.

  A few seconds later they were on their way … though until they rounded the bend, Hugh couldn’t stop staring at the mirror, half-expecting something – Maude Angstrom’s cruiser, for a high-falutin’ example – suddenly appearing on their tail.

  II

  As they pulled onto Main Street, Angie started sniggering.

  ‘What?’ Hugh slowed up to pass a Lincoln that someone had abandoned by the side of the road – in fact, checking his mirror, Hugh saw that the nearside front wheel was on the kerb. Even worse, the car had clearly continued forward and impacted on the wall of the old Maritime Museum. ‘God, some people,’ he said.

  ‘Old Mrs Slater must have one of her daughters visiting.’

  ‘And that’s funny?’

  The woman on the radio was speaking in a thick Maine accent, talking about ghosts as part of a Halloween special. Hugh reached over and turned it off.

  ‘Well, she was – the daughter, not Mrs Slater – was standing almost glued up against the window—’ Angie changed her voice to that of someone clearly distressed: ‘Help, let me out of here for God’s sake!’

  Hugh smiled. Across the street, on his right, the school bus was parked at the bus-stop, no driver to be seen anywhere.

  ‘But then, when I looked back – I glanced away for like, a second – she’d gone. And I reckon she just ducked down when she saw me looking at her.’

  Hugh had been about to remark that the street was remarkably quiet for the rush-hour, even though the rush-hour in Tuboise was neither fast-moving nor anywhere near as long as sixty minutes. The plain fact was there was nobody to be seen anywhere. But then, they were experiencing what, for the most part, was a rainstorm of almost Biblical proportions.

  He sneaked a glance at the large windows of Maxell’s Drugstore as they went by and was surprised to see it not only bereft of customers but also there was no sign of old Pop Maxell, generally to be seen on the front boards in that old wicker chair no matter what the weather.

  Hugh leaned forward and looked up at the sky through the windshield. No witches to be seen anywhere, and barely an hour to go before Tricks and Treats would be the order of the day, with winter standing just around the corner of the curtains waiting for its cue to take to the stage.

  He looked back at the road.

  ‘Some woman staring out from the house next to Jerry’s place.’

  ‘The one that’s been for sale for ages?’ He sensed his wife nodding. ‘Huh, I thought that place was empty.’

  Well, what are poltergeists? the woman on the radio asked her studio guest, appropriately a writer of supernatural fiction.

  Hugh looked down at the radio, frowning. ‘I thought I’d turned that off?’ he muttered.

  Angie had turned around to keep watching. ‘So did I,’ she said. ‘Thought it was empty, I mean.’ Then she turned back and faced forward just in time for them to pull into their driveway.

  ‘Well, I must say that I’m glad that’s over,’ Hugh declared. He turned off the engine and popped the CD/radio player cover from its mounting.

  ‘Hugh—’ Angie reached over and placed a hand on her husband’s.

  He looked up just in time to stare right into the face of Eleanor Ferguson, pressed up against the glass right next to his head. ‘Jesus, Ellie, what—’

/>   ‘Hugh? Angie? Is it you?’

  Hugh popped his belt-clasp and opened the door. Eleanor stepped back, her hands up to the neck of her sweater, pulling it tight around her.

  ‘Ellie, are you—?’

  ‘They’re here, Hugh,’ she said, a sob stifled in her throat and quickly swallowed away. She turned her head and looked across the road. Joe McHendricks was standing in his drive, hoe in his hand, Red Sox ball cap pushed up and back off his forehead, sleeves turned up at the cuffs. He was watching them. Hugh gave a single wave and turned back to Ellie, but she had moved completely away and was now heading up the grassy roadside towards the beach, walking backwards, still pulling at her sweater and shaking her head, eyes as wide as saucers, her concentration shifting between Hugh and Angie and the straight-backed figure of Joe McHendricks. She waggled an index finger at Hugh admonishing – threatening? warning? – him.

  Across the road, Mr McHendricks had stepped away from his driveway and was moving after the woman, his steps confident but unhurried, the hoe hanging in his hand like a tribesman’s spear.

  ‘Leave her be, sweetie,’ Angie whispered.

  ‘All of ’em!’ Eleanor shouted, her voice dwindling now in the wind. ‘They’re all here.’

  It was Halloween, a Saturday afternoon during what was already shaping up to be the wettest winter in Maine since 1973, when the Atlantic broke the barriers down at Sunny Hollow and came on up the Coast Road, just stopping short of Griggs’ Mall. The rain was coming down near on horizontal now and Hugh and Angie were soaked … soaked but unable to move. The sky was darkening all around them, but cold and wet as he was, Hugh didn’t feel all that comfortable going inside and leaving the old woman out there on the road.

  ‘Mr McHendricks will get her,’ shouted Angie, who had already got out of the car and was heading for the front door.

  ‘What the hell’s he doing,’ Hugh muttered, ‘gardening in the goddam rain?’

  Watching the back of the striding figure of the man across the street, Hugh thought that was about right – McHendricks would get her. The idea of that just didn’t fill him with optimism.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ Angie said. She turned around on the step and looked up at the sky.

  Hugh moved to one side to look down the street just in time to see Mr McHendricks give a single wave and then disappear down the driveway of the old lumber mill road that led towards the pond. He shook his head and looked back at McHendricks’s house.

  ‘Hey, hold on there a—’

  ‘What is it?’

  Hugh pointed at the house. ‘I just … Oh, he’s gone now.’

  ‘Who is? Hugh, can you get the damn key?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, sorry.’ He fumbled and pulled out the key. He unlocked the door. ‘I thought I’d just seen McHendricks, that’s all. In his house.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem so strange to me. It’s his house, after all.’ Angie pushed open the door – which set off the preliminary alarm – and walked across to the control panel to punch in the reset code.

  ‘Hey,’ Hugh said suddenly, ‘the bedroom.’

  ‘Damn!’ Angie shielded her eyes to look up. ‘Did I leave the window open again?’ She came back outside and looked up to see the window firmly closed. She looked around at Hugh. ‘This Trick or Treat or something?’

  ‘It’s something,’ he said. ‘I thought I saw someone at the window.’ Hugh turned around and looked across at the McHendricks house. ‘His place, too. McHendricks. Nobody there now,’ he said.

  ‘Trick of the light,’ Angie said.

  ‘Mmm. Maybe.’

  ‘And where’s Mr McHendricks?’

  ‘He went after Ellie Ferguson.’

  ‘So he couldn’t be in his house?’

  ‘Mmm. Maybe.’

  ‘You know any other words?’

  Hugh turned to her and his face broke into a grin. ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Maybe.’ And that was when Angie slapped his arm.

  Hugh feigned pain and then looked down the street to the road to the lumber mill and then back at their own house.

  ‘You want to cue me in on what’s going on here?’

  Hugh shrugged. ‘Must just have been the rain and shadows is all.’

  Angie looked up at the bedroom window. ‘You think maybe we should call someone?’

  Hugh opened the trunk and lifted out their two suitcases. ‘Call someone?’ He slammed it, pressed the automatic lock button on the key remote and ducked over beside his wife, who was straining her neck to see into the upstairs bedroom. ‘Like who?’

  ‘Whom!’

  Hugh sighed. ‘Like whom?’

  ‘I was thinking maybe the Sheriff. I’m kind of scared to go in.’

  Hugh shook his head. ‘You just went in and turned off the alarm.’

  Angie shrugged. ‘Yes, well, you know what I mean.’

  And he did. If the alarm wasn’t picking up the presence of an intruder … ‘The alarm would’ve gone off if someone had broken in,’ he said, more for his own benefit than his wife’s. ‘Must have been the rain.’

  Angie nodded. ‘Yeah. And you’re tired.’ She put her head on one side and blinked at him. ‘You are tired, aren’t you, sweetie?’

  ‘Well, it’s a bit of a drive. Driving through Boston and all.’

  ‘How’s about I make you a coffee?’

  ‘You bet,’ Hugh said. ‘But first I’m going to change my pants – I’m soaked … just from walking from the car.’

  ‘Well, yes, and wandering around to see if Maude Angstrom was taking a pee and, just now, standing there in the downpour talking to Ellie,’ Angie added. ‘What did she mean – “they’re all here”?’

  Hugh shrugged.

  ‘Who was she talking about?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Angie settled herself onto one of the counter-seats and started rubbing her hair with a towel. ‘She didn’t seem happy about it, that’s for sure.’

  The doorbell sounded hollow and Angie wasn’t sure whether that was what startled her – the fact that it sounded as though the entire house was empty and—

  listening to her, whispering about her, watching every move she …

  —lonely, or wondering who was standing out there in the rain ringing their doorbell.

  ‘Coming!’ she shouted.

  ‘What?’ Hugh shouted from upstairs.

  ‘Someone at the door,’ Angie shouted back as she pulled it open.

  ‘Yes, something at the door,’ Frank Gozinsky said in an affected snarl. He removed his hat and smiled. ‘You wanted me?’

  ‘Did we?’

  ‘Maude said.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Who is it, honey?’

  Frank shifted his attention to the staircase and watched Hugh slowly appear, buttoning his shirt.

  ‘Hey, Frank.’

  Frank nodded – ‘Hugh …’ – blinked once and glanced sideways at Angie.

  ‘Everything okay?’

  ‘Frank says he thought we wanted him, sweetie. Apparently Maude told him.’

  ‘Do we? Want him, I mean? What did Maude say exactly?’

  ‘I just got it wrong. No big deal.’

  ‘Give her a call,’ Angie said. ‘Could be she meant someone else.’

  They waited for Frank to call her on the cell, but he just stood there.

  ‘Hey, no problem.’ Frank turned his hat around in his hands. ‘Looks like I got the wrong end of the stick.’ He waited and then he wagged a finger at them. ‘She said she let you through, though. Naughty girl.’

  ‘Yeah, my fault,’ Hugh said. ‘Don’t get pissed at her.’

  ‘Already did,’ Frank said, and he made a clicking sound with his mouth.

  ‘We just got home,’ Angie said, deciding not to pursue the Maude connection.

  ‘Uh huh?’ Frank said. Rain was running off his forehead and pooling on the step.

  ‘Boston,’ Hugh offered.

  ‘To see my sister,’ Angie added.

  ‘Nan,�
�� Hugh said. ‘Her name is Nan.’

  ‘Hey, I remember Nan,’ Frank said. ‘I live here, remember.’ He looked over at Hugh and laughed. ‘Talking to me like I don’t know her sister.’

  Hugh chuckled and gave a go figure shrug.

  Frank nodded. ‘To bed, to bed, said Sleepyhead; tarry a while, said Slow; put on the pan, said Greedy Nan, we’ll sup before we go.’

  Nobody said anything for a few seconds (which seemed like an age to Angie) and then Hugh said, ‘Children’s rhyme?’

  Frank’s smile dropped from his face.

  Angie took a step backwards without even thinking about it.

  ‘No,’ Frank said. ‘It’s a Wall Street saying.’

  Hugh frowned and made to say something, but then Frank’s face cracked into a chuckle and he slapped Hugh playfully with his hat. ‘Naw, yeah … it’s a kids’ rhyme. From way back.’

  They all laughed – Hugh and Angie a little dutifully, they both felt – and then Angie said, ‘Oh, hey – I almost forgot.’

  ‘Yeah? Forgot what?’

  ‘Hugh saw someone in the house.’

  ‘When we got back,’ Hugh said, trying to sound dismissive.

  ‘Yeah?’ Frank said. ‘You see who it was?’

  Hugh shook his head and shot a glare at his wife. ‘I’m not even sure … well, I think it was the rain.’

  ‘It was raining in your house?’ Frank’s smile seemed to be lacking in humour and he stepped forward. For a few seconds, the Sheriff was standing almost nose to nose with Angie until she took another step back. He’s in the house, a little voice whispered at the back of her head. This isn’t a good idea.

  ‘Maybe I should—?’

  ‘Not a good idea,’ Angie said in a daze.

  ‘Not a good idea to check your house? When your husband says he’s seen an intruder?’

  ‘It wasn’t an intruder,’ Frank said.

  ‘So you’re saying it was someone you allowed in there?’ The Sheriff looked over at Angie and then back at Hugh. ‘I’m not too sure what—’

  ‘The place is a mess,’ Angie said.

  She was immediately aware of how lame that explanation sounded but she couldn’t think of anything further to say. So she took a small step forward. ‘Once we get sorted out, we’ll give the place a good going over …’