Strangers (39 page)

Karl, Jr. shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. I’ve always had a quiet sense of humor.”

Karl, Sr. realized the seriousness of the situation. He said, “Son, I want you to put down that gun so we can talk, father and son, okay? You tell me now, are you taking drugs?”

Karl, Jr. smiled in the winning way he had for his yearbook photo. “Yes, Dad, I am. I have overdosed on hot Dr. Pepper.”

“I’m sorry no one came to see you, Dr. Prescott,” Miss Williams said. She had drawn Christmas Eve duty at the small nursing home in Lebanon, Missouri. “It must make you feel terrible that nobody cares if you live or die. Well, I care—and I want you to die.”

Miss Williams had an
ice-pick
.
Twice in the chest and once in the throat and then Miss Williams left Mr. Prescott’s room.
There were six other patients on the floor.

“Laura,” Vern Engelking said, “let’s
exchange
gifts.” They sat at the kitchen table.

“Now? Don’t you want to wait until tomorrow?”

“Ah, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
creeps
into your pretty pants from day to day.”

Laura giggled. “You sly old fox! You’re feeling all romantic, aren’t you?”

Vern said, “Ah, love of my life, believe me you cannot know the depths of my feeling for you at this very point in time.”

“Do you want your gift now?” Laura said. “I mean, the one I
bought you?
The other gift you’re hinting for we’ll arrange when we get to bed.”

“No-no-no,” Vern said. “I wish to bestow my special gift upon you first, my dear.”

“I’ll bet I know what it is,” Laura said. “I’ve certainly dropped enough hints about that diamond necklace.”

“Close your eyes, my dear.”

“You’re being so silly, Vern!”

“If you don’t close your eyes, you won’t get your fine surprise,” he said in a
sing-song
.

She closed her eyes. He stepped behind her, took a nylon cord from his pocket, looped it around her neck and drew it tight.

“Gaah!” Laura’s head shot forward. Vern pulled her back. Her face turned red and then blue. Her eyes bulged and the veins at her temples writhed. Her tongue shot far out of her mouth.

Slowly, slowly, Vern Engelking increased the pressure.

There is a “New South” where whites and blacks go to the same schools, work in the same places, and even socialize together, but in Beau Bien, Mississippi remains “Old South,” and the white people there maintain their tradition—of “Keeping the colored in their place.” That’s why Lee Charles Deveraux, the manager of the Beau Bien Holiday Inn, always addressed thirty-year-old Willie Jones, a custodian, as “boy.”

It wasn’t that he was fed up with being called “boy” that made Willie Jones go to Lee Charles Deveraux’s office and kill him, slashing his throat with a pearl-handled straight razor that had been his father’s. Willie Jones did that because it was Christmas Eve and it was
his
time.

Then Willie Jones took the master key to all the Holiday Inn rooms. There weren’t many guests at the motel but Willie and his razor were busy for well over two hours.

The emergency room
staff at New York’s Bellvue Mental Hospital were
ready for an overflow crowd. The holiday season was not a universal time of gladness and joy. For many people, it was time for a crack-
up,
time to blow their tops, to blast off into the ozone. Christmas was a time for crazies.

Nobody thought Dr. Juan Castillo was going to go crazy. In addition to Spanish and English, the middle-aged psychiatrist spoke passable Yiddish and Italian. He was the one who could usually calm down a psycho, get him responding in a more or less rational way. Dr. Juan Castillo was the heart-of-gold staffer others at Bellevue went to see when the job pressures were squeezing them because he was one easy guy to talk to.

Dr. Juan Castillo didn’t have the clipboard he usually carried when he came into the emergency room. He had a machete and he started swinging it.

Caroline Lynch had lived in Indianapolis all her life and was happy about the prospect of going somewhere else, even though she did not know where that would be. She was fifteen, mature and responsible, and, because tonight was Christmas Eve, the Hansens were paying her two dollars and fifty cents an hour to baby-sit their
three year old
Eric. She
was,
of course, free to raid the refrigerator, to take anything she wanted.

She didn’t bother with the refrigerator. She went to Mr. Hansen’s
tool box
and took out a hammer and pounded Eric Hansen’s head to a pulp.

The Hansens had told her she might use the telephone just as long as she didn’t tie it up too long. Her call to another Stranger took only a minute and he came and got her and they drove west, away from Indiana.

His last name was Friday but he was not a sergeant, just a uniformed patrolman with the Los Angeles Police Department, and his first name was Emil, and not Joe, but that didn’t lessen at all the amount of bullshit he had to put up with:

“Dum-de-dum-dum,” when he stepped into the locker-room, a gang of idiots with the theme from
Dragnet.

Or stopping a motorist for speeding and, “Is your badge number 714?”

Tonight, though Emil Friday had more on his mind than the grief he had because of his name. It was Christmas Eve and, in his words, “Christ, everyone is killing everyone.” Their gumball lights
demanding
“Make way,” the siren blasting, they were racing to investigate a stabbing on Sepulveda. The radio was crackling with reports of shooters and knifers and hot damn! You name it bad scenes.

“Just what the hell is going on?”

“Tell you what it is,” said his partner, Ralph Washburn, who was behind the wheel of the patrol car. “It’s a good time to kill, if you know what I mean.”

“Huh?” said Emil Friday.

Ralph suddenly swung a hard left and squealed into the parking lot of a drive-in restaurant.

“What the hell…”

Ralph twisted his upper body. He was holding his pistol and he jammed it into Emil Friday’s throat and pulled the trigger. “And those are just the facts, Friday,” he said.

The snow fell dream-like, blanketing the world with the purity and cleanliness seen only in vintage Bing Crosby Christmas musicals. The Buick Regal pulled into the driveway of the house on Walnut Street. Vern Engelking sounded the horn for the briefest of instants and left the engine running.

“Which one?” he said.

“We’ll find out,” Jan Pretre said.

The front door opened and Marcy Louden stepped out. She was dressed for winter, in her blue, white trimmed parka and boots. The hood of the parka was back.

 
“I wish you could see it, Vern,” Jan Pretre said. “Her aura is almost blinding. I’ve never seen one like it. It’s so much more intense than when I first saw her at your house.”

Marcy was slowly walking toward the car.

“Michael never knew?”

“Michael thought he knew everything,” Jan Pretre said.

Marcy got in the front between them. “Well?” Jan Pretre asked.

“You told me to be ready and I was ready, Jan. I used the hedge-clippers. There were a lot of other things I had hidden all over the house, just in case, but the hedge-clippers worked fine. So, they’re all dead,”
Marcy
giggled sweetly. “Even Chopper, the guinea pig. I got him just like I got the other one.”

Vern Engelking backed out ‘of the driveway. The three Strangers drove into the snowing silent night to kill and kill and kill…

— | — | —

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Four time Bram Stoker Award nominee, four time Pushcart Prize nominee, and International Horror Guild award and Pulitzer Prize nominee
Mort Castle
has published seven novels, two short story collections, three chapbooks, dozens of comic books, one CD, and some “other stuff,” including journalism, gags and captions for cartoons, and the entire print advertising campaign for a hog farm flooring system manufacturer. He edited the essential reference work
WRITING HORROR: THE HORROR WRITERS ASSOICATION HANDBOOK
, from Writer’s Digest Books, is the only living author to have stories in all five volumes of the acclaimed
Masques
anthology series edited by J.N. Williamson, and, along with legendary blues diva KoKo Taylor (“Wang-Dang-Doodle”) and Broadway and Hollywood actress Etel Billig (
Project Greenlight
) was named one of “21 Leaders in the Arts for the 21st Century in Chicago’s Southland.”

Though Castle’s recent story collections
Moon on the Water
and
Nations of the Living, Nations of the Dead
, have been widely praised and award nominated, his horror writing is perhaps best represented by the novels
The Strangers
,
published in 1984, and
Cursed
Be
the Child
, 1990.
The Strangers
was labeled “one great scary book” by
The Star
and is currently optioned for film.
Cursed Be the Child
“deserves to be acclaimed a classic” wrote
Rave Reviews
, and has also been published in Germany (an abridged edition) and Poland, where it earned such praise as: Kilka s
?ów
o “Zagubionych duszach” od autora: “
Opisuj?c obyczaje i wierzenia Cyganów w tej ksi??ce opiera
?em
si?
na
gruntownych badaniach, jednak?e przy paru okazjach wymy?li?em cyga?skie przys?owie lub bajk?. (...) Chocia?
w
ksi??ce mowa jest o zboczeniach seksualnych - napastowaniu nieletnich, gwa
?tach
, pedofilii i kazirodztwie - nie ma ?adnych scen opisuj?cych szczegó?owo akty seksualne pomi?dzy doros?ymi a dzie?mi. (...)”

Quite popular in countries other than his own, Castle has also seen his work translated into French, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish and other languages he can neither speak nor read.
in
2001, fans at Argentina’s premiere fantasy and horror website
Galaxia Cthulhu
ranked his story “If You Take My Hand, My Son” the “Fourth Best Horror Story of All Time,” with the other slots being filled with works by Poe, Lovecraft, and Clive Barker. Castle replied, “Gracias.” Mort Castle’s Greek Fan Club and Sheepherding Social and Professional Society
is
headed by Dimitris G. Vekios, President for Life and Sole Member.

Conducting writing workshops and giving readings throughout the world, mostly in Illinois, Castle was a “Featured Reader” for Chicago’s Columbia College “2003 Story Week,” a citywide literary event that also spotlighted Irvine Welsh, author of
Trainspotting
, and Dennis Lehane, author of
Mystic River.
This year as last, Castle will be a Guest of Honor at the annual World Horror Convention where he will conduct a writing workshop.

Castle and his wife of 33 years, Jane, live in Crete, Illinois.