The Frighteners (2 page)

The old lady wasted no time. She ran from the room, skirting his outstretched fingers, fumbling open the lock, and hurling the door open. Her slippers again clopping on the floor, she ran along the hall and down the grand staircase to the first floor. As she moved, however, the figure followed. It ripped along the wallpaper, seldom leaving her sight entirely, keeping her terrified.

Old Lady Bartlett hurried down the stairs, past the old oil paintings of fishing boats in Fairwater Harbor and scenes of the sun rising over Plum Island, visible on clear days from the widow’s walk atop the house. When she got to the landing, she was just a few feet from the front door. Lightning flashed a spectrum of colors through the stained-glass window, which depicted a sperm whale in the act of being harpooned. Despite the storm, the outside of the house looked like salvation to her.

But as she reached for the door the Grim Reaper, who had disappeared from the stairwell wallpaper, reappeared in that surrounding the front door. This time the arms reached out to draw her into their hideous grasp. The fingertips twitched inward, as if to say, “come to me.”

Screaming, she spun around and ran across the foyer and through the dark dining room into the kitchen, where it was her habit to have a light burning. Another brass lamp, this one in the form of an oil lamp suspended from the wall above the old, four-burner gas stove, cast long shadows around a kitchen rich in history. A cast-iron meat grinder was bolted to a knife-scarred oak countertop. A white refrigerator with curved edges had toiled noisily since the 1950s. On the stove sat a tin coffee percolator and a cast-iron frying pan. A mayonnaise jar half-filled with bacon fat stood ready for use in frying eggs.

She looked around for a weapon and her eyes found the knife drawer that sat just a little askew after years of frequent use. As she stepped toward it the man who had chased her through the very fabric of the walls of Bartlett House appeared once again. This time he bulged out of the kitchen’s floral wallpaper—the design showed pink roses, white baby’s breath, and assorted greenery. The wallpaper was stretched as thin as the skin of a soap bubble, yet it didn’t break. The man was tall and seemed not to touch the floor as he walked, and the paper behind him sucked into a narrow band that reached back, like the stalk of a Venus flytrap, onto the wall. His features were finely chiseled this time, but to Old Lady Bartlett he wasn’t human. His eyes were strangely angled, and on his mouth was something that resembled a sadistic grin.

She whimpered as the paper-clad hands reached for her throat. Then her fingers found the handle to the knife drawer and succeeded in jerking it open. The drawer crashed to the floor, spilling knives onto the black-and-white-checked linoleum. The old woman reached down and fumbled for one.

She grabbed a large carving knife by the blade, and when she brought it up her fingers were dripping her own blood. Several cuts ran across her fingers between the second and third knuckles. The blood squeezed out between her trembling fingers as she turned the knife around and whirled, whimpering all the while, to face the evil thing that had been tormenting her daughter for such a long time.

She rained blow after blow on the thing that had bulged out of the wallpaper. She cut it and slashed it, and each time a rip appeared in the fabric of the monster, there was nothing underneath but musty Maine air. Rips healed seconds after they appeared. Old Lady Bartlett kept shredding the beast, but it kept healing, until at last she was exhausted and over the sound of the rain and the thunder she heard a taunting laugh.

The whole kitchen shook as, suddenly, the Grim Reaper sucked back into the wall. The wallpaper snapped back into shape, although shredded paper hung in long strips where she had cut it. Once again the whirring of the old refrigerator filled the room.

Old Lady Bartlett staggered out of the kitchen, back through the darkened dining room, pausing just long enough to switch on the ornate crystal chandelier suspended above the old oak captain’s table. Outside, the air seemed a bit stiller. The storm was passing over on its way inland from the North Atlantic. The rain still fell, but not in sheets; it ran over the top of the long-untended gutter and spilled onto the cobblestone walkway out front. The thunder was a distant memory, gone inland.

She staggered to the foot of the stairs, where she collapsed. She let go of the knife and clutched her bleeding hand. She sat there for a minute, two minutes, listening to the sound of the rain and her own sobbing, and then dried her eyes.

Suddenly the carpet surrounding her bulged up on both sides of her. It formed itself into the shape of gigantic fingers, four and five feet high, that wrapped around her and began to squeeze. She screamed as the fingers crushed through her velvet robe and began to squeeze the life out of her.

Then came a shout from the top of the stairs. “Leave her alone,” the voice said. It was Patricia.

Patricia Bartlett looked down from the top of the stairs, a disheveled-looking woman in her early fifties dressed in a white nightgown and gripping the top of the banister. Once she’d had a soft attractive face, but a lifetime of suffering had etched lines of sorrow around her eyes and mouth.

“It’s me you want,” she said, quieter this time.

With a guttural rumble, the fist that had encircled the old lady shrank away from her, then re-formed into the figure of the hooded man. Moving as quickly and silently as a panther, the gruesome figure ran up the stairs. Patricia watched with barren eyes and, at the last minute, collapsed onto the floor at the top of the stairs.

The hooded man moved silently around her, the carpet billowing up as it did around her mother, then grabbed her by the wrists. Silently, the man dragged her into her bedroom. She made no sound; her face was expressionless. The bedroom door slammed shut.

Two

M
agda Ravanski was one of those New York City career women who was out of place living and working in Fairwater, Maine, but had no clue about it. A tall and self-pampered woman of forty or so with hair dyed chestnut to cover the gray, she dressed immaculately and had a tendency to look down at her carefully tended nails while talking to one of her subordinates at the
Fairwater Gazette.

That was another thing wrong about the woman—the newspaper business, even in New York City, rarely attracted women who were more interested in how they looked than in how well they covered the news. A fashion consultant, Magda fell into the job of managing editor of the
Gazette
while on summer vacation with her third husband. When he left her high and dry in the Presidential Suite of the Smuggler’s Cove Inn, she needed a job, and fast. Newspaper work was the most glamorous job in town. She had worked on her college paper and written a column for the weekly fashion-industry magazine, and thus she argued her way into the managing-editor job. Besides, being a managing editor mainly entailed making sure the men under her did their jobs, and bossing others around was something that came easily to the woman.

On this day, when the streets were still glistening from the previous night’s downpour, the man she was bossing around was Steve Bayliss. The
Fairwater Gazette’s
junior reporter, he was a local lad only one generation away from working the lobster boats. Bayliss was trying hard to make his mark in journalism, even if all he had to prepare himself for the slot was a junior-college degree and a collection of videotapes of classic newspaper movies that included all five film versions of
The Front Page
as well as every episode of TV’s
Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

Bayliss was twenty-two but looked seventeen, clean-cut, hardworking, and eager to please, and that made him a perfect target for Magda Ravanski’s ire when she was in a bad mood, which she was a good deal of the time.

DEATH STRIKES AGAIN
read the headline of the story he was composing on his computer. In a window adjacent to the story was the photograph of a smiling yuppie sporting a forty-dollar haircut and an L. L. Bean polo shirt. Beneath the photo was the caption
Victim Chuck Hughes, age 30.

Magda read out loud as Bayliss fidgeted and tugged at the collar of his freshly pressed white shirt. “ ‘Third mysterious death this week, twenty-three in two months. What is happening to the people of Fairwater?’ ”

To him, she added, “What is happening, Steve, is a fit of bad writing.”

He cleared his throat.

She continued: “ ‘The mystery heart condition that has killed twenty-three people in two months has claimed another victim. Doctors are baffled as to why seemingly fit and healthy people are suffering massive heart attacks.’ ”

Magda sucked in her breath and sighed deeply. “Steve, I expected better from you.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Ravanski.”

“Please, call me Magda. I’ve asked you.”

“Sure . . . Magda.”

“I mean, this isn’t the
Daily Planet,
although if Superman is anywhere in the neighborhood I would love to hear from him.”

Steve smiled uncomfortably.

She said, “Remember: who, what, where, when, and why.”

He checked his notepad. “I have that written down.”

“Good. Memorize it. Who is Chuck Hughes? What happened? Okay, he died, we know that, and we know where and when—in Fairwater last night. The big question is why. The man looks fit to me.”

She bent over and looked more closely at the photo. As she did so the front of her blouse opened slightly and Steve got a whiff of the scent of Passion splashed between her breasts. He wondered, however, not about her sex life but if she didn’t need a new prescription for her contact lenses. Steve was
very
young, in fact as well as in appearance.

“The man looks very fit to me,” she concluded. “So what killed him? Don’t give me this half-assed speculation about strange epidemics of heart attacks. Here, look at what you wrote down here.”

She read out loud again: “ ‘Many of Fairwater’s residents are claiming that the shadow of Death has once again descended on the town.’ Steve, what’s this ‘shadow of Death’ stuff?”

“It’s what they’re saying,” Steve replied. “People are starting to freak out.”

“Steve, death is not a proper noun. There’s no capital
D.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, hanging his head.

She continued: “ ‘For decades the name of Fairwater has been synonymous with death, following the infamous 1954 Bradley-Bartlett murder spree, when twelve people died at the hands of hospital orderly John Charles Bradley and Patricia Anne Bartlett. Now, forty years later, the Grim Reaper is once again stalking the quiet streets of Fairwater.’ ”

It was Magda’s turn to hang her head. Steve went back to fidgeting. She said, “No, Steve . . . no, no, no. Have you learned nothing during your internship with us? This is tabloid trash . . . irresponsible scare mongering. What are you trying to say here? That Death is the greatest serial killer of all time? This really sucks, Steve.”

He flinched. Suddenly the prospect of working on a lobster boat alongside his father and grandfather no longer seemed quite so distant. He looked around nervously at the small newsroom, the six other denizens of which—two reporters, a secretary, a sportswriter, a gossip columnist, and the executive editor—were pretending they weren’t aware of the dressing-down he was getting. Bayliss loved the newsroom, even though it didn’t smell of ink and there wasn’t a single typewriter in the building, only computer screens and the soft tapping of electronic keyboards. He was not about to lose this job without a fight. He decided to risk Magda’s anger by defending himself.

“Magda, people are scared of what’s happening.”

“Me, too, I’m scared of what’s happening to a bright . . .”

She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed it. He gaped at her hand as if it were something just descended from an alien spacecraft.

Magda lowered her voice: “. . . and attractive young reporter.”

Again the scent of Passion drifted past his nose.

He said, “They never really forgot what happened here in 1954. I mean, that’s before my time.”

“Mine, too,” she said quickly.

“But my dad told me plenty about it. That Bradley-Bartlett pair were really brutal killers. Some people say they ripped the hearts out of their victims.”

“Now, Steve.”

“Well, that’s what my dad said.”

“You know what? Skip what your dad says, unless he’s giving advice on how to broil a five-pounder. This Hughes guy who died yesterday is being buried today. Call the coroner’s office and get some usable quotes. Get me detailed medical background. Find me a doctor who will go on record saying what killed Hughes.”

“Okay,” Bayliss agreed. At least he wasn’t being fired.

“Get quotes from the sheriff’s office. And please, get rid of all those references to Death as a person.”

“Sure thing, Magda,” he said. “I’ll get right on top of it.”

“That’s exactly what I want to hear,” she replied.

Seen at any time when it wasn’t night or pouring rain, Fairwater was a small but pretty town, nestled in a wooded valley where the Manasseh River flowed into Fairwater Bay. For the most part, houses were perched on the slopes of the hills that ringed the harbor, reachable only through a complex series of steep and winding roads.

The business district sat on the flat plain surrounding the harbor. Roads paralleled the series of docks, some of them dating back to the seventeenth century, when Fairwater was a stopover point in the coastal shipping trade that ran from Plymouth Colony and Salem through New Brunswick, Nova Scotia. Later in its history, Fairwater served as a whaling town second in importance only to Portsmouth. In the twentieth century, the harbor became a lobstering and yachting center. Most recently, tourism took hold in Fairwater, with restaurants, inns, and summer condos rising to cater to the same New York and Boston residents who made L. L. Bean shirts and slacks fashionable. To allow them better access, several on- and off-ramps connected the coastal highway with the business district and the harbor.