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

  Halloween Chillers

  A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense

  Douglas Clegg

  Contents

  A Note from the Author

  The Halloween Man

  Praise for The Halloween Man and Douglas Clegg

  Get the Free Newsletter

  The Halloween Man

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  the damnation highway

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  he whispered…

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  PART TWO

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  INTERLUDE

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  PART THREE

  INTERLUDE

  Chapter 27

  COMES THE HALLOWEEN MAN, REAPING

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Epilogue

  Also by Douglas Clegg

  Contact Douglas Clegg

  Disclaimer

  Publication Credits

  About the Author

  The Nightmare Chronicles

  Praise for Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

  Discover Douglas Clegg’s Fiction

  Want More?

  Author’s Note

  Underworld

  White Chapel

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  O, Rare and Most Exquisite

  The Little Mermaid

  The Rendering Man

  1

  2

  3

  The Fruit of Her Womb

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  The Night Before Alec Got Married

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Only Connect

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Chosen

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Damned If You Do

  The Hurting Season

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  I Am Infinite, I Contain Multitudes

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Want More?

  Get the Newsletter

  Also by Douglas Clegg

  About the Author

  Disclaimer

  Publication Credits & Copyright

  The Words

  1. The End Is Like This

  2. Before the Night

  3. The Night Begins

  4. The Deer

  5. Shelter

  6. The Church

  7. In Darkness

  8. The Party

  Also by Douglas Clegg

  Get the Newsletter

  About the Author

  Disclaimer

  Publication Credits & Copyright

  A Note from the Author

  Dear Reader,

  I have always loved October and the Halloween season. The pumpkins, the scarecrows, the ancient stories of spirits and goblins, the sense of witches astride broomsticks, the masks, and the idea of the dark harvest and the coming of All Souls Day.

  I’ve gathered three books together for you who also love Halloween as a season, an event, a place of the mind.

  First, the novel, The Halloween Man is set on the coast of New England in a strange town called Stonehaven. Then, my Bram Stoker Award-winning collection, The Nightmare Chronicles, containing thirteen stories and novelettes of dark places and haunted people. And finally, one very dark night of friendship and transformation between two young men in The Words.

  I hope you enjoy these journeys into the heart of October itself.

  Best,

  Douglas Clegg

  DouglasClegg.com

  Praise for The Halloween Man and Douglas Clegg

  “Clegg’s stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby.”

  —Dean Koontz, New York Times bestselling author.

  * * *

  “Douglas Clegg has become the new star in horror fiction.”

  —Peter Straub, author of Ghost Story and, with Stephen King, The Talisman

  * * *

  “The Halloween Man is one of the best horror novels that I’ve read in years...I had never read anything by Clegg before reading this novel, but now I’m going to go out and get the rest of his books. If you’ve never heard of Clegg either, or are a fan of horror fiction, get this book right now.”

  —Pixel Planet

  * * *

  “Clegg gets high marks on the terror scale...”

  —The Daily News (New York)

  * * *

  “Every bit as good as the best works of Stephen King, Peter Straub, or Dan Simmons...”

  —Hellnotes

  * * *

  “Packed with vivid imagery; a broadly-scoped but fast-paced plot; powerful, evocative writing; superb characterizations; and facile intelligence...Douglas Clegg has given horror lovers the best Halloween gift possible—an entertaining spinetingler written with unique style...”

  —DarkEcho

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  Get book updates, exclusive offers, news of contests & special treats for readers—become a V.I.P. member of Douglas Clegg’s long-running free newsletter.

  * * *

  Click here to sign up.

  * * *

  Click here to explore more fiction by Douglas Clegg.

  The Halloween Man

  A Novel of Supernatural Horror

  Prologue

  The shattering of glass and metal—as some unseen intruder broke the window—did not wake him.

  A voice in his head whispered, “Your soul.”

  The boy shivered in his sleep. Rain and wind blew in across the near-desolate room, across the old woman’s face as she remained in some dream. The crunch and squeal of a door opening, of glass being stepped upon, all of this played at the edge of the boy’s consciousness but he could not tug away from the dream that had grabbed him.

  The voice whispered, “Your heart.”

  His eyelids fluttered open for a moment, and then closed, as if the real world were the dream, and his inner world, the truth.

  Even the mindpain was only a shredded curtain, blowing against a window of the dream.

  The boy dreamed on. His inner eyes opened onto the other world, the one of insane
geometries, of orange lightning, of fire that rained from trees like leaves falling, of the birds rising from the water their impossibly pure white wings spreading across the burning sky. As the sky filled with bloody swans, he saw the dark ram with its golden eyes shining as it galloped towards him across the surface of the unbroken water. Then the eels wriggling across the glassy surface, turning the brown water red with their wakes. The ram rode across their backs, its hooves beating like knives on stones. The Azriel Light came up from its breath, forming crystalline in the mist of air, and then burned across the world. What was unspeakable found voice and its bleating froze the air for a moment hacked from the fabric of time as the secret of all stabbed at his ears.

  Someone tried to wake him from it. The mindpain came back like a bolt of lightning, burning along his neural pathways. The boy’s eyes opened, his dream torn apart.

  The man shook him awake and held a hand over his mouth. The room came back with its shadows of curtains and half-opened cupboards. The shroud of dawn. The room that always seemed too small for all of them. The others slept on around him.

  The man wore a dark leather jacket and jeans, and the smell from him was almost sweet—like sage on the desert after a rain.

  “You Satan?” the boy asked in a hushed tone of reverence.

  “I could be,” the man whispered, his breath all cigarettes. “If you keep quiet, you’ll live. Understand?”

  The boy nodded. The mindpain blossomed against his small skull. When it came on, as it usually did after one of the Great Meetings, it would blast within his head like the worst headache. Sometimes his nose would bleed from it. Sometimes he’d go into convulsions. He never knew how hard it would hit; he just knew it was PAIN. He knew it HURT. The mindpain didn’t let go until it was good and ready to.

  The boy felt something pressed against his side.

  Cold metal.

  “That’s right,” the man whispered. “It’s a gun. I will kill you if you make a noise or try to fight me. Or if you try to do what I know you can do.”

  The boy began shivering, and wasn’t sure if he could will himself to stop. He wanted to be back in his dream. It felt like ants were crawling all over his arms and legs. Ants stinging him all over, and then tickling along his neck. He wanted to swat and scratch, but he was afraid the man might use the gun. The boy had seen a jackrabbit get shot clean in half once. He didn’t need to imagine it happening to himself.

  But the markings on him, the drawings...

  He knew they were moving, the pictures on his shoulders. He wished he could scrape them from his flesh. He wanted to tell the stranger with the gun about them, about how they meant bad things when they began moving, but the boy knew this would do no good.

  The man grinned as he lifted the boy up, wrapping a shabby blanket around him. The boy’s last view of what he had come to call home was the old woman lying there staring at him. Blood sluiced from between her lips, and tears bled down in rivulets from her eyes. The mattress beneath her was soaked red. Her fingers were still curled around a small amulet she kept with her, nothing more than a locket, a good luck charm.

  The boy was too tired to fight, and weakened, too, by the previous day’s performance. Mindpain always came after the show. Mindpain was like what the Great Father had called a hangover. It was the morning after. That was a problem for him, it sapped him of strength, and even when he had tried to kick out at the man, he could barely move his legs.

  The man would probably kill him. The boy knew this is what kidnappers usually did. He had watched late night TV shows and knew that kidnappers rarely kept a kid alive.

  The boy tried not to think of the gun.

  Tried to remember the Great Father holding his arms out, his hands open to him. “I will be your comfort in the valley of the shadow,” the Great Father had said.

  This was the valley of the shadow of death. This kidnapper and his gun and his blanket and the red stain on the mattress with the old woman’s mouth wide open.

  Thinking about it, the boy winced. The hammering in his head grew stronger.

  The pounding of the rain on the roof seemed unbearable. It was a terrible rain, it had come at first as ice and then tiny pebbles hitting the corrugated tin roof, until finally, it was just water. God is pissin’ on us on accounta our sins, that’s what the old woman who took care of him would say, her Texas twang increasing with her years. She was dead now. She was in whatever Great Beyond existed, the boy knew. She was in the pictures that covered him now, as were all things that were no more. If the mindpain hadn’t descended that night, weakening him further, he might’ve been able to struggle against this evil man who took him. Even though the blanket covered the boy’s ears, it was as if the hoof beats of wild horses were beating down upon him from heaven.

  The kidnapper threw him into the backseat of a car. Slammed the door. As they drove off, the boy glanced back at the place he’d called home and knew in his heart he would never see it again. Dawn was just bursting from the far horizon. Rain accompanied it, the first fresh drops hitting the car windows, dirt rinsing down. The pain in the boy’s head grew, and he could feel the tingling begin along his back and shoulders. He knew that whatever was supposed to start, all the things that he’d been warned about by the Great Father, would come to pass now.

  Through him, the radiance would come, like electricity through the idiot wires of the gods.

  His skin felt molten.

  PART ONE

  THE STORM KING

  * * *

  “Down came the golden ship, plowing into the fallow earth as if planting a new crop in a dry field...”

  From THE STORM KING: INTERGALACTIC KNIGHT, Vol. 12

  the damnation highway

  “It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey.”

  —On The Road by Jack Kerouac

  Chapter One

  THE KIDNAPPER

  * * *

  1

  * * *

  You can’t ever take this back.

  The kidnapper heard the voice in his head.

  You can’t ever undo this. You must now follow it through, what you’ve started.

  You must now take it to its logical conclusion.

  Try not to picture what you’re going to have to do to the kid.

  The only emotion the man felt was an indefinable revulsion, not even fear, for an adrenaline rush overcame his cowardice. His sweat had dried up; his body no longer trembled with the knowledge of what he had to do. It was no longer a plan, or a plot; it was an action in fact. Yet he had to have control over himself, or he would lose it. He might just go over the edge, and then all that he’d worked so hard to keep in place for so many years—the lurker beneath his own skin—all would run wild.

  If a place could have an aura, this one did, and it was the aura that caused his revulsion. An aura of darkness, and it was almost like a physical heaviness to the place. A halo of nightmare, all around the periphery. He’d do right by the world if he poured kerosene at its edges and torched the whole place, and the dozen or so people sleeping there. The Rapturists, they called themselves, but for people of God they had quite an arsenal stored out in New Mexico. The Feds were already surrounding their Quonset huts just outside of Las Cruces, out in the dusty hills, ready for a showdown, at least according to the media. But the Rapturists had pockets all over the United States and parts of Central America. They were a big family of loons whose religious zeal tended towards forming militias and announcing messiahs with every change of weather.

  This enclave, small as it was, and apparently as harmless, contained the only messiah that the man wanted:

  The boy they called Shiloh or Prophet.

  Funny that no one’s standing guard. Funny that they don’t feel the need to protect their little messiah from men like me who might want to do something terrible to him.

  He had one final protection with him in case they did catch him, one little parachute of sorts.

  Don’t think abou
t it.

  All you want is the boy.

  Funny though that no one is waking up, and funny about that woman lying on the mattress. Too dark to really get a look, but why didn’t she wake up? Why didn’t she try to stop him?

  Don’t think about that either.

  Don’t think about what might have been done last night, perhaps as some kind of God ritual among them, some kind of Kool-Aid laced with People’s Temple cyanide, or some other nasty little “let’s go to Heaven together, shall we?” party.

  These Rapturists were that crazy. Their whole sense of religion is built around death anyway. No big surprise if by sunrise all of them will be found dead.

  All but the boy.

  What had Fairclough called it?

  Oh yeah, the Azriel Light, which was suitably biblical since Azriel was the Angel of Death. The Azriel Light was simply a phenomenon of idiot humans going crazy and killing themselves when in the presence of the light of Holiness. Leave it to Fairclough and the Rapturists to describe their lack of survival skills to some bogus religious phrase. “The Azriel Light,” the blonde on the Christian show had said, “is the warm glow of God’s love, but it is not of the flesh, but of spirit. The flesh is a covering, like this blouse and skirt I’m wearing, and we must shed it to move into the eternal light.”

  This was a place of darkness. No dawn, and no damn Azriel Light was going to make it any brighter.

  I know another name for the Azriel Light, he thought. Moonfire.

  All he wanted was to get the boy in the car and get the hell out of this enclave of rundown homes out in the middle of a Texas nowhere. The stink was everywhere—Stony Crawford could smell it like the scent of old blood, the way you knew that something or someone was dead, had been dead a long time and had just lain there in the excrement of death as if waiting for resurrection. He couldn’t wait to get out from among the shacks and mobile homes, and back into his car. And those cages, full of rattlesnakes, all still and eerie beneath the trailer that sat upon cinder blocks. Christ, that was creepy. People who would keep fifty rattlesnakes for their church social weren’t people you wanted to mess with.