The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (24 page)

OUTSIDE HEAVENLY

Rio Youers

The pillar of black smoke could be seen from Heavenly. The townsfolk looked from their windows and gathered on sidewalks. They knew it was the Roth place burning, and they prayed for the girls but not the man.

#

Police Chief John Peck sat on the hood of his cruiser and watched the volunteer fire department hush the flames. It took all of the one thousand gallons carried in the engine and most of the two thousand carried in the tanker, but they got it down and when the smoke cleared the remains stood like an incomplete sketch. Ashes swirled and clung to the tall grass. Sassafras and oak at the edges of the lot creaked disagreeably. Some leaves were blackened. Beyond, the sky paled to iris-blue and a murmuration of starlings made a shape in the air and disappeared.

Calloway’s voice crackled over the radio. Peck had posted Calloway on Dogwood Road to turn away the curious, and with the Roth place in flames they could be many. Calloway told him that a truckful of menfolk had turned up to help, but Peck knew what they really wanted was to witness, up close, Roth struck low.

“It’s under control,” Peck said. Through haze and dancing ash he saw the fire chief approaching. “You thank them boys and send them on their way.”

He slid off the hood and met the fire chief in the climbing sunlight, away from the smoke and ash.

“She’s out, but we’ll keep a close eye.” Joe Neath had headed Heavenly’s fire department for seven years. In his other life, he was the foreman at Gator Steel and a father of five. “Out doesn’t mean dead, ‘specially in this heat.”

“Any idea what started it?”

“No obvious point of origin, but Perry Horne will be out later and he can tell us more.” Joe unzipped his jacket a little way and palmed sweat from his throat. “I don’t need a fire marshal to tell you it wasn’t an accident, though.”

Peck sighed and stiffened his jaw. The fire chief nodded, started toward the ruin. Peck followed. They skirted the yard where dry grass ticked, then crossed to the house’s eastern face, intact but damaged. The ground was soupy from the hoses’ spray. Peck stepped around the deeper puddles where the sky was reflected dull. A child’s soft toy stared at him with stitches for eyes.

“You might want to ready yourself,” Joe said.

Heat drove off the building and kinked the air and Peck felt his shirt latch to his back. The smell was char and smoke but something else, too. A sharp scent that kicked like ammonia. Peck cupped a hand over his nose and mouth. Ashes brushed his cheeks. They neared a window black as a box of soot with the glass broken and faux wooden blinds part-melted to the frame. Within, the carbonised remains of the living room. Most everything was stripped to whatever wouldn’t burn. Peck noted the steel frame of a bed that had collapsed from the room above and what remained of the armchair where Beau Roth no doubt watched TV and sank beer and contemplated wrongs. Peck would study the scene later, when it was safer, but for now he couldn’t see much beyond the savagery.

The corpse hung by its arms from a support beam. It was headless and naked. The stomach was open from sternum to groin and the entrails strung around the room. They—like the rest of the body—were red and blistered but not burned through.

“Jesus Christ.” Peck turned away and tried to breathe deeply but the air was too choked. He spluttered and spat in the dirt.

“No accident,” Joe said.

“Well, Christ.” Peck looked again and turned away quicker than before. His nostrils flared. “That Beau, you think?”

“I’d say.” Joe wiped more sweat from his throat. “Torso’s about the right size.”

“Yeah.” Peck nodded. “Why didn’t he burn up?”

“Makes no sense.”

“The girls?”

“No sign.”

The two men looked at each other. They were the same age and height—forty-three, a little under six feet—and shared a similar build, once muscular but starting to soften. It was as if growing up in Heavenly had shaped them similarly, like two dunes sculpted by the same winds. They said nothing but much passed between them. Peck sleeved grey sweat from his brow and shook his head.

A small section of the back wall crumbled and fell. Embers lifted and died in the air. Peck’s radio squawked and he grabbed it, thankful for the diversion. He started to speak but got a chestful of that bad air and coughed. He strode clear of the house and tried again.

“What you got, Ty?”

Tyler Bray was a part-time cop and most-time grease monkey at Go Auto, which made him useful when it came to maintaining the department’s two vehicles. He was young and enthusiastic, but better with a wrench than he was with a badge. Peck had him skirting Roth’s two acres for signs of anything untoward, mainly to keep him out of the way.

“I found Mary Roth, Chief.”

“What’s your twenty?”

“A short sprint northerly.” Ty’s voice was tight with nervous excitement; he wasn’t rotating tires now. “A hundred yards, I’d say. There’s an old pickup sitting on blocks, but I doubt you’ll see it with the grass being–”

“Step on the roof a moment, Ty. Flap those long arms.”

Peck looked north where the grass moved like a great hand was brushing over it, and after a moment Ty’s head poked up and he waved his arms. Peck started briskly toward him, cutting a trail through grass that started at his knees, then climbed to his chest and beyond. Rat snakes whipped out of sight and some tightened as he stepped over them, tongues at the air. Peck kept the mast of dark smoke at his back and turned often to keep his bearing.

Mary Roth knelt head down, arms crossed over her face. Her dress was faded, dirty, and had rucked up to her pale stomach. Her thighs were smeared with soot and grime.

“She say anything?” Peck asked Ty, stepping abreast of him.

“Not a word, Chief.”

“Mary? Mary… it’s Chief Peck.”

The sun had risen fast and seemed dedicated to this thin clearing behind the abandoned pickup. Peck felt sweat trickle to his beltline and the heat at the back of his neck was heavy as a metal bar. He blew over his upper lip and crouched beside the woman. He could smell the smoke in her hair.

“Mary?”

Peck had known her all her life—Beau’s only child, and to look at her was to cry, imagining what she might have been under kinder circumstances. But Beau was a fiercely wicked man who crushed all that could be loved. Mary—like all—was born beautiful. Thirty-two now with ghosts on her shoulders, her spirit withered like some sweet fruit dried in the heat.

“Talk to me, Mary.”

He crouched lower and saw her mouth through her crossed arms. Teeth clenched.

“Are you hurt?”

A beat, and then she shook her head and uncrossed her arms. She used the hem of her dress to mop wet eyes. Soot beneath her fingernails. Smudged across her brow. She breathed and her upper body trembled, as if the world’s hard edges had been packed into her lungs.

“This all…” Mary gestured at the truck and the clearing, then wider: at the trees, sky, and everything. “This all seems lesser now, like something that can be opened and poured out.”

Peck wiped his eyes and saw Beau Roth disemboweled and headless. Crows bristled suddenly from the grass and made south, calling.

“You need to tell me what happened, Mary.”

She almost smiled. There was red in her eyes. “Nothing but the devil’s doing.” Her hands trembled, curled to fists. “That son of a bitch got what he deserved.”

#

Mary Roth weighed all of one hundred and twenty pounds and her fifteen-year-old daughter—Cindy: missing—was yet smaller. There was no way that, even working together, they could have strung up Beau’s corpse. He was a truck of a man, loaded with old muscle. Peck knew he had some work to do.

The interview room was small and cool and—until about an hour ago—used mainly for storage. Interrogation was not one of Peck’s regular duties. His days were spent on admin, general upkeep, and—when there was time—patrolling. Every now and then he’d be called to settle a dust-up, or would ticket speeders on the open stretch of blacktop between Heavenly and Gray Point. It was an unremarkable department, comprised of three full-time cops, one part-timer, and one volunteer. Enough for a two-stoplight town. Even so, Peck rarely worked fewer than sixty hours a week.

He and Ty cleared the interview room while Mary Roth got cleaned up and checked by paramedics. Calloway led her in just a little shy of noon. Her chestnut hair had been brushed and clasped back from her face, which was pale and sad, and her eyes had the look of cold water. She wore clothes salvaged from the town hall’s lost and found. A Nike sweatshirt and a pair of basketball shorts almost as long on her as pants. She took a seat and placed her trembling hands flat on the table. Her fingernails had been scrubbed.

“Am I under arrest?”

“No, Mary.”

“I may as well be; I got nowhere else to go.”

She closed her eyes and a tear slipped fast onto her cheek. Peck nodded at Calloway and he left the room. For a moment the only sound was electricity in the walls and the sigh of the A/C. Peck set the audio recorder running. Tape spooled with a hiss.

“Tell me what happened, Mary. Leave nothing out.”

She looked at him. “I tell you a lie and you’ll think I’m guilty.” She looked away. “I tell you the truth and you’ll think I’m insane.”

“Let’s go with the truth.”

“I already told you.” Another tear, quick as the first. “It was the devil’s doing.”

Peck looked at the running tape and knew that the clock was ticking. County forensic units were already on the scene. If he didn’t get answers soon, Pine County or state police investigators would take the reins. They’d be direct, insensitive. Peck didn’t want them in his town.

“Your father’s dead,” he said. “Your daughter’s missing. No doubt the devil played his part.”

Mary wiped her eyes and they flickered and she stared for a long moment at the blank wall. There was a depth to her expression that made him turn away. He’d learned to study aspect and body language, where the truths were often clearer than anything spoken. The weight of her eyelids, the set of her mouth, her hands palm-down on the table, illustrated a single truth that unnerved him: Mary was haunted.

“I want to help you,” Peck said.

“I’m beyond that.”

“And I want to find Cindy.”

“She’s been gone a long time.”

“Talk to me, Mary.”

A mile out of town the Roth place—what remained—stood black and wet. The air still smelled of smoke and that other thing, sharp like ammonia. The vehicles plugging the yard belonged to the fire marshal and the county forensics unit, each working to assemble pieces that might make something like a picture. In Heavenly proper, tongues ran like a new fire and the devil was mentioned more than once, always in regard to Beau himself. In the interview room, the tape ran and the A/C purred. John Peck said little. Mary Roth blinked tears that flashed and unbridled her ghosts.

#

“Momma died. Some brain thing, so they say. Thirty and dead, and I think God walked out on us the day we parked her box in the ground. Daddy got closer. First in a way that was affectionate, and then overly familiar. He raped me on my eleventh birthday. I felt afterward like a dress that had been left out in the wind and sun, all colourless and tattered. Something that could never be worn pretty. At fourteen I was pregnant with his child. You didn’t know about that. The child was born—a boy—and at five months he fell off the bed and knocked his head good. He cried a lot and died in the night. Daddy buried him in the garden, like a dog with a bone. This all has nothing to do with the fire, except it does: when God is so missing from your life, the devil has more room to move.”

Peck inhaled through his nose, his teeth locked and lightly grinding. He showed no emotion, but felt inside as though a match had been struck close to his heart.

“Daddy lost his job when Gator Steel cut loose a lot of manpower, and life moved from bad to worse in a hurry. I thought about running away. Even killing myself. I don’t know if it’s courage or stupidity that keeps a person from doing those things, but whatever it is, I got plenty of it. Daddy found work after a time. Nothing solid. Just here-and-there jobs. Cutting wood. Raking leaves. That kind of thing. I started waitressing at Captain Griddle. Daddy didn’t like me leaving the house, but I brought in as much money as him and he found no room to argue. Anyway, that’s where I met Gordy Lee. Short order cook. Some sweet, but not exactly busy between the ears.”

Peck nodded. He remembered Gordy. Cleft lip and a stutter. Gordy got knocked around by his older brothers. Peck would often see him cooking eggs with bruises about his face and then one day he wasn’t cooking eggs any more. Rumour was he’d made tracks to Canada, but nobody knew for sure.

“We fooled around,” Mary said, “but it was nothing much. Then one night when we were alone, cleaning up, he lifted my skirt and pumped himself into me, and I didn’t stop him. Boy came like a horse and we made more than eggs in that kitchen. I told him a couple months later and he ripped quick out of town. Guess he wasn’t ready to be a daddy—or to deal with
my
daddy. Chicken-livered, harelipped ol’ son of a whore, either way you cut it.”

“And Gordy is Cindy’s father?”

“Yes, sir. She got his brown eyes and that’s all.”

“You ever hear from him?”

“No, sir.”

“You don’t know where he is?”

“No, sir.”

Peck let his mind run an unlikely track: Gordy Lee—nearly sixteen years tougher and uglier—shooting south to claim his little girl, and taking care of Beau Roth in the bargain. Again Peck saw Beau hanging by his wrists, headless, guts strung about the blackened room. He remembered the bruised, skinny kid cooking eggs at Captain Griddle and couldn’t get the pieces to fit, no matter which way he turned them.

Still, he asked, “You think Gordy may have tried to get in touch with Cindy?”

“No, sir.” Mary shook her head. “Boy was a coward. A stupid one, at that. He could cook eggs and fuck like a bug, but that’s about it.”