Read Allhallow's Eve: (Richard Laymon Horror Classic) Online
Authors: Richard Laymon
Allhallow's Eve: (Richard Laymon Horror Classic)
Copyright © 1985 Richard Laymon
The right of Richard Laymon to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.
First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2012
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Cover photograph © Nejron Photo/Shutterstock
Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library
eISBN : 978 0 7553 9159 2
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Richard Laymon wrote over thirty novels and seventy short stories. In May 2001,
The Travelling Vampire Show
won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, a prize for which Laymon had previously been shortlisted with
Flesh, Funland, A Good, Secret Place
(Best Anthology) and
A Writer’s Tale
(Best Non-fiction). Laymon’s works include the books of the Beast House Chronicles:
The Celler, The Beast House
and
The Midnight Tour
. Some of his recent novels have been
Night in the Lonesome October, No Sanctuary
and
Amara
.
A native of Chicago, Laymon attended Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, and too an MA in English Literature from Loyola University, Los Angeles. In 2000, he was elected President of the Horror Writers’ Association. He died in February 2001.
Laymon’s fiction is published in the United Kingdom by Headline, and in the United States by Leisure Books and Cemetery Dance Publications.
Praise for Richard Laymon:
‘This author knows how to sock it to the reader’
The Times
‘A brilliant writer’
Sunday Express
‘No one writes like Laymon and you’re going to have a good time with anything he writes’ Dean Koontz
‘In Laymon’s books, blood doesn’t so much as drip as explode, splatter and coagulate’
Independent
‘Stephen King without a conscience’ Dan Marlowe
‘Incapable of writing a disappointing book’
New York Review of Science Fiction
‘A gut-crunching writer’
Time Out
‘This is an author that does not pull his punches … A gripping, and at times genuinely shocking, read’
SFX Magazine
Also by Richard Laymon and published by Headline
The Beast House Trilogy:
The Cellar
The Beast House
The Midnight Tour
Beware!
Dark Mountain
The Woods are Dark
Out are the Lights
Night Show
Allhallow’s Eve
Flesh
Resurrection Dreams
Alarums
Blood Games
Endless Night
Midnight’s Lair*
Savage
In The Dark
Island
Quake
Body Rides
Bite
Fiends
After Midnight
Among the Missing
Come Out Tonight
The Travelling Vampire Show
Dreadful Tales
Night in the Lonesome October
No Sanctuary
Amara
The Lake
The Glory Bus
Funland
The Stake
*previously published under the pseudonym of Richard Kelly
Clara Hayes had lived alone in the last house on Oakhurst Road ever since a heart attack struck her husband at the top of the stairs and he tumbled down to land at her feet. Dr Harris said the broken neck killed him before cardiac arrest got the chance. That was eleven years ago.
He’d been a cranky old bastard, and she was well rid of him.
Alfred was a far better companion than her husband had been, even though Alfred spent most of the day stalking through the cemetery behind the house.
The ten o’clock news came on, so Clara knew it was time for Alfred to come in. She used her remote to turn off the television, then picked up her cane and hobbled out to the kitchen. She opened the back door.
A chilly wind blew against her. She took a deep breath of the fresh October air, and peered across her yard.
‘Al-l-l-fred!’ she called.
Generally, she would hear the clink of his collar tags before ever seeing him. She listened, but heard only the dry shuffling of leaves on the graveyard trees.
‘Al-l-l-fred?’
Careful not to fall – her broken hip last year had laid her up good and proper for five months – she stepped down the three wooden stairs to the yard. She made her way across the moonlit lawn, and stopped at the edge of her flower bed. From there, she peered through the bars of the cemetery fence. So dark over there, the trees shading the moon.
‘Al-l-l-l-fred!’ she called. Much too loudly. She imagined heads rising in their coffins, turning – corpses listening to her voice. Softly, she called, ‘Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.’
Her eyes searched the darkness.
Saw a solitary figure near the cemetery fence.
Gasping, she took a quick step backwards. Her foot slipped on the dewy grass. She jabbed down her cane, and caught her balance.
‘Dear me,’ she muttered.
She looked again at the dark figure – the stone angel of a monument she’d seen thousands of times before, in daylight. The graveyard looked so different at night. She didn’t like it, not one bit. She should’ve stayed in the doorway to call Alfred, the way she always did after dark.
‘You just stay out,’ she muttered, ‘if that’s your drother.’
She turned away from the cemetery, and started her journey back to the open kitchen door. She hurried. The back of her neck tingled with gooseflesh, and she knew it wasn’t the wind’s doing.
I’m just being silly, she thought. That graveyard’s safe as apple pie. I’m just letting my jitters get the best of me.
Never yet been a corpse crawl out of its hole and go chasing after live folks. It’s not hardly about to start happening tonight.
Fur brushed her leg, and she yelped.
Alfred scampered up the porch steps, stopped abruptly in the doorway, and looked over his shoulder at Clara.
‘You rascal,’ she said,
She took a deep, shaky breath, and pressed a hand to her chest.
‘Scared my wits out,’ she told him.
She started to climb the steps.
That’s when she heard a quiet, muffled clank rather like a crowbar dropping onto a wooden floor. Staring at Alfred, she hardly breathed.
The cat turned away, as if bored. He disappeared into the kitchen. Clara hurried in after him. She swung the kitchen door shut, and locked it.
Alfred sat down in front of the refrigerator. He looked back at Clara.
‘Not just now,’ Clara whispered.
Turning off the kitchen light, she limped into the dining room. She made her way past her highboy. The room was dark, but she saw no use in planting herself smack in front of the window where she just might be seen – so she approached the window from its side.
If she just had one of those cardboard periscopes like Willy used to play with … Well, you couldn’t ever see much with that contraption, anyhow.
Bracing herself on the cane, she leaned toward the window. She eased aside the soft, priscilla curtains and peered out.
The Sherwood house, next door, looked no different
from usual. The old colonial was just as dreary and forlorn as could be: its driveway and lawn overgrown, its siding sadly in need of paint, its windows boarded over.
Though she couldn’t see its front door from here, she knew it was padlocked shut. So was the back door. Glendon Morley, the real estate man, had the only keys.
Maybe he’d gone in, for some reason. Didn’t seem likely, though. He hadn’t come by with house-hunters since July, and Clara suspected he’d given up on trying to foist off the place. Who’d want to live there, after what happened?
