Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,76

needed to be done.

Ahead, through the gray drizzle, he spotted Mother of Sorrows Church jutting from atop the small rise on which it had been built, and he went over for the final time the massacre he was about to commit.

CHAPTER 23

“I think people should always try to take the bad things that happen to them in their lives, and turn them into something good. Don’t you?”

Orphan (2009)

Mandy crouched next to the bus’s window, peering out into rain-swept forest, searching for the source of the scuffling she’d heard again. Seeing no animal or person, she made her way quietly to the front of the bus and exited through the bi-fold doors. She wanted to run, disappear into the mix of evergreens and deciduous trees, but then she spotted eldritch blue cigarette smoke drifting out from behind the end of the bus. She started along the flank of the rusted yellow relic, suddenly, happily, convinced she would discover Noah back there. He and Steve had returned from the hospital with the police. They had come looking for her. Noah found her sleeping inside the bus, didn’t want to disturb her, and so decided to hang around outside it until she woke.

“Noah?” she said.

Noah didn’t answer.

Perhaps he was listening to his Walkman through a set of headphones? Or perhaps it wasn’t Noah but Austin. He had escaped from Cleavon and his brothers after all, and he was ignoring her because she told him to stop slapping Jeff’s cheek.

“Austin?”

No answer.

Collecting her nerves, Mandy peered around the bus’s rear quarter.

A man sat on the jutting metal bumper. He was looking away from her so she could only see the back of his head. He raised the cigarette to his turned-away face.

Mandy noticed blood dripping from his hand—and just like that she had an epiphany. This man had slaughtered the children who’d once occupied the bus. She didn’t know how he did this, or why, but he did it, he butchered them, then he killed himself, and now she was seeing his ghost, haunting the spot of his passing, as ghosts tend to do.

The apparition turned to face her. Where its face should have been was a spiraling black void, and that spiraling black void terrified Mandy more than anything had in her life, because it wanted to suck her into it, and this would be worse than death, for she would not merely disappear, cease to exist, she would be undone, erased, so she had never been born.

Mandy turned to flee, but her legs had become elephantine. She managed to lift one, to take an impossibly slow step. Her foot sank into the ground all the way to her knee. She glanced over her shoulder, through her stringy bangs and the falling rain, and saw the ghost floating toward her. The black hole that was its face was expanding, cannibalizing its neck, then chest, then arms and legs, consuming its entirety. Then it slipped over her, silently, painlessly, consuming her too, undoing her—

Mandy heaved awake, her breath trapped in her throat. She lay on the floor of the bus where she had fallen asleep. Rain drummed on the roof. The wind howled.

A dream, she told herself, exhaling all at once. Just a dream, a horrible, horrible dream—

Her relief wilted.

The car accident wasn’t a dream. Jeff paralyzed from the waist down wasn’t a dream. Nor was Floyd playing baseball with Austin’s head, or whatever happened to Cherry to make her scream the way she had.

Despair swelled inside Mandy, despair as cold as the bony finger of death. She fought the tears that once again threatened to burst from her eyes, because if she started crying, she wouldn’t stop, not for a long time. Instead she tried to think about something nice, but this proved impossible, like trying to look at the positive side of a funeral. She had no nice thoughts inside her right then.

In her bleakness Mandy sought refuge in her childhood memories. They were neither good nor bad. They occurred too long ago to pass judgment on. They were merely a distraction, a picture of a simpler world when all that mattered were toys and candy and the love of her parents. This was all she’d needed to be happy, day after day, year after year—until when? When had the innocence ended and the real world kicked in? Probably around the time she became interested in boys. That’s when “important” things began to matter, like the clothes she wore, or how she did