Halloween Spirits: 11 Tales for the Darkest Night Read online

  Gray was disgusted and shocked at the brutality that has been shown to those so young and innocent. It was a crime more heinous than any he had ever encountered and one that he knew in the marrow of his bones must go appropriately punished.

  It was that thought that decided his next course of action.

  Donaldson had noted his sudden hesitation and moved closer. “What is it, Shaw?” he asked. “Do you feel something?”

  Gray put on his fake smile, the good one, the one he used whenever he was forced to talk to the medicos about his disability. “Sorry, Sheriff. Just reacting to the smell of weeks of elephant shit and camel urine.” He moved away from the group, out into the center of the ring, and went through the motions again for the benefit of those who were watching. As before, he shook his head in the negative and the group moved on.

  Gray knew that if he told the Sheriff the truth, the bodies would be recovered from their graves and used as evidence. Michaels would be put on public trial, his fate to be decided by a system full of lawyers and loopholes.

  A system that could just as easily let a vicious killer back out on the streets as it could send him to the electric chair.

  A system Gray had absolutely no faith in.

  So he kept his mouth shut. He went through the motions of using his ability for the rest of the hour that remained available to them. He even endured Donaldson’s desperate disappointment and frustrated insinuations on the ride back to his home, just so he could be assured that Michaels would be dealt with in the just fashion he deserved.

  One fact kept circling around inside his brain, a fact that kept him oddly reassured as he waiting for the coming of night and the cloaking darkness it would bring with it.

  There had only been fifteen bodies buried beneath the big top, but there were sixteen missing children.

  Which meant that there was a strong chance that Jimmy Newman was still alive.

  But if he was alive, Gray didn’t expect him to stay that way for long.

  As soon as the sun went down Gray would be paying another visit to the Great and Glorious Traveling Carnival and Circus.

  The Carrion Man had a date with the Ringmaster.

  And, oh, what a show it will be, he thought to himself with a grim smile.

  *

  “Get in there, you little brat!” snarled Michaels, dragging the missing boy into the center ring and forcefully shoving him to the ground. He tossed a shovel at the boy’s feet a moment later.

  “Start diggin’,” Michaels ordered.

  When the boy did not act quickly enough, the carnival owner drew back one booted foot and kicked him in the ribcage. “I said dig!”

  Choking back tears and a howl of pain, the boy hauled himself up and reached down for the shovel.

  Gray had seen enough.

  “Leave it alone, James,” Gray said softly from the shadows beneath the bleachers where he had been hiding for the last two hours. He activated the controls of his chair and rolled out into the light.

  Both the boy and Michaels froze in shock and surprise at the sound of his voice. Michaels knocked the boy back off his feet to the ground before whirling to face Gray. When he saw who it was, however, the anxious expression on his face turned to one of disdain.

  “Look who’s here, Jimmy. It’s our resident freak, the Carrion Man himself.” The carnival owner waved a hand dismissingly in Gray’s direction. “You shouldn’t be here, cripple. You’re going to end up hurt.”

  “I don’t think so, Michaels. The only person who’s going to get hurt around here right now is you,” Gray replied calmly.

  The other man laughed mockingly. “Yeah, right. You can’t even get up out of that chair. How are you gonna stop me from killing you, never mind protect the boy?” To prove his point, he pulled back a foot and savagely kicked the youth again.

  The sight caused Gray to grit his teeth in anger. “This time you’ve taken one too many, Michaels,” he answered, his voice shaking with anger at the thought of all the children who had suffered at this pig’s hands. “This time you will be stopped.”

  Michaels laughed again. “Oh, no!” he cried, in a high falsetto voice. “It’s the Carrion Man! Run away!” He snorted in disgust. “Whatcha gonna do, freak? Use some psychic mumbo-jumbo on me? Wave your arms and turn me into a toad?”

  “I don’t intend to do anything,” Gray replied. “They do.” As he said the words, he took his hands off his lap and held them with his palms facing the bare earth on either side of his chair. He summoned up the true extent of his ability and pushed his power downward, felt it eagerly flow from his hands and into the earth around him. At first it flailed blindly, seeking, but then he felt it reach out and grab hold of the dead buried there beneath the big top floor, buried deep where the police cadaver dogs had been unable to find them the first time the carnival had been searched. His power reached out and gathered them all in, like a loving mother will gather her children, giving out new life to temporarily replace that which had been taken away.

  Down beneath the earth, the dead began stirring.

  Michaels hesitated for a moment, watching Gray’s strange motions, but when nothing immediately happened his bravado reasserted itself and he began walking in Gray’s direction. As he went past, he snatched up the boy’s discarded shovel and slung it over one shoulder.

  “What happened, freak? Your powers desert you?” Michaels laughed. “I warned ya, gave ya the chance to get outta here. Now I’m just gonna hafta bash your ugly little face in.”

  Gray ignored him, looking beyond him to where James was slowly struggling to his hands and knees. The boy’s dirt stained and tear-streaked face lifted toward him, the plea for help in his young eyes as blatant as if it had been spoken aloud. Gray smiled reassuringly. “You might want to look away, Jimmy. This isn’t going to be nice.”

  The youth stared at him for a moment more and then nodded. He sat back down, burying his face in his hands so that he wouldn’t have to see what was coming next.

  Michaels ignored the exchange and took another step in Gray’s direction.

  Fifteen feet in front of Michaels, half the distance to where Gray sat calmly in his wheelchair on the edge of the ring, a child’s hand suddenly broke through the surface of the dirt floor. The hand twisted and turned in the stark light, working its way free of the dirt around it. Grave mold grew across the back of the palm and, in some places on the fingers, the white gleam of bone shone through the greying skin.

  Though he’d been dead for almost three weeks, life had returned to Tommy Williams’ discarded body.

  Life with a purpose.

  Life with a grim, dark need.

  Michaels stopped abruptly, staring at the hand jutting out of the earth before him. As if sensing his attention, it twisted in his direction, the fingers opening and closing rapidly, grasping out toward him.

  The press had gotten it all wrong, those many years before, when they slung that oh-so-clever nickname on me, Gray thought with a smile. Carrion Man indeed. He was far more than just a human divining rod, attuned to the rotting remains of those who had passed on. Grayson Shaw was a necromancer, one from the old school, born to his art and trained in its use since birth. In his hands, he held the dark, forbidden power of life over death.

  And he used it now.

  He called out to them all, guiding them to the surface with the sound of his voice and the hum of his power as it coursed through the earth under Michael’s feet. He called for them to rise up, to do what he was afraid the halls of justice would not be able to do, to take revenge against the one who had so heinously torn their lives from them.

  And they came.

  Eagerly.

  As little Tommy Williams freed his other arm and part of his head from the dark earth around him, Michaels screamed in terror and turned to run, only to find two of his earlier victims, Amy Smith and Rebecca Turner, had already managed to work themselves free of their earthly confinement and had cut off his retreat in that direction. The
ir eyes gleamed with an unholy light as they eagerly reached out toward him, their decaying lips curled into smiles of savage glee. A hand, missing almost all of its flesh and belonging to Michaels’ first victim, Tad Stevens, burst through the ground immediately beneath him and locked itself around his right ankle. As Michaels continued to scream, his other leg was trapped in the same fashion.

  Unable to move, Michaels tried to use the shovel as a weapon, raising it over his shoulder and swinging it at his assailants. With supernatural quickness, the weapon was blocked by a skeletal forearm and then snatched out of the man’s hands and tossed to the side.

  Other shapes were moving in the surrounding darkness now, shambling into the light to join the fray. The smell of freshly turned earth and the cloying scent of rotting flesh wafted through the air. Gray inhaled deeply, pulling the aroma down into his lungs, a smile of satisfaction on his face as he watched the events playing out before him.

  The coppery tang of blood joined the other scents filling the air inside the circus tent and Gray laughed aloud as the predator became the prey. It didn’t take long for Michaels to stop screaming, as the children tore him apart limb from limb.

  When they were finished, when their victimizer was nothing more than a few vague scraps of raw flesh strewn about the center ring, Gray called the children to him. They came, like worshippers to a shrine, and he set their souls at ease as best he could before sending them back down into the earth to lie at rest.

  In the end, only a few stains and a certain tartness to the air gave evidence to what had happened there. The ground in the center ring was once again smooth and unblemished. The remains of Jasper Michaels were nowhere to be seen.

  Activating his controls, Gray rolled his chair over to where Jimmy was still crouched on the floor, his eyes shut tight and his hands over his ears to shield them from the screams. Gray reached down and gently shook the boy’s shoulder to get his attention. “It’s okay, Jimmy. You can look now,” he said softly when the boy lifted his head and opened his eyes.

  Jimmy lowered his arms and raised his head. He glanced swiftly around, looking for signs of his captor.

  “It’s over now, Jimmy. He’s gone. He won’t hurt you again.”

  The boy jumped up and hugged Gray, tears of relief falling from his eyes.

  After a time, Gray gently forced the child back to his feet. Looking him in the eyes, he said, “I’m going to take you home now, Jimmy. Your parents and the police are going to ask you a lot of questions. I would appreciate it if you could leave me out of all this, if you’d just tell them that you escaped on your own when your kidnapper’s back was turned. Can you do that? Can you do that for me?”

  The boy nodded. “Yes sir. I can do that,” he said.

  “Good.”

  The two of them turned and slowly made their way back over to the entrance. Jimmy slipped out first. Before he followed, Gray turned back and faced the center ring once more. Letting a hand slip off his lap and face the ground, he sent a final, silent message.

  “Sleep well, my children.”

  Deep beneath the ground, the dead smiled in their now restful sleep.

  THE DEVIL CAME TO MAMIE’S ON HALLOWE’EN

  Lisa Morton

  It was Hallowe’en night, and business was slow at the whorehouse.

  Leona didn’t put much stock in the stories that kept other folk indoors on this night. She’d laughed over tales of Jacky-Ma-Lantern, who’d once outsmarted the Bad Man and then couldn’t get into Hell or Heaven, and so on Hallowe’en he wandered around lighting his way with a coal kept in a pumpkin. She’d once seen the strange blue lights in the bayou that some said led unwary travelers to their doom on this night, but she didn’t really believe they were spirits. And her favorite of Miss Mamie’s girls, Lizzie, had talked about going down to New Orleans once and meeting up with a real hoodoo man, who she’d watched bring a dead boy back to life on All Saints’ Day. But as much as Leona loved Lizzie, she thought even decent, smart folk could sometimes be bamboozled when they found something they just plain wanted to believe in.

  It was about midnight now (“the witching hour”, Leona remembered Lizzie once calling it), and the swamp just behind Miss Mamie’s was dark and quiet, no flatboats poling up to the dock tonight, unloading new customers. Leona wondered again where Lizzie had gotten to; Beulah, the cook, said she’d left out the backdoor about four that afternoon, just as the sun was going down. She’d taken a big kettle with her, and said she’d be back around night. It wasn’t safe to wander around the bayou any night, and Leona couldn’t imagine where Lizzie had gone.

  It didn’t help that Mamie’s scrawny old cat, Lumpy (so named because he was as black as a lump of coal), was missing, too.

  So Leona sat on the back porch, waiting, hoping one or the other would show up soon. Beulah had already gone home, and the kitchen was cool but the night was unseasonably warm and humid. Usually she’d have to be in the main parlor, playing the piano for the customers, but there weren’t many of them tonight.

  Leona cranked the phonograph again, and settled back on the old splintered wood of the porch steps to listen to Ma Rainey. Harold, Miss Mamie’s bartender and muscle, had been into town today, and Leona had given him seventy-five cents to get the record for her. It was “Traveling Blues”, and Leona swayed back and forth, humming along, as the song spilled out of the phonograph’s big horn.

  I went to the depot, looked up and down the board,

  I went to the depot, looked up and down the board,

  I asked the ticket agent, “It’s my time on this road?”

  Leona had listened to the song enough now that she’d be able to play it on the piano when she went back in; if anyone wanted to hear, she could sing it, too.

  Fact was, she thought she could sing it just as good as Ma Rainey herself.

  One of the funny things about Miss Mamie was that she only wanted live music at her “establishment”; she claimed the menfolk didn’t want to hear just records, although Leona knew plenty of menfolk who liked Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey and Sippie Wallace. Miss Mamie, though, said she’d paid plenty of money for that piano, and live music gave her place “a touch of class”. Truthfully, Leona was glad, because it gave her a way to make herself useful around Mamie’s place—she had a natural gift for the piano and for singing.

  Unfortunately, even those gifts wouldn’t carry her much longer.

  Miss Mamie had come into the kitchen yesterday afternoon, before most of the other women had even gotten up yet, and she’d called Leona away from the washing and sat her down at the table. Mamie’d just gotten back from doing some banking in town, and she was dressed up, looking fine for a woman of forty. It was no wonder she still got customers requesting her services.

  “That Jackson Smith done asked about you again last night,” she’d said, while lighting a cigarette.

  Leona had tried not to squirm. “That so?”

  “Um-hmm.” Miss Mamie took a drag from her smoke, then went on. “He’d pay extra for you, Leona, since it’d be your first time. We’d both make some mighty nice money off’n it.”

  “I’m not doin’ nothin’ with Jackson Smith,” Leona had replied.

  “He’s not so bad,” Mamie said, squinting at Leona through her tobacco haze.

  “I know he’s not, Miss Mamie, but I…”

  At that point Mamie had actually set the cigarette down and leaned across the table, and Leona’d had to struggle not to lean back, away. “Now you listen to me, child: You sixteen years old, you a woman now. I promised your mama, God bless her, to look after you ‘til you was growed. She was one of the finest ladies I ever had work for me, and I owed her, but I figure the time you growed is now. I can’t keep carryin’ you, Leona—”

  Leona had cut her off. “But Miss Mamie, you your own self said I was the best piano player you’s ever likely to hear—”

  “I did, but, honey, we need somebody to play something livelier here, not those slow things you like. You
put a few drinks in these boys and give ‘em that slow music, and they likely to just fall asleep before we can even get ‘em upstairs with a girl. Don’t nobody make no money then.”

  Leona looked down, hurt. “That slow music’s the blues, Miss Mamie. I thought the men liked it.”

  Mamie reached out and stroked Leona’s wrist. “They do, honey, but it’s not good for business. Now, I could get me somebody from town to play the piano, play them nice fast tunes; might not be so good as you, but I wouldn’t have to give ‘em room and board, neither.”

  Leona had felt a cold chill settle into her then. She’d known for a time this was coming, but she’d hoped she might have a little longer. Just long enough to save for a ticket to Chicago or Atlanta and a couple of months of room and board while she tried to get a job singing, maybe even make a record of her own…

  Miss Mamie had taken a last pull off her cigarette, then stubbed it out in a china plate. “I love you like my own, Leona, you know that; I done raised you since before you could put two words together. But you need to be makin’ a decision: Either you stay here and take up The Life, or you move on.”

  Miss Mamie had gotten up then and left.

  Beulah, the cook, had worked over the stove in the corner, listening quietly. She was a kind woman who came out here, to the edge of the bayou every day to work for Miss Mamie. She’d never minded that Leona slept in the kitchen, and kept her phonograph there; she liked the music, too, and she liked Leona.

  She’d waited until Mamie had gone, then she’d come over to where Leona sat, wiping furiously at her tears. “Don’t cry, honey,” she’d said, in her soft, sweet voice. “You can sing just as good as any of ‘em, just as good as Ma or Bessie or Victoria Spivey. You don’t need this place.”

  Leona had looked up at Beulah gratefully. “You think so?”

  “I know so,” Beulah had said, giving her a hug that smelled like warm cornbread. “The only men you need to make money is the kind that’ll let you sing, and you’ll make a lot more money than you’d make here. You believe that.”