Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (11 page)

he whirled and slammed the Slugger against my skull. Next thing I

knew I was on the floor, and as I rolled away the bat came down on the meat above my collarbone.

That burst of pain hard-wired me.

The pistol was right there, by my other hand.

I snatched it up. Charlie stood above me, Roger’s bat raised over

his head with both skeletal hands. He opened his mouth, and I swear I actually heard him take a breath. Blood bubbled over his black

teeth, and he started to say something, the way he always did in my dreams.

“No,” I said. “This time you don’t say a word.”

Six times I pulled the trigger. And I thought of Roger, and a

missing little girl, and a woman who was down the hall.

And Charlie Steiner fell. His bones clattered to the floor. The

lights started to flicker, and then the room started to spin. A black hole opened up in the middle of it, and I remembered the mummy’s

cobwebbed mouth opening all those years ago at Butcher’s Lake, and I remembered his buzz-saw scream.

But there was no scream this night. There was only chanting. There on the ground, with gunfire echoing in my skull, I know I heard it.

Distant. Indistinct . . . as if it came from a place far below or far above.

And then I started to fade and the lights went out, and the black hole went away, and the moon seemed to hang above me in the darkness. It shone on me and the dead thing at my feet like a spotlight that could open a hole into a black brimming pit. And there was no way to fight it, not when the moon shone down and that black hole returned at

my feet. Charlie’s wrecking-ball fist had already crumbled, and I was slipping into unconsciousness, and everything was suddenly slipping away except for me and the whisper of my own breath.

Wherever I went next, I didn’t hear anything.

It was a quiet place, and empty, and I was alone there.

I awoke the next morning, and I was alone still.

[80] THE MUMMY'S HEART

– – –

The Louisville Slugger lay there on the floor. My pistol was next to it. But Charlie was gone. The only trace of him was a set of scratches that started in the far corner of the living room and ended at the front door. Looking down at them, I remembered the clicking percussion

of his bony feet as he came after me the night before.

I searched the house for Ana, but she was gone, too. All that was

left was a beat-up Corolla parked in my driveway, and a princess

costume on the bedroom floor—a gown that smelled of Ana’s vanilla

perfume. I went down to Butcher’s Lake, hoping I’d find her there. I drove to her apartment, and then I went to The Double Shot, but by then I knew she wouldn’t be there . . . or anywhere.

I kept it to myself for a few days, hoping the phone would ring,

hoping it would be Ana. But the phone didn’t ring. Finally, I worked up the nerve to call Ben Cross. He came over to the house, and I told him the whole story. God knows what he thought of it. But after I

finished, Ben asked me to get in the car and we went for a little drive.

To Potter’s Field.

To Charlie Steiner’s unmarked grave.

“We thought it was kids who did it,” Ben said staring down at the

open hole and the broken box at the bottom. “You know—Halloween

night, taking a dare to buck the town legend. We expected we’d find Charlie’s bones hanging in a tree somewhere. But after what you’ve told me, I’m not so sure.”

Ben kept the story out of the paper. That was fine with almost

everyone. The town fathers didn’t want any more tabloid reporters

sniffing around. The next day, a county work crew used a backhoe

and filled in Charlie’s grave. They tamped down the earth and rolled a couple strips of fresh grass over the top of it. Next thing you knew, Charlie’s unmarked plot looked like it had never been disturbed at all.

Ben didn’t real y want me in the Steiner place anymore, but we

worked it out. I had nowhere else to go. Now it’s my home. More than anything, it was the place I’d been with Ana. That’s what I wanted to remember about the house by Butcher’s Lake, and that’s why I stay there.

As for Butcher’s, I still go down there. Not often, but often enough.

Usually at sunset. Sometimes I’ll take a bottle of wine and walk along NORMAN PARTRIDGE [81]

the shore. One night the wind was up, blowing through the eucalyptus, making the cattails dance. It was almost dark. And I thought I saw someone down near the water, staring at me from a gap in the cattails.

I hurried to the spot.

Someone was there. In the cattails, watching me.

I moved closer.

My hand reached out.

It was a Halloween mask. A little princess with black hair and red lips. The mask was hung up in the cattails. I didn’t want to think about how it might have gotten there. I really didn’t need any false hope.

But I took the mask home with me, and I put it on the mantelpiece

right next to the plastic tiara Ana had worn that Halloween night.

Of course, I didn’t tell anyone about it.

No one, except Ben.

“Maybe she’ll come back,” he said. “She was a dream, that one. I

guess she really was.”

I don’t know anymore. I really don’t.

Like I said, I don’t like dreams. I don’t trust them.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have them.

I have them, still.

N

Norman Partridge
’s fiction includes horror, suspense, and the fantastic—“sometimes all in one story,” according to Joe Lansdale.

Partridge’s novel
Dark Harvest
was chosen by
Publishers Weekly
as one of the best one hundred books of 2006, and two short-story collections were published in 2010—
Lesser Demons
from Subterranean Press and
Johnny Hal oween
from Cemetery Dance. Other work includes the Jack Baddalach mysteries
Saguaro Riptide
and
The Ten-Ounce Siesta
, plus
The Crow: Wicked Prayer
, which was adapted for film. His work has received multiple Bram Stoker awards. He can be found on the web at NormanPartridge.com and americanfrankenstein.blogspot.com.

a

UNTERNEHMEN WERWOLF

CC

Carrie Vaughn

October 31, 1944

The boy, Fritz, had only a few hours to assassinate the collaborator.

He had completed the first part of the mission the night before,

crossing over enemy lines into occupied territory. This was the easy part; he’d done it a dozen times before. But this time, he carried a gun in his pack, not the messages and supplies he’d couriered

previously.

As usual on these journeys, he awoke in the morning, safe in a

copse of autumn shrubs he’d found to hide in, hidden by fallen leaves and tangled branches. He was naked, but he was used to that. After giving himself a moment to recall where he was, to reacquaint himself with his human limbs, his grasping fingers instead of ripping claws, he untangled himself from his pack, looped around his shoulders so it wouldn’t slip off when he was wolf. Inside, he found a canteen of water, a day’s rations, and common workmen’s clothes and boots so

he could travel unnoticed. And the gun.

Dressed and armed, he set off. He’d memorized the maps and the

description of his target. The village had been occupied by Allied forces for several weeks, and the woman, Maria Lang, a nurse, had

not only surrendered to enemy forces, she had been assisting in

administration of the village, supplying the American soldiers with aid and information. The village might or might not be recaptured in

[85]

[86] UNTERNEHMEN WERWOLF

coming battles, that wasn’t his concern. Right now, the woman must be punished. Executed.

Not murdered, they told him. Executed.

He balked, when they told her his target was a woman. That did not matter, his superiors in his SS unit told him. She was a collaborator.

A traitor, not worthy of mercy. And Fritz was seventeen now, ready for such an important mission. He ought to be more than a letter

carrier. And so here he was, trekking across abandoned farmland

toward the edge of a wooded stretch where the collaborator’s cabin was said to stand, using his preternatural sense of smell to detect the scent of treachery.

A wolf could cross enemy lines when a man in a uniform could not.

When even a man in disguise could not. A wolf traveling in a forest did not draw suspicions. And a wolf could be trained to follow a certain route, certain procedures. To return to a certain spot on schedule. A wolf was wild, but the man inside the werewolf could learn.

Fritz had been a shepherd boy, like in one of the old fairy tales, tending sheep in pastures at the edge of a Bavarian forest. Still living the old ways, with the old fears. Then, he cried wolf, and no one

heard him.

He survived the attack, and the bite marks and gashes on his legs

healed by morning, and everyone knew what that meant. He knew

what to do, and on the next full moon he spent several nights in the woods alone. Howled to the sky for the first time. When he returned, friends and family said nothing about it, did not ask him what he felt or what he’d experienced. He learned to live with the monster, but he no longer looked after his family’s sheep.

The war came, and he was too young to be recruited as a proper

soldier, but a man from the SS found him. Said he was forming a

special unit, and that he’d heard rumors about these forests. About the shepherd boy who no longer looked after sheep. Colonel Skorzeny had a job for him, and you did not tell men like that no, so Fritz went with him.

His new home, a compound fenced in with razor wire—steel

edged with silver, he was told—had normal barracks and storage

CARRIE VAUGHN [87]

buildings and such. There were also cages, for those who had not

volunteered, or who had changed their minds. The soldiers carried

knives and bayonets laced with silver. Silver bullets loaded their guns. A mere knick from one of those blades, a graze from one of

those bullets, would kill him. Fritz did as he was told.

Fritz had never met another werewolf before joining Skorzeny’s

special unit. The SS colonel had found a dozen of them across

Germany, and he made more, finding soldiers who volunteered

to be bitten, and a few who didn’t. Fritz was the youngest, and his instinct was to cower, to imagine a tail folding tight between his legs, to lower his gaze and slouch before the older, fiercer werewolf soldiers. Skorzeny would shout at him for weakness because he didn’t understand, but the others recognized the gestures of a frightened puppy. Some looked after him as an older wolf in a pack would.

Some took advantage and bullied.

Fritz was a monster from a fairy tale. He shouldn’t be afraid of

anything. What, then, did that say about the SS soldiers he cowered before? Who were the greater monsters? He told himself he deferred to them because he was loyal to the Fatherland, because he fought for the Führer, because he believed. But when he returned from a mission in the pre-dawn gray, lying naked at a rendezvous point as soldiers waited to escort him back to the barracks and the silver razorwire, he knew the truth: he was afraid. Even him, near invulnerable, a

monstrous creature haunting dark stories, was afraid. This was the world he lived in.

Tonight was the full moon. He had two choices: to stay human and

shoot the woman before night fell. Or to wait until the light of the moon transformed him, and let his wolf do the work with teeth and

claws.

In the forest some miles outside Aachen, he did not trust his

wolf to do what needed to be done. The wolf worked on instinct,

on gut feeling, and in the end Fritz could not tell his wolf what to do, especially on a full moon night. He had tried to argue with the colonel, who wasn’t a wolf and didn’t understand. But the colonel

said this mission must happen now, and must be completed tonight.

[88] UNTERNEHMEN WERWOLF

The Allies were gaining ground and a message needed to be sent to

other would-be collaborators, that death awaited them.

So Fritz went.
He
would have to complete the mission, not his wolf, because he suspected his wolf would follow his instinct and

run to safety. Away from Germany. He and his wolf had been having

this argument for months, now.

He found the house; it wasn’t hard. As the description said, it

stood alone, isolated, and the woman lived by herself. She walked to the village several times a week, but she rarely had visitors. The place seemed oddly comforting: an old-fashioned white-washed cottage

with a thatched roof, a garden plot that still had a few odd remnants left over from the fall harvest, a well lined with stones and a wooden bucket beside it. He circled the place, smelling carefully, and only smelled a woman, Maria Lang. And she was at home.

He camouflaged himself behind a tree on a small rise some