"Shit, J.C., I don't know." Beans was impatient with his inquisitors. "I just know that we need to leave an offering. It's what we gotta do, or things are gonna get all screwed up."
"What kind of offering?" the Pieman asked.
"It's gotta come from Timmie." Beans turned to the girl. "You got anything we can use?"
Timmie patted her pockets, shaking her head. "I didn't know I was supposed to bring something, but I guess..."
"That's okay," Beans assured her. "We'll find something." He watched as Timmie pulled a small handful of coins from her front pocket and an old, battered man's wallet from the rear.
Beans reached for the wallet and flipped through the cracked yellow, plastic photo folder. "Perfect!" he exclaimed, pulling out a much-weathered color photo. It displayed an informal family scene.
Looking over Beans' shoulder, Jeremiah could see a picture of what must have been Timmie four or five years ago. Beside her, a grinning older boy stared defiantly into the lens of the camera. Behind the two of them was Timmie's mother, who looked much older and more tired now. Next to Timmie's mother, a tall handsome man gazed off slightly to the right. It must have been Timmie's father. Before the divorce. Long before last night.
Beans took the photo and carefully began to tear it apart.
Timmie's hand shot out to stop him.
He stepped back, away from her reach. "It's okay, Timmie. I won't ruin your mom or dad. But we need Gary."
She let her hand fall to her side and watched apprehensively as Beans rotated the picture in his fingers, tearing out the picture of the young boy, removing him from the family.
Beans handed the mutilated photo back to the girl. "Sorry, Timmie," he said softly, conciliatory. "But we need a suitable offering. Give me your change too. The more the better. It can't hurt." He held out his hand for the small fistful of coins she still clutched. "J.C., Pieman, give me your change."
The two boys dug into their pockets and handed Beans whatever small change they had between them. From his own pocket, Beans added three quarters and a number of pennies.
"Here." Beans held out the money and the fragment of photo to Timmie. "You'd better do this. It's your problem; it should be your offering." He dumped the lot into the girl's cupped hands and stood aside. "Take it out there." He pointed toward the center of the glade, to a spot near the twisted, dead tree. "There's a hole under the big rock at the bottom of the tree."
They watched as Timmie stepped hesitantly out into the light of the glade. Her footfall made no sound on the soft grass. Around them the silence grew as the air in the trees died along with the bird chatter, which had been incessant since their arrival had momentarily interrupted it.
In the hush, Timmie walked slowly to the center of the glade.
She seems very small and fragile out there, Jeremiah thought. With chin held up, shoulders squared, back straight and hands cupped before her, she looked like the celebrant of some religious ritual. The sun sparkled in her short light-blond hair, causing it to glow almost white, like the halo around the head of a saint.
Watching Timmie walk across the glade, Jeremiah felt a tug at his heart. She looked so vulnerable in the open space. At any moment he expected to see wild men or savage Indians rushing toward her from the dark woods. It was a slow motion movie. But there were no wild men or Indians.
Across the glade, Jeremiah could see Petie, standing now, watching the girl as were the rest of them.
Exactly in the middle of the open area, next to the tree, a small hillock covered in grass rose up about two feet. This mound wasn't much different from the many others around the glade, except that, perched on top, was a large black rock.
From where he stood, Jeremiah guessed the stone must have weighed 30 or 40 pounds. He watched Timmie approach until she was standing beside the rise in the ground.
She looked back at the three of them.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jeremiah glimpsed Beans nodding to the girl as if giving her permission or encouragement.
Holding her small treasures in one hand, Timmie reached over and, with considerable effort, lifted up one side of the large stone. Carefully, she placed the piece of photograph and the coins under the rock. She let the rock settle back on top of everything and brushed off her hands on the legs of her jeans. She held them out in a what-do-I-do now gesture.
Beans waved her to come back.
Timmie returned faster than she had gone. It was as if, now that her chore was done, she wanted to be out of the limelight and away from the glare of the open space.
Simultaneously, the three boys reached for the girl as she approached. It was as if together they wanted to retrieve her from the open glade before it could pull her back and claim her for itself.
"Good job!" Beans whispered, welcoming Timmie back into the fold with a pat on the back.
"Do you think it'll work?" she asked.
"No. We'll work," Beans said. "The offering is just insurance. It'll help, but we still gotta do our job. Come on, let's get out of here."
The tall boy led the other three back around the edge of the clearing as quickly as possible. On the other side, Petie waited, still silent. Although the four older kids had never been out of his sight, the small boy's relief at their return was evident.
Beans patted Petie on the head. "You're okay, Petie. Think you can lead us out of here?"
Petie beamed and grunted. "Yeah." Whirling around, the youngster headed back into the underbrush and began picking his way confidently through the trees.
THE HAUNT
After the birth of their third child, Kevin and Karen Marsh rent an unseen vacation seaside cottage in distant, isolated San Sebastian. Even before they can settle in, their dog balks and runs. Seventeen year-old Gillian claims she hears noises under the house. On their first morning they discover the rotting corpses of a dead cat's kittens, and when Kevin sends twelve-year-old Scott out to dispose of the bodies, the boy returns with a picnic basket of homemade goods he found on the porch. Karen marvels at the friendliness of their neighbors. Little do the Marsh's know how friendly the villagers will become over the summer. Karen becomes obsessed with cleaning their cottage while Kevin tries to finish writing his long delayed novel. The teenagers find their own diversions and peculiar new friends, unaware that they are all being woven into a web of horror the village and its dowager leader have designed for them. [Explicit sex and violence and supernatural terror]
THE HAUNT (CHAPTER ONE)
Kevin Marsh felt bile in the back of his throat.
Oh God, he thought, what the hell is that awful smell?
The unfamiliar crash of invisible waves beat against the shoreline in the darkness behind him, back beyond his family, waiting at the fence that separated the yard from the beach.
What the hell have I gotten us into? he wondered as he pushed at the door of the cottage. He tried to hold his breath against the sickly-sweet odor.
He was tired, irritable--and worried about Karen. Her pregnancy had gone well up to now, but the uncomfortable, day-long trip from the desert to the coast--from unbearable heat to an incredible damp chill--with two bickering kids, a suckling child, a nervous cocker spaniel and a fluttering parakeet had been rougher than he'd expected. Now she was standing with the kids between the house and the waves, in the middle of a wind-scrubbed nowhere, while he investigated the huge house on the beach.
Instinctively he'd thought it better that Gillian and Scott wait at the gate with their mother and the baby while he went ahead and scouted with their only flashlight what the advertisement had called a “cottage.”
In the shadows by the gate, Kevin had expected his wife to protest, as if keeping them all together were more important than individual safety, but he was surprised when she just nodded and reached out to pull Gillian and Scott closer. She was a strong-willed woman and often more capable than he of making quick, firm decisions. But this t
ime she deferred to him with silent acquiescence.
As Kevin begin to move away, he noticed Scott shift into the crook of his mother's arm, whereas Gillian shrugged off the gesture with her usual I'm-too-adult-to-need-that-kind-of-kid-stuff teenage contempt.
The yard was suitably large, spread out in a dark dirt veldt between the house and the fence, on the other side of which sand took over from the lush grass. The path from the front gate to the house was paved with flagstones that led across the dark yard like a river of stone.
Kevin braced his hands against the door. It was stuck on something.
He pushed harder.
The smell he had noticed when he’d first stepped onto the porch became worse. It was as if someone had torn open a bag of rotting offal; the odor enveloped him.
The cottage had looked so neat and perfect in the last bit of light that reflected off rapidly lowering clouds. It was far beyond anything he had expected from the ad on Craig's List. That was before he'd smelled the noxious odor that had brought him up short--almost as much as the obstinate door.
He turned away to get his breath. In the gathering darkness, he could see everyone still standing by the gate at the end of the large yard. Seventeen year-old Gillian stood with her arms crossed, long, blond hair swishing across firm shoulders, her impatient, trim figure, stalking back and forth, exuding attitude.
Scotty was holding his mother's arm, not because at twelve he needed comfort, but because he probably felt she required his. A thin, gangly kid with a mop of unruly hair like his father‘s, Scott already came up past his mother's shoulder.
A warm feeling swelled inside of Kevin. He couldn't imagine life without Karen and the kids. Gillian was a royal pain in the ass sometimes, but she would grow out of it; Scotty had a compassion far beyond his years. And now the little Joshua had increased the circle of their love.
He waved.
"I'm freezing my butt off out here," Gillian shouted.
Kevin turned back to the door and gave it a mighty shove. Reluctantly, it swung open into another darkness, releasing a palpable explosion of dank, sickening air.
He swallowed hard and slipped into the room. He could see very little by the small, weak beam of the flashlight as he ran his hand along the wall beside the door until he found a light switch and snapped it up and down without effect. Maybe the bulb was out.
Now that he was inside, the foul odor didn't seem to be as bad as it had been at the door, but it still lingered, rising up behind him like an invisible wall between himself and escape to his family.
Pulling the door partially closed behind him, he looked behind it with the flashlight--and retched.
A huge, yellow calico cat, one paw trapped against the floor, the other caught in the wood at the bottom of the door, glared up at him with sunken, empty eye sockets. The cat was dead.
It looked to Kevin as if the animal had died horribly, trying to scratch its way out of the house. Even in the limited glow of the flashlight, he could see splinters in the cat's paws, a torn-out-claw, trailing bits of dried, bloody flesh lodged in the hard wood of the door.
Kevin was startled when the dead animal began to writhe with life. He moved the light down the long, desiccated body to a nest of wriggling white maggots in the cat's belly.
He barely made to the edge of the porch before a greasy hamburger and soggy French fries, put down three hours earlier, came back up.
"Kevin! Kev! What happened?" Karen shouted. "No! You two stay here," she told the children as she handed the baby to Gillian, threw open the gate and rushed up the path to Kevin's side.
He tried to spit his mouth clean.
She moved toward the open door that yawned at them, the mouth of a dark cave.
"Don't go in there!" Kevin grabbed his wife.
"What is it? What's wrong?"
"A dead cat. Probably got trapped inside. Go on back with the kids; let me clean it up and check the rest of the place before you guys come in."
He watched Karen make her way back down the path, her figure svelte again after her latest pregnancy, looking ten years younger than her thirty-nine years. From the moment he'd met her back in college, he'd considered himself the luckiest man in the world. That had never changed, and never would, he thought.
He moved back into the house, avoiding the dead cat, imagining the sickening sound his shoe would make on brittle bones and fat maggots.
He made his way past the covered furniture in the living room and tried the switches in another room without success. He could see bulbs in the fixtures.
Why hadn’t the electricity been turned on? No sense bumbling through the place without decent lighting.
Back near the front door, Kevin grabbed a dust cover off an old wing-backed chair and wrapped up the body of the cat and its squirming inhabitants. Holding the bundle at arm's length, he carried it to the fence on the right side of the house and dropped it in the sand.
"It's okay now," he said, returning to his family.
"Yuck!" Gillian wrinkled her nose. "You hurled all over the place."
"Was it really gross?" Scott asked, indicating the white lump of the shrouded cat.
"Yeah, pretty much." Not wanting to dwell on images of the cat and the white feeding frenzy on it, Kevin turned to Karen. "The power isn't on."
"We should have gotten here earlier," she said.
"I really expected the inn to be open. How was I to know they roll up the sidewalks at sunset? Even on a Saturday night." He shrugged, helpless. He had the key to the cottage the rental agent had mailed him and a note that their contact in town would be Angus MacAndrew, the owner of the White Horse Inn. But when they'd driven through San Sebastian an hour earlier, the inn had been as dark as the other shops on the short, steep main street.
"They probably close everything at sundown to avoid the vampires," Scott exclaimed.
Kevin ignored his son's fantasy. "The rental agent said that the tourist season doesn't really start until after the Fourth of July. Maybe that's it."
"And then they roll up the sidewalks at nine," Gillian muttered.
"The Fourth is two more weeks away; today's only the twenty-second--"
"Hey! The longest day of the year, the first day of summer," Scott exclaimed, proud to show off his knowledge.
"What do we do now?" Karen asked.
Kevin shrugged. "I suppose we could go back out to Highway One and see if we can find a motel."
"I don't remember seeing anything for the last sixty or seventy miles," Karen said.
"Maybe, if we continue north... We're only about a hundred miles south of Monterey."
"Screw that noise!" Gillian said. "Like, drive another hundred miles to find a Motel 6? No way, José!"
"I doubt they have Motel Sixes in Monterey," Karen said, smiling with her normal tolerance for their daughter’s usual inability to agree with any family plan.
"Or we can camp out here," Kevin said. He shinned the flashlight on a stack of wood by the side of the house. "We can build a fire and get all cuddle-cozy warm, and--"
"Where'll we sleep?" Gillian asked.
"Well put mattresses on the floor and--"
"Okay, let's hang at a Motel 6," Gillian sighed.
"Kevin, I'm too tired to drive anymore today," Karen said. "Let's just stay here and make the best of it--at least for tonight."
"Awesome!" Scott said, giving Kevin a high five. Relieved that he had another ally, Kevin responded with an additional slap to his son's open palm while Gillian looked on with disgust.
As Kevin led them into the house, Gillian stopped in the doorway and wrinkled her nose. "It stinks in here."
"It just needs to be aired out." Karen went over to a window and, with some effort, balanced Joshua in one arm, and raised it a few inches. A freshening breeze rippled the curtains. She brushed dust from her hands. "The place is filthy."
"I'm sorry." Kevin felt compelled to apologize, although every
thing looked pretty good to him. "I guess it's been empty for a while. A little GI party, and we'll have the place as good as new."
"Yay! A party!" Scott clapped his hands.
"What's a GI party?" Gillian asked, suspicion clouding her face.
"When I was in the army, whenever we were expecting an inspection in the barracks, we'd have an all-night GI party: Scrubbing, cleaning, polishing--you know, good old-fashioned housekeeping."
"That's what I figured," Gillian grumbled.
"We'll all pitch in tomorrow--whip this place into shape in no time," Kevin said. "For tonight, though, Scotty and I'll get our stuff and the menagerie out of the car."
"And we girls'll get things organized in here," Karen said. "Gillian, you help me push the furniture to one side so we can make room for some mattresses in front of the fireplace."
"It'll be fun," Kevin said.
"I get to make the fire!" Scott shouted.
"Sure, Mr. Boy Scout." Kevin grinned. "But later. For now, I need your muscles at the car."
"Mom," Kevin heard Gillian ask as he and Scotty headed out the door. "Where are we going to put Billabong's cage?"
"We can stick it anywhere. I'm not ready to worry about the bird yet. Come on and help me with this furniture. And see if you can find a broom or something. This place makes my skin crawl."
Kevin heard the exhaustion and discouragement in Karen's voice and a wave of guilt washed over him. So far their vacation was turning into a disaster. And it was his fault. Karen might have been the one who'd insisted on a real summer vacation after the baby came, but he was the genius who'd committed them to six weeks at an unseen beach cottage in an unknown village that wasn't even on the Triple-A map.
* * *
Kevin had had to park the car in a flat, sandy space near the beginning of a poorly-defined path between the sand dunes. The worn rut was almost a hundred yards long and wound around the contours of the dunes until it finally meandered next to the crooked, white picket fence that surrounded the cottage.
"Let's leave the word processor in the car,” Kevin told Scott. “I'll bring it in tomorrow." As he spoke, he realized that making the word processor their last priority was indicative of his attitude toward the scholarly writing he should have been doing for the last ten years. Well, not this time, he promised himself as he began to pull luggage out of the back of the old station wagon; this time he was going to buckle down and write his major thesis. Not an easy one--A Comparative Analysis Of Obsession In Les Miserables and Moby Dick. He'd publish and obtain his long overdue promotion. The status quo of his career had gone on for too long. Without tenure, his job was as secure as the next round of budget cuts. Besides, the extra money was the least he could do for Karen and the family, especially since it was his fault she had become pregnant again!