Shades: Eight Tales of Terror (5 page)

On the very next day after Edgar’s departure, Lamar ordered the housekeeper to have the Tarlington stableman ready the buggy and accompany her into town to pick up a list of items. She was loathe to do this, and leave the children alone with him, but
had no grounds to object. So the woman did as instructed and spent the better part of the morning shopping in town. She made her last purchase at eleven in Mather’s Clothing Store before heading back for home.

Upon reaching the Tarlington house, she instructed the stableman to drop her off at the front before sending him on around to the back of the house to bring the purchases in through the rear entrance. She later confessed to taking this action because she had a “bad feeling” about what Lamar may be up to and wanted to leave him with no unobstructed exit in case they caught him at something untoward.

Instead, she walked into a slaughterhouse.

As soon as she opened the front door
, the housekeeper spied bloody shoe prints leading from the closed salon back toward the rear of the house. She screamed for the stableman, and when he arrived they opened the doors to the room to reveal the first part of the grisly handiwork that Lamar Tarlington had performed in their absence. All three children…twelve-year-old Annette Tarlington, and her twin ten-year-old brothers, Samuel and Phillip…were dead. Their small bodies lay on the blood drenched floor of the salon, minus their heads.

The stableman raced back into town to fetch the Sheriff, dropping the housekeeper off at the first neighbor’s house he passed. Within half an hour, a small group of armed townspeople returned to the Tarlington estate. After viewing the carnage in the salon, they determined that Lamar had taken all three children into the room befor
e locking the door and murdering them all together. And judging by the single set of bloody footprints and accompanying blood drips, he then left the room carrying the severed heads by their hair.

The party had no difficulty following the gore spattered trail through the house and out the back door. It took a little more effort on their part to discern it from there, but many of these men were seasoned hunters and possessed skills up to the task. They tracked the killer’s path from the house, out around behind the barn, and finally to a disused corn silo a short way down the hill. It was there they found the second testament to Lamar Tarlington’s madness.

The door to the silo had some form of arcane symbol scrawled on its surface, probably from the blood of one of the victims. A metal bucket sitting next to the door contained a paintbrush and its inside was coated with drying gore. They realized Lamar must have filled the bucket from one of the bodies and carried it down with the heads from the house. Tracks around the entrance indicated the killer had been in and out of the building several times that morning.

Drawing his gun, the Sheriff pushed open the door and stepped inside. In his later years he admitted he didn’t give any warning in the hopes of surprising Tarlington into doing something stupid and giving him cause to shoot the monster on the spot. His hope turned out to be in vain.

The killer was dead.

The interior of the corn silo looked like some hellish version of an ancient temple. Strange runes and symbols covered the walls as high as eight feet. These appeared to be drawn in charcoal. The floor was a different matter. Tarlington had painted a large circle, touched at three points by a crimson triangle within. A child’s head sat at each point of the triangle, facing
toward the center. Behind each head, the madman had propped up large mirrors he must have scavenged from different dressers and bathrooms of the house.

Then Lamar Tarlington had apparently knelt in the center of this diagram, and cut his own throat.

Evidence recovered afterwards included a chest full of spiritualist pamphlets and flyers that seemed to have been received in the mail and stored unopened or ignored. On the other hand, a small trunk in Lamar’s bedroom revealed the existence of three books bound in old leather and filled with horrific designs. It was written in a language unknown to anyone in the area. Unfortunately these fell into the hands of the judge, who doubled as one of the local preachers, and he burned them in front of his church as an object lesson to his congregation on how to deal with evil before it can corrupt weak minds.

The le
gend of Lamar Tarlington was not so easily erased. The locals never forgot, and often referred to him as The Necromancer due to the encounter with the alderman in the grave yard. Some townsfolk claim they still hear strange whistles in the cemetery. Also, two different employees at the Tarlington house have quit without notice while claiming they saw Lamar Tarlington looking in a window at them. So there is a history of ghost stories associated with this character.

Edgar Tarlington tore down the corn silo, and moved what remained of his family to New Orleans. He didn’t sell the house though, choosing to leave it sitting empty for several years instead, before renovating it and leasing it out. This arrangement continued for the next thirty years before a branch of the Tarlington family moved back into the house and resumed living there. The house still belongs to what
remains of the Tarlington clan. It has been restored and furnished with turn of the century furniture, and converted into a private museum. Many of the personal items of the Tarlington family, including Lamar Tarlington, were recovered and used for display. Lamar Tarlington’s bedroom was restored to look as it did when he lived there and many of his surviving personal effects are kept in that room.

A large portrait of the man hangs on the bedroom wall.

It has been confirmed that the museum gave tours for the classes containing Laura Taylor, Barry Price, and Corvin Bradshaw the week before the crime.

With this now explained, I return to Corvin Bradshaws statement.

That’s right. T
hat’s what she said. She said The Necromancer was after her. That she had seen him staring at her through the window, and that he had a big knife of some kind with him. I was beginning to think maybe she belonged back in the nurse’s office, after all.

“Lamar Tarlington?” I’m making it plain I’m having a hard time with this. “
The
Lamar Tarlington is after you? The dude’s been dead for like ten thousand years and now his ghost decides to skip across town and pick on you? Why, because he don’t like cheerleaders or something?”

“He’s only been dead a little over a hundred years, you dope,” she says like she’s all smart or something, but I can tell she’s still panicky. “And I think the reason he’s after me is because Barry might have stolen something from him.”

Okay, now that caused my ears to perk up. Hearing that a guy like Barry Price pulled a lowdown is always music to my ears. It just proves my point that some people ain’t near as good as they like to pretend they are, but it’s always guys like me that get busted even when I didn’t do nothing.

“So how do you steal something from a dead guy? And what does that have to do with you?”

“Remember the field trip?” she’s asks. “Remember how we had to hold up the buses when we left because Barry had to make an emergency run back into the house to go to the bathroom?”

I remembered that. And if you’ll check, there should be a lot of other people who remember that too, detective. We were all sort of pissed about it at the time.

“Anyway,” she goes on. “Yesterday was my birthday, and Barry gave me this really nice present. It was this old fashioned fountain pen made out of real silver. It had fancy scrollwork all over and my initials on the side. At the time I thought it was really thoughtful and sweet.”

“So? If it had your initials on it…”

“My initials are LT! Get it?  Laura Taylor! Lamar Tarlington! He must have seen that pen in Tarlington’s room and went back to steal it!”

“Oh…” I’m still trying to picture a toady like Barry Price having the guts to swipe anything, much less something like that. But I guess impressing a chick can even make a tool like Barry grow a pair…if not a brain to go along with them.

“Yeah…oh! And now I’ve got the pen and that evil son of a bitch is after me! I’ve got to get home and get that thing back to Barry so he can put it back!”

I gotta admit, I was loving this stuff up to that point. This whole situation had karma written all over it. She was so freaked out I was even thinking of offering to return the pen myself, just to see if I could horn in on a little of Barry’s action. Hell, I could have done a better job of it than that idiot anyways.

But that was when Laura starting screaming.

I was just getting ready to see what she thought about me returning the pen, when she starts pointing at the door and shrieking like she’s lost her mind. I almost crapped my pants on the spot, just because of her screaming all of a sudden like that. But when I turned to see what she was pointing at…aw hell… I almost had a heart attack.

The doors in the old part of the school have those diamond shaped windows in them. You know, the types with the little wires running through the glass. Well, when I looked over to see what she was freaking out about…

T
here stood Lamar Tarlington looking in through the window at us.

Hey, you can smirk all you want! It was him! I saw the portrait in that bedroom and this was the exact same guy! He had that big black mustache, and slicked down hair, and his eyes were wide and staring like a crazy man…and they were staring at me and Laura like we were the scum of the earth. Dude, there was murder in those eyes!

Anyways, I’m standing there trying not to piss my pants when I hear the door behind me slam open. I almost jumped out of my freaking skin, and turned around to see Laura outside and running for the back gate before the door slammed shut again. She had left me all alone with that dead bastard! That’s a chick for you! Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to wait around for him to come into the room and chat so I hit the door and took off after her.

Yeah, that’s right. I don’t care what everybody thought they saw. I wasn’t chasing her, I was running from the same guy! And she was screaming because of him, not me!

So I run out there and see that Laura had already reached the gate. That girl was flying! I didn’t know where else to go, so I took off for the back gate too. There wasn’t any way I was going back in that school building, and now it looked like I might be stuck in the same mess she was. That’s when I decided to follow her and get that pen back to the museum. To hell with scoring with Laura Taylor or showing up Barry Price, I was going to make sure it got back there for my own sake.

So I followed her out the gate
and a good ways down Maple Street before I finally catch her. She’s gasping and blubbering and talking crazy, and I’m trying to get her to slow down and make sense. She wasn’t even talking in real words, just…what’s that word for it…oh yeah, gibberish. She’s just panting and crying and making sounds. I’ve never seen somebody that scared before, even a girl.

“Laura,” I yell at her. “Stop it! Which way is your house! We need to get that pen!”

She just keeps on blubbering and squeaking like she’s lost her mind. That’s when I decided to do what they do in the movies. I mean, if these weren’t hysterics…what were? Right? So I slapped her.

That’s right, I slapped her! Not punched her or threw her around like somebody must have told you I did, I just slapped her. And it worked. She got ahold of herself.

Then she slapped me back, which really pissed me off, but at least she stopped wheezing and freaking out.

“Laura! Focus! Where is your house from here? You got to get that pen, so I can take it back to the museum!”

“Wait,” she shakes her head. “You take the pen? But Barry…”

“Screw Barry! That chucklehead will just mess up again, or not take it back and say he did. Give me the pen and I’ll go straight to the museum and just hand them the damn thing. I’ll say somebody else took it and I’m returning it and that’s all they need to know. I’ll catch a little crap for it but I’m used to that. At least this way we know it
will be back where it belongs and Tarlington will leave you alone.”

I could tell she was sorta hot about the way I was dissing Barry, but I could also see she was going to go along with it. Even though she would never admit it, the girl knew I was right and she was a lot better off having me do the deed instead of her pet idiot. Of course, right about then I also figured out she wasn’t ever going to thank me for any of it but I didn’t care about that anymore.

“Okayyyy…” She looked at me like she wasn’t sure about it. “But how will you get there. You don’t have a car.”

“I’ll walk. It’ll take a couple of hours but that still gets the pen back before it even gets close to being dark. You can go along with me, or go sit in some restaurant or something like that where there’s a lot of people around you. Give me your number and I’ll call you when the deed is done.”

She was nodding along with me as I talked and I knew that was the way it was going to go down. I also knew she would be staying at the restaurant but, like I said, I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted out.

“Okay.
” Laura keeps nodding and seems to be getting more in control of herself. “Okay, we’ll do it your way.  My house is this way. It’s only a couple of more blocks.”

We start walking again and turn the corner to head down Wallace street. I can tell she’s
eager to get home now because she’s looking ahead of her like a horse headin’ for the barn. Yeah, that’s an expression my Grandpa used to use, but it’s the best way to describe it. Anyways, it’s just as well she was because I look back to see if anybody was around to watch our little scene in the street and guess who I see…