Close Encounters of the Strange Kind

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

  OF

  THE STRANGE KIND

  By

  Michael Kerr

  Copyright © 2014 Michael Kerr

  Discover other Titles by Michael Kerr at MichaelKerr.org

  Kindle Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this Author.

  Also By Michael Kerr

  DI Matt Barnes Series

  1 - A Reason To Kill - Link

  2 - Lethal Intent - Link

  3 - A Need To Kill - Link

  The Joe Logan Series

  1 - Aftermath - Link

  2 - Atonement - Link

  Other Crime Thrillers

  Deadly Reprisal - Link

  Deadly Requital - Link

  Black Rock Bay - Link

  A Hunger Within - Link

  The Snake Pit - Link

  Children’s Fiction

  Adventures in Otherworld – Part One – The Chalice of Hope - Link

  Adventures in Otherworld – Part Two – The Fairy Crown - Link

  Author’s note

  If you have read one or, hopefully, several of my crime thrillers, I thank you, trust that you enjoyed them, and dare to anticipate that you have stumbled across and decided to download this anthology of short stories that, as the title suggests, are of the strange kind.

  As a writer of fiction, I feel the need to explore other genres and let my imagination roam free. I’ve read a lot of spooky stuff over the years by wordsmiths such as Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch and – inevitably ‒ Stephen King, and so have decided to indulge myself by writing some weird tales of my own.

  I’ve put these together in no specific order. Witches, ghosts, vampires, demons and aliens abound, waiting up ahead to cause a little trepidation and even raise a smile or two in places, as well as the hairs on the back of your neck. I hope that you are entertained by some if not all of them.

  ~ Michael Kerr

  Contents

  Author’s note

  Contents

  1 ARIANA’S CURSE

  2 JAKE AND THE VAMPIRE

  3 PARLOUR GAMES

  4 NOT ALONE

  5 A NEW EVENTUALITY

  6 A SPECIAL MISSION

  7 A LABOUR OF LOVE

  8 DO YOU BELIEVE?

  9 THE MAJESTIC

  10 MAROONED

  11 A TERRIBLE PLACE

  12 THE SHOW MUST GO ON

  13 MARSTON MANOR

  14 ENCOUNTER

  15 A FAMILIAR VOICE

  16 THE WAITING ROOM

  17 BY SPECIAL REQUEST

  18 JOSIAH’S ANGEL

  19 A PERFECT DAY

  20 SOMETHING VERY STRANGE

  21 TOO CLOSE FOR COMFORT

  22 SHELTER FROM THE STORM

  23 CONTAGION

  24 THE RETURN

  25 IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

  1

  ARIANA’S CURSE

  The heaped branches were kindled, and the roar of the flames and sizzle of sap drowned out the sound of all else as the rapt gathering backed away from the raging conflagration to form a six-deep circle. They watched eagerly as Ariana’s wet clothing began to steam, and then ignited.

  Twisting and straining, her frantic efforts were ineffectual against the chains that held her pinioned to the green oak stake. Her wailing became a strident inhuman scream as her exposed skin began to blister and burst, and her long, raven hair became a crackling, smoking flambeau; a fleeting, radiant torch.

  As fat bubbled, and the blood boiled in her veins, a quietus enveloped Ariana. She looked out from what was her pyre, down into the mass of faces; their eyes wide and mouths agape, below her.

  “Let this day be an end to Twycross and to all who reside here,” she said, her raw, rasping words somehow escaping the noise of the fire, to be heard clearly by every man, woman and child in attendance. “By all that is unholy I curse you and this godforsaken land to reap what you have this day sown.”

  The air pricked with the heat that radiated out from the staked witch, and the crowd shrunk back in fearful expectation, aware of the dying woman’s power as she gave them one last rictus smile, before turning incandescent and exploding outwards, no longer mortal blackened and burning flesh, but a million glowing droplets of liquid fire, that rained down and engulfed all that they touched.

  Twycross was obliterated from the landscape that summer day in 1690, not to be resettled, but reclaimed by stunted gorse, thistle and wild bramble; an area that was shunned by even the largest of native fauna, which slunk around the invisible periphery in morbid fear of unseen evil.

  “Oh, Jim, it’s just perfect,” Sally said, looking eastward through the kitchen window of their new house, out over the nearby Sugar River and the undulating pine and spruce-clad hills beyond.

  Jim smiled. “It’s a prime site, Sal. Phase two will be behind us, farther down the hill, with no view worth jack shit to speak of.”

  “This is so much better than the pollution and rat race of the city,” Sally said, turning into his arms and hugging him. “I can’t believe we found this location.”

  “This spot hasn’t been built on since the town that stood here burned down at the back end of the seventeenth century,” Jim said, going over to the refrigerator and taking out two bottles of Bud Ice, to press one against Sally’s bare arm, making her jump.

  “I’ll get you back for that,” she giggled. “Ice cubes where the sun don’t shine, while you’re asleep.”

  “You do that and I won’t tell you about the witch’s curse on this place.”

  “You mean we’ve got a local hag who thinks the development sucks?”

  “No. I mean way back, when the town of Twycross was here.”

  “So, what’s the curse, uh?”

  “No ice cubes?”

  “Okay, chicken, no ice. Though it could be cool foreplay.”

  They sat at the pine table in the nook of the bright and airy kitchen of their newly built Cape Cod-style home, and Jim related to Sally the folklore that he had been told by a Salem hotelier, who had claimed to be a descendant of a harness maker and saddler; one of only a handful of survivors to escape the catastrophic events of so long ago.

  “The town was supposedly visited by a Witchfinder General, who scoured the area looking for oddballs with black cats and a bad reputation,” Jim said. “When he arrived at Twycross with his men, a young woman by the name of Ariana Pelham was immediately arrested and put on trial.”

  “Why?” Sally asked.

  Jim grinned. “Get me another cold one and I’ll tell you.”

  Sally went for the beer and handed it to him. Jim twisted off the cap, sipped slowly, then set the bottle down and made a meal of lighting the third of the five cigarettes he allotted himself each day. He took a perverse delight in building up the tension.

  “You’re being a pain in the butt, Jim. Tell me the story, or you don’t get to fool around for a week,” Sally said, lying through her teeth, as he well knew.

  “Okay, you win,” he said, exhaling a stream of lung-filtered smoke to form a blue raft that hung cloudlike beneath the ceiling. “Legend has it that this Ariana character was a spinster who had long black hair, a cottage full of cats, or familiars as they called them, and no doubt a broom or two tucked away in the pantry for good measure. Mo
st damning thing was that she peddled medicinal remedies to the townsfolk: pills for malaria, foxglove, tincture of benzoin for wounds, and assorted elixirs, ointments and poultices. She also had an herb garden; the whole nine yards to get any self-respecting witchfinder’s rocks off.”

  “So what happened to her?” Sally said as Jim paused to chug his beer.

  “She was tied to a ducking stool and half drowned in the river we drove past on the way in.”

  “The Sugar River?” Sally said, standing up and going back to the window, to once more gaze at the broad expanse of slow moving, brackish water, that was as smooth as a millpond.

  “Yeah. They dunked her like a doughnut for a while, then took her back to the town square and did a Joan of Arc job on her. Only she allegedly took most of her executioners out. As she died, the whole town went up, and almost everyone with it.”

  “That’s awesome, and sad,” Sally said, a shiver running down her spine as she turned away from the view of the river, which now appeared somehow menacing and unsettling.

  “It’s just folklore, honey; an urban legend. I don’t buy witchcraft or spontaneous human combustion, especially when over three hundred people in the town are supposed to have just gone up like roman candles.”

  “So what do you suppose happened?”

  “I don’t. I keep UFO’s, Bigfoot and all that X-File kind of weird shit firmly where it belongs, in a file labelled fiction and entertainment.”

  “I think I believe it,” Sally said in a whisper. “Not everything can be explained away by saying that if it’s outside the perception of our five senses, then it can’t exist. There are too many strange events. You can’t just write them all off, or come up with lame, convenient, half-assed solutions.”

  “Okay, Scully. But let’s hope that in this case it is bullshit, and that Ariana was just an innocent victim who took the rap for locals tripping on ergot-laden rye bread.”

  “Why?”

  “Because as she was dying she allegedly cursed the land that Twycross – which is now Harper’s Bend – stands on. And I don’t want us to be part of the next unexplained mystery to hit the tabloids, TV, or the front page of the Enquirer.”

  It was a week later that Sally had the first nightmare. In it, she was being hustled – fettered in manacles and shackles – up the steps of what she knew to be a courthouse, with the sun glinting off its round-headed windows as she scrunched her eyes to look up at the cantilevered pediment and octagonal cupola above her.

  Now standing in a dock, she could smell the polished wood, and even briefly admired the fine panelling and rich carving about her. That was before she caught the cloying, sweet scent of the cologne that the bewigged Witchfinder General wore, no doubt to mask a body odour as sour as the vilifying tirade of accusations he levelled at her. His name was Travis Ludwell, and his vocation was to rid New England of all witches, who he considered to be the spawn of the devil and an affront to good, God fearin’ folk.

  Sally woke up, not lying in bed beside Jim, but stood naked, her hands white-knuckled, clenching the top of a ladder-backed chair. A film of perspiration coated her from head to foot, her long, ash-blonde hair was matted, soaked, and her stomach alive with the sensation of cold, fluttering wings, that she recognised as a symptom of the state of terror that gripped her.

  “You okay, Sal?” Jim said, sitting up in bed.

  “No, not really. I had a nightmare.”

  “You’ve been letting that story pray on your mind, Sal,” Jim said as he slipped a towelling robe around her shaking shoulders. “It’s just overreaction; your subconscious running riot. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “No, Jim. It was too real. I’ve never had a dream with so much vivid detail and...and solidity. I couldn’t have invented such a scenario. I want to check out the man I saw. His name was Travis Ludwell. Maybe we could find a painting or etching of him. I need to know that he never existed, before I can try to dismiss this as just a bad dream.”

  “Sally, can’t you just―?”

  “Don’t patronise me, Jim. You should be able to see how important this is to me. I have to be convinced that I wasn’t experiencing an event that really took place.”

  The following morning, still on vacation following the move out to Harper’s Bend, Jim and Sally visited the reference section of the Salem public library, which gave up surprisingly concise historical facts pertaining to the region, including an account of Twycross being razed to the ground, but with no clue as to whether it was believed to have been effected by human hand, an act of God, or at the instigation of a dying, closet witch, who had not confessed her affiliation with the devil.

  Sally gasped and reached across the scarred top of the oak table – between the stacks of books that they had gathered – to grasp Jim’s wrist in a vicelike grip. Unable to speak for a moment, she stared at the illustration of an engraved copperplate in the leather-bound volume in front of her.

  “Found something, eh?” Jim said, and then saw how ashen her face had become and moved quickly around the table to her side.

  “It’s him,” Sally said, stabbing her finger at the image of the cruel, hard face staring up from the yellowing folio, with sinister oil-bead eyes that sat too close together over a large, hooked nose and downward curving knife-slash of a mouth.

  Travis Ludwell had indeed existed; lauded in text as a distinguished lawyer and burgess and clerk of the House of Burgesses. But they could find no further details of Ludwell in the library as they cross-referenced and searched for a fuller history of the man.

  “Let’s try the public records office,” Sally said. “There must be more on this guy, somewhere.”

  “It’s almost five, Sal,” Jim said, rolling his neck to ease the ache from hours’ of being bent over the reference books, as he closed a dusty tome that must have weighed in at over four pounds and had probably not been opened in decades. “Let’s call it a day. We’ll start again in the morning.”

  Driving the Jeep Cherokee back to the ‘Bend’, Jim tried once more to rationalise Sally’s anxiety. “You could have seen a picture of this dude before, and just not have any conscious memory of it, honey.”

  “That’s as likely as finding rocking horse shit, Jim. Or New York blizzards in southern Florida. I saw him, up close, warts and all. He even had an oversize ring on his pinkie; a solid gold lion’s head, that he kept rubbing all the time, as though it was a genie’s lamp.”

  Sally tossed and turned that night, and was about to get up and take a couple of sleeping pills, or go downstairs and read for awhile, when sleep surreptitiously claimed her. She was immediately transported back in time, into the mind and body of Ariana Pelham, and was at once hit by the full force of the undiluted fear that surged through the young woman, whose sensations she now shared.

  The ropes chafed her skin as she was lowered in a seat attached to a pole, down into the icy waters of the Sugar River, which crept up her legs, then higher to her breasts. In an instant she was fully submerged, choking on the muddy water. The ducking stool was raised and lowered a dozen times; the torment measured to ensure that she would not drown, but only suffer closeness to death as a precursor of the purification by fire that she had been sentenced to.

  Now, as both Sally and Ariana, she sensed the power within her; the special talent that she had only used to heal and benefit these people, who until so recently she had considered to be good friends and neighbours. In the presence of Ludlow and his cohorts, these same fickle folk now bore her aloft, across the fields, away from the river to the town square in front of the church. And with less consideration and sensitivity than they might afford a hog being led to slaughter, they thrust her up and secured her tightly to the stake.

  Gobs of spittle and phlegm slimed her face, and punches bruised her body as she was also verbally bludgeoned by accusations of all manner of despicable acts of black magic that they knew to be false.

  “Burn witch, burn!” they chanted, and a flaming torch was hurled i
nto the mountainous bonfire, that was the fuel to set her alight and supposedly deliver her to hell.

  As the searing pain ate into her feet and legs, Sally was cast out, to become separate from Ariana in her final agony; to watch her horrific end from within the mob, which jeered and threw fruit at her, and more kindling to feed the blaze. Many of them were intoxicated with both the spectacle and the punch that was being served up from the barrels of an enterprising innkeeper.

  It was then that Ariana cursed the townsfolk and the land that Twycross stood on, in the final seconds before her burning body seemed to expand, to become a glowing ball that erupted and sprayed out a deadly firestorm onto the flesh of the people, the fabric of the buildings, and the earth that the town was built on.

  Sally’s scream was dying in her throat as Jim shook her awake at a little after three a.m.

  “For Christ’s sake, Sal, are you okay? Speak to me,” he said, stroking her cheek with his hand.

  Sally was sitting bolt upright, perspiring heavily from every pore, sweltering, feeling as though she were naked in the salt wasteland of Death Valley.

  “I...I need a glass of water,” she stammered, shakily climbing from the bed and hurrying to the bathroom.

  She stood transfixed, staring into the mirror at the blisters which began to swell on first her face and then all over her body; domes of pain, stretched by the pus that filled them.

  Jim appeared behind her, and at first could only stand open-mouthed, stupefied at the sight of Sally, whose flesh was bubbling. It was as if an invisible paint stripper were being applied to her skin, which the cool, air-conditioned atmosphere made all the more incredulous to behold.

  “What in God’s―”

  “I was being burnt at the stake, Jim,” Sally shouted. “It wasn’t just a freaking nightmare. Look at me. I’m being possessed by a girl who was legally murdered over three hundred years ago.”