Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (6 page)

nothing. Later a diver went in, and the next morning they dragged

the bottom. But they didn’t find any trace of a little girl, dead or alive.

They did find a body, just after dawn, but it wasn’t underwater.

It was a boy’s body, and it was hidden in a stand of cattails.

The kid was wearing a New York Yankees uniform. It was my

brother Roger, and he’d been beaten to death.
Blunt object trauma
was the phrase they used.

That could have meant a wrecking-ball fist had taken him down.

Or it could have meant the mummy had used Roger’s own

Louisville Slugger to finish the job.

They found the Slugger just a few feet from my brother’s dead

body.

It’s the one thing of Roger’s that I still have.

Once people learned what Charlie Steiner had been up to in the weeks and months before that fateful Halloween night, they discovered he sure enough fit the m.o. for a kid who’d gone nuts enough to dress up like a Halloween boogeyman and charge a pair of fully armed cops.

Behind Charlie’s house—which was just this side of the

boondocks, and not too far from the dirt road that skirted the lake—

Sheriff Cross discovered a path chopped through heavy brush. It was a little wider than a deer run, and it snaked up a hill. At the top of that hill was Charlie’s own private temple. Google the name of this town and the word “mummy,” and you’ll find pictures of it. Some people

say Charlie built it, that it was some kind of plywood pyramid, but I’ve seen it inside and out and I can tell you that’s an exaggeration. It NORMAN PARTRIDGE [47]

was (and still is) a simple A-frame design—that’s how the pyramid

stories got started—but it had four sides. And, sure, Charlie did paint Egyptian-style pictures and hieroglyphs on it back in the day, but all that stuff faded away a long time ago.

To tell the truth, there wasn’t much
inside
to the place at all, then or now. One large room with a narrower loft cubby up above, the

kind of place that used to sit in a far-off corner of a large property so the owner would have a hideout with just enough space to get into

some trouble out of sight of the main house.

And maybe that’s what the place was in the old days, when the

A-frame had been in better repair. The whole property had made the slide to rack and ruin by the time Charlie’s folks bought it. But in the old days—who knows? I’ve heard the old road along the swamp was

once used by bootleggers who wanted to skirt the two-lane county

highway on delivery runs. Hey, anything’s possible. Histories get

lost—for houses, for places . . . even for people.

But the little slice of history made by Charlie Steiner in his

A-frame hideaway wasn’t lost at all. No, after the incident at Butcher’s Lake, the contents of Charlie’s own private temple were photographed, cataloged, and filed, using the best police science of the day. Examine that stuff today and it looks like it belonged in a clubhouse for an obsessed monsterkid. The walls were papered with one-sheets from

the old Universal creepers, and there were lobby cards and eight-

by-tens of Lon Chaney, Jr. doing his thing as Kharis. Comic books

featuring an army of Kharis wannabes, too. Paperback novels, plus a couple magazines tipping monsterkids to Hollywood makeup secrets.

There was even a stack of 8mm monster movies and a cheap projector.

Remember, this was 1963—a long time before VHS, let alone DVD.

There was other stuff, too. Charlie had taken Woodshop 1,

2, and 3 in high school, and he’d learned enough to build himself

his very own Egyptian sarcophagus. A couple professors from the

State U came out and looked at it, and they said Charlie might have made something of himself as an archeology student if he’d taken

another path. They analyzed some other Egypt-ware he had in his

little hideaway, too. There was a brazier that looked like a real-deal museum piece, a collection of little jars with odd-smelling oils, and

[48] THE MUMMY'S HEART

a box with a bunch of leaves the guys at the local nursery couldn’t identify. The profs from State U fingered the brazier as a knockoff piece of bric-a-brac from the days of the King Tut craze in the

1920s, and the carved box came from the same era, but they didn’t

have any more luck identifying those leaves than the nurserymen

did. A rumor spread that Charlie had himself a stash of marijuana, but surely the profs would have known what that was. Even though

Mickey Spillane always bumped Jack Kerouac out of the paperback

racks around here, we weren’t that far off the map. There’s no doubt a couple of college guys would have known reefer when they saw it.

But it wasn’t the drugs (or possibility of same) that kept the story pot bubbling. No. The mummy mythos did that job. Of course, there

weren’t too many people around here who knew much about Kharis

and his eternal search for a reincarnated princess, but that changed PDQ. The local all-night TV station took a clue and started running those old movies on the
Late Late Show
, and a lot of folks stayed up watching, looking for answers. Not long after that, we had a town full of experts. You’d hear people sitting around in coffee shops discussing reincarnation, black magic, and all the rest of it. A couple of tabloids picked up the story, too. One of them ran a piece called “The Terror of Butcher Lake.” That’s where the name came from, and it stuck.

Sheriff Cross and Deputy Myers became mummy experts, too.

Just like everyone else, they coffee’d up and watched those Universal movies on the
Late Late Show
. After the mummy marathon aired, Cross even borrowed the prints from the TV station and ran them

on the big screen at the local Bijou for some of the guys from the D.A.’s office, the state shrinks, and a few other invitees. God knows what that crowd made of them. I’ve always wondered if they just sat there stunned, or if they ate popcorn and had themselves a ball. I especially wonder about Sheriff Cross—after all, he’d gunned down

the thing. It must have been something to see its twin take loads

of buckshot and keep on coming, even if it was just a Hollywood

shadowshow up on the big screen.

Of course, the Hollywood part of the equation was just the

sizzle for the story, not the steak. The inventory of Charlie’s temple didn’t stop there, because there was more locked up in his personal NORMAN PARTRIDGE [49]

madhouse besides the movie stuff. There were books about black

magic, too. A stack of them. And there were notebooks Charlie

had written with lots of missing pages, and other books with whole chapters cut out.

But by then, it really didn’t matter.

After all, Charlie Steiner was dead.

For the next few weeks, I told the story over and over. My parents didn’t let me talk to any reporters, of course. It’s hard to believe with the way things are now. These days people spill their guts anywhere and everywhere, but that didn’t happen back then. You kept your

business to yourself unless the cops told you otherwise, and that’s the way we played it. I talked to a couple of doctors, and I talked to someone from the district attorney’s office. Of course, I talked to Sheriff Cross, too.

I told all of them the same story. How Roger and me and the

preacher’s kid had come across the mummy—or Charlie Steiner.

How he seemed to be working some kind of magic spell, and how

he’d tossed a bound girl into the water after saying something about dreams, and wishes, and sacrifice.

It really was a simple story, and it didn’t change. But every time I told it, the whole thing always came back to one question that

punched a hole in the whole deal: Where was the little girl? They

never did find her body in the lake. And, sure, there had been a

couple young girls reported missing in neighboring towns during the preceding months, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, if Charlie had tossed a missing girl into Butcher’s Lake, they should have found her body. Drowned girls didn’t just disappear into thin air.

Pretty soon, that girl in the princess mask was all the doctors

wanted to talk about. I can’t really blame them. After all, I’d been busted up pretty good that night. I had a concussion. I was still

having headaches several weeks after the fact. My sentences would

run off to nowhere, and my thoughts would run to places I didn’t

like. I wasn’t sleeping too well and I admit I had problems putting things together after a while.

Not the story, but other things.

[50] THE MUMMY'S HEART

The story was always there in my head.

The story was always the same.

I knew what I saw and heard that night, and I was sure it happened just the way I remembered it.

But, in the end, it didn’t matter what I thought. The doctors

brought in a headshrinker from upstate, and he put the word out

that I was having trouble separating reality from fantasy. Something about disassociation, or misassociation, or something like that. All this, because I stuck to my story about a little girl who no one could find. That, and the fact that sometimes I talked about a mummy, and didn’t talk about Charlie Steiner at all.

Like it mattered.

Like that thing hadn’t been real for me on Halloween night.

For most people, that delivered the entire episode to the closing

gate. Sure, something had happened out there in the darkness, and

my brother was dead. But as far as the state shrinks and the D. A.

were concerned, they already had the culprit responsible for my

brother’s murder. That kid’s name was Charlie Steiner, and Charlie wasn’t talking to anyone. He’d died in his very own boogeyman suit.

The undertaker didn’t have to do much work on him—Charlie’s belly

had been hollowed out by the sheriff’s shotgun, and there weren’t

enough guts left in his carcass to fill a whore’s nylon. So they sluiced the blood off Charlie and scraped off his makeup and dressed him up in a suit that had already been a couple sizes too small on him a few years before. Didn’t matter, because there was less of Charlie now.

His family (such as it was) didn’t even hold a funeral. They wanted Charlie in the ground double-quick, and they didn’t have any money anyway. So the county took care of things, and they did a first-class, bang-up job.

I’ve heard that some of Charlie’s wounds leaked so bad you could

hear the formaldehyde sloshing around in his plywood coffin when

they hauled him off to the local Potter’s Field. They dropped him

in a hole and covered him over. They didn’t even put a tombstone

on Charlie’s grave, though it didn’t take long for most of the kids in town to figure out where it was.

Pretty soon guys were daring each other to climb the wrought-

NORMAN PARTRIDGE [51]

iron fence and take a piss on old Charlie, the trick being to do the job without the terror of Butcher’s Lake reaching up and pulling them

down to hell by the short hairs. And not too long after that . . . well, people have short memories, don’t they?

They forget.

They forgot the Terror of Butcher’s Lake.

They forgot Charlie Steiner.

They forgot my brother Roger.

And life moved on.

For most people, anyway.

For most people, that’s the way they like it.

The story ends, and they turn the page.

So life moved on, the way it does. I finished junior high and started high school. But everything I did, I figured Roger would have done better. It made me feel kind of like a shadow, two steps behind a guy who wasn’t even there to cast it anymore.

Fresh out of high school, I got drafted. Uncle Sam sent me to

Vietnam, and I stayed there four years. That was the first thing I felt I did on my own, so it didn’t seem like such a bad deal to me. Of course, I couldn’t leave everything behind. I took Roger’s Louisville Slugger with me. Sometimes I used it on scruffy baseball fields . . . most of the larger bases had ball fields. Sometimes I took it into the jungle, but I never used it there. It was just something to help me keep away the bad dreams.

Funny to be in a jungle and dream about a desert, or a mummy,

but it happened.

Over and over, night after night.

But after a couple years, I stopped dreaming about the mummy.

I dreamed about the jungle instead, and the war. I was crazy enough to think that marked some kind of progress, but looking back on it maybe all I did was trade one bad dream for another.

Then I came home and slipped back into the world. I borrowed

a car, drove around. Started doing some of the same things I’d done before I left. And then the dreams started to change again.

I dreamed about my brother, and Butcher’s Lake.

[52] THE MUMMY'S HEART

And the girl in the princess mask.

And the mummy.

I’d wake up sweating, with my head feeling like it was ready to

crack. Finally one morning I didn’t go for a drive. I started looking at the newspaper classifieds instead. Figured it was time to find work, something new that would put the past behind me. For a while I

even thought about college, because I could have used my G. I. Bill benefits.

But that whole plan changed one morning with a couple of

knocks on the front door. It was Sheriff Cross. Older and grayer, but still built like a guy who could hold his own with just about anyone.

“Hey, Sergeant. Welcome home.”

“Thanks.” I knew I should have said more, since I was practically

a kid the last time I’d seen him, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“Got a minute?” he asked. “I’ve got something here I’d like to

show you.”

“Sure.”

Sheriff Cross had a new leather wallet. He flipped it open. There

was a deputy sheriff’s badge inside. He flipped the wallet closed and handed it to me. I took it from him.