Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror (5 page)

Mary Jane was babbling about the shadow she had seen, so Karl moved her up the stairs to her room, where his eyes landed on the old calendar. He squinted at the date.

“1888,” he said. “It sounds so familiar.”

“Look, the shadow is out now,” Mary Jane whispered, pointing to the part of the picture it once haunted.

“Well that’s impossible, is this a different month?” Karl went to pull the calendar off the wall.

“No!” Mary Jane snatched his hands away. “Don’t touch it.”

“Mary Jane, please get a hold of yourself. There’s no shadow, just some nut job trying to recreate Sorority Row.”

“I saw him,” she whispered.

The doorbell rang and Mary Jane jumped onto her bare bed.

“It’s ok, it’s just the police. Stay here, I’ll go down and talk to them.”

She launched forward and grabbed his jacket, “No, please Karl. Stay with me here.”

“I’ll be downstairs, no one can get in.” He smiled and extracted himself from her white knuckled grip, then left the room to meet the police.

Suddenly a police siren erupted in the street below her window and Mary Jane felt her shoulders relax. She was safe now. She got up and stared at the calendar, chiding herself for being so girly and imagining a shadow man had come from it to slaughter her friends. It was ludicrous. It was just a creepy old calendar. It was all down to some nut job, like Karl had said.

Just as she had finished reasoning it all away, she noticed that the picture had changed once again. Instead of it depicting a softly lit, foggy cobbled street, it now had bodies strewn across it. There was Mary-Ann, Annie, Lizzie and Catherine, all in various throes of death, their blood the only color covering the grey cobbles.

Mary Jane felt a cold breath on her neck. A hand trawled her shoulders and up toward her jugular.

“Hello again, my dear. I’m sorry to have been so improper. I really should have introduced myself before,” said the man behind her.

Mary Jane turned slowly to look at him. He was no longer shadow-like, but now fully formed.

He stepped back and bowed, sweeping his black velvet cape behind him. He extended his hand to her. “They called me Jack.”

She saw a glint of metal and a toothy grin and then her screams were lost amongst the sound of distant bells ringing in the New Year.

* * *

“Hey, look at this,” said Timothy, lifting up an old red leather calendar from the evidence box.

“Where’d that come from?” asked Anthony as he picked up another box of evidence from storage. He wedged it on a nearby shelf and sighed.

“It was collected at that sorority murder house. Detective Burns was there, he said that some guy was screaming at them, saying it was to blame or something.”

Anthony cracked his back and walked over to his colleague. “What is it? A calendar?”

“Looks like it, but the dates are all messed up; the pages are all from different years.”

“What’s the picture for January?”

“Yuck, it’s awful. It looks like a scene from Jack the Ripper or something. Five dead girls.”

“Well, we need a calendar up here, let’s just skip ahead to February. What’s the picture for that month?”

Timothy flipped the page and found the big smiling face of a clown. “Is that better?”

Anthony rolled his eyes, “Not really. I hate clowns. Remember I worked on that John Wayne Gacy serial killer case?”

“He was put to death, and this clown doesn’t look anything like him.”

“Can’t we just buy one of those puppy calendars?”

“No, budget cuts. We’ll just put up with clown face,” Timothy said, hanging the calendar on the evidence locker’s wall.

“Help me with these boxes, buddy.” Anthony motioned to the door.

Both men walked out, and behind them the clown’s smile got a little wider.

A Night in the Pampas

John Stewart Wynne

Joaquin Rojas wasn’t expected to attend his brother Roberto’s annual New Year’s Eve party at his villa on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, and had phoned him with his regrets over a month ago. So Roberto was surprised to see Joaquin among his guests in the grand hall who were dancing to well-known songs being played by a popular band Roberto had hired for the occasion. In fact, Joaquin was dancing with Roberto’s own daughter Lillian, not yet twenty, a pretty girl with shoulder length curly red hair who had a special rapport with her uncle whom she considered a suave and dashing figure, especially for a man just turned fifty.

Roberto tapped Joaquin on the shoulder. “Surprise, surprise,” he said. “I thought you were supposed to be off somewhere in the wilds with your old regiment to ring in the New Year.”

“We had to cut our trip short,” Joaquin replied. “Due to unforeseen circumstances.”

“Well,” Lillian chimed in, “I can’t say I’m sorry to have your company. I don’t remember when you’ve missed one of my father’s New Year’s Eve parties before.”

Joaquin smiled. “I never have.”

“What were your ‘unforeseen circumstances?’” Roberto asked.

Joaquin said gravely, “It’s not a subject to discuss on a night meant for celebrating and good cheer. I expect you’ll hear something about it soon.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I won’t press you. I’m glad you’re with us tonight and I’ll leave it at that.”

As Roberto moved on to greet some new arrivals, Lillian whispered to her uncle, “My father doesn’t speak for me. I want to know what it was that brought you back to the city early. I can’t stand anybody keeping secrets from me, including you.”

He smiled. “You were always too curious for your own good.”

But wasn’t the entire Rojas family blessed with a healthy curiosity, Joaquin wondered. It hadn’t done any of them any harm. In fact, it was curiosity about the world that had spurred them on to new heights. They were overachievers, he and Roberto in particular, determined to carve a rightful place for themselves among the cream of Buenos Aires society. The brothers lived life as a great adventure. They were always on the lookout for the latest frontier to explore and then conquer. These pursuits were aided by the fact that they’d been born into positions of privilege.

It had all started with their father, now deceased, a shipping magnate who had befriended Aristotle Onassis during his formative years in Buenos Aires, when he’d taken the job of a telephone operator and secretly listened in on conversations of the elite as they discussed which lucrative stocks to buy and which to dump fast. Onassis had passed this “insider information” on to Joaquin and Roberto’s father, who invested his money in the stock market and one day woke up rich enough to acquire a small shipping company of his own. Roberto and Joaquin were still shareholders in that company and had become rich beyond their wildest dreams. But Joaquin was also a retired colonel in the Argentine Air Force, and that was his greatest source of pride—not his shares of stock.

“Tell me all about your trip to the pampas, Uncle Joaquin,” Lillian pleaded. “And don’t leave out a single detail.”

He pretended not to hear her request, and as the band began to play the famous Uruguayan carnival tango
La Cumparsita,
Joaquin led her into a parlor where he noticed several of their relatives relaxing and enjoying after-dinner drinks. They eagerly welcomed Joaquin who pulled up chairs for him and Lillian and joined in the conversation. But like Lillian, they were all interested in hearing about Joaquin’s recent trip more than anything else.

He found himself capitulating to their requests. After all, he was a born raconteur and enjoyed spinning a good story and captivating an audience with his bravura delivery.

He explained that it had all been his idea. He’d talked four men that he’d served with in the upper echelons of the Argentine Air Force into taking the week between Christmas and New Year’s to re-cement their old bonds, and they’d set out together on horseback through the pampas as, remarkably, none of them had ever made a trek through the wild unruly grasses west of the Rio de la Plata stretching to the Andean forelands, having lived and worked in the confines of Buenos Aires most of their lives.

He told vivid, piquant stories about their journey, describing dramatic vistas, how they’d shot at and mostly missed numerous pigeons, skunks and guanacos along the way, and admitted to wild pranks he and his comrades had played on each other, even though a few of them were already grandfathers.

“Who were the men who made up your party?” his cousin Carmen asked. “I might know one or two of them.”

“They were the men from our Fighter Squadron, ‘the Attack Group,’ as we were known back in the day. I asked them all to come, at least the ones who were still alive and accounted for. There were eight of us in our original elite unit. Two of them are dead now and Leopold Florencia disappeared, having deserted the Air Force on the eve of our first raid on the British warships in Port Stanley. So it was Juan Cobo, Antonio Castillo, Nicolas Baer, Lucas Rossi and myself.”

“I can’t say I know them personally. But my husband is a friend of Antonio’s,” Carmen said, laughing. “And he’s a rogue.”

“I didn’t say we all wore halos, did I?” Joaquin asked with a wicked twinkle in his eye. “He’s the one who told me about the practical uses of the pampas grasses.”

“Don’t tell me you make tea from them?” Carmen asked skeptically.

“They’re probably used for medicines,” Lillian guessed.

Joaquin roared with laughter. “Something much more pleasant. You know the tops of the pampas grasses are crowned by feathered flowers, silvery grey headed plumes, and they’re put to unusual use right here in the suburbs of Buenos Aires.”

“I don’t remember seeing them around,” Carmen said.

“Well, you just exonerated yourself,” Joaquin declared. “Swingers put them in their front yards to advertise to other swingers passing by that they’re welcome to stop by and do some couple swapping.”

At first the group gasped in disbelief, then Carmen said, “I wish I’d never heard you say that, and furthermore I’m not going to mention it to my husband,” and everybody laughed.

The melancholy strains of the chaconne-like Mexican waltz
La Llorona
floated in from the hall, the band’s male vocalist clearly enunciating the stanza:

Yo soy como el chile verde, Llorona,

picante pero sabroso.

I am like a green chile, Llorona,

very hot yet delectable.

“Yes,” Carmen said. “Exactly!”

Joaquin was trying to escape any further questioning, or so he thought, by tilting the subject to dangerous passions and bringing his account of his trip back to Buenos Aires and ending it there. But it was just a ruse, as he had no intention of revealing the truth about what had happened.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he said, “I’m going to step outside to enjoy a cigar.”

He strolled out onto the long portico where he could be alone. Lighting his Maduro, he took in the night air and treasured the sight of the creamy full moon he saw shining above Buenos Aires in the distance.

But he wasn’t alone for long. Lillian followed him onto the portico and sat right down in the wicker chair near where Joaquin was leaning against the railing, just like a determined shadow unwilling to separate herself from him. The odor of her uncle’s Maduro overwhelmed the natural scents of the night, the spices, herbs and flowers. But she didn’t dislike it.

“It’s a hot night,” she mused.

“It’s generally hot this time of year, and tonight is no exception,” he noted with some exasperation as he turned to face her, knowing full well the reason she wasn’t letting him out of her sight.

She confronted him directly. “You were supposed to be spending Christmas and New Year’s with your Attack Squad.”

“All right,” he relented. “You want to know why I came back early. I’ll tell you. But first I’m going to describe the thing I saw out there in the pampas, even if it frightens you. I came face to face with a werewolf.”

She had to stop herself from breaking into laughter. “That’s the stuff of folklore and old wives’ tales. There’s no such thing as a werewolf.”

“Yes, there is. I saw one. Though I’ll admit, if you’d asked me before our trip if I believed such things as werewolves existed, I’d have laughed in your face. I haven’t been laughing much lately though. In fact, I’ve felt sick inside ever since I got back.”

He pulled a wicker chair up next to hers and sat down.

“We’ve always trusted each other, you and I,” he said. “You know me as a sober military man not given to flights of fancy.”

“That’s one of your great strengths,” she said. “And one that I respect.”

“Then I’ll tell you about what happened,” he said. “If you assure me you’ll keep what I tell you confidential.”

“I promise,” she said. “I won’t breathe a word of it.”

Her uncle’s tale began ordinarily enough. The men had traded a train for horses midway across the Argentinian countryside and began their ride through land that was mostly crops, where they were more likely to pass tractors than they were other horses. They skirted a few inns and small villages scattered among the sheep and cattle ranches in the flat monotonous landscape. It wasn’t until they got to the edges of the Western pampas near the Chilean border, where the distant peaks of the Andes shimmered in the distance, their peaks still covered with snow, that they found themselves in the wilds they had sought and where they planned to set up camp and talk about old times.

It was nearing sunset and they were riding single file along a lonely stretch of the pampas where the grasses were at their highest. That’s when Joaquin first saw the monster—which had the body of a man and the head of a wolf—standing waist deep in the waving green grasses, not more than a hundred feet away from him and his men and staring menacingly at them. He quickly called this half-man, half-wolf to the attention of his comrades, who were as alarmed as he was. One of the men took a shot at it with his rifle. The creature disappeared, leaving only the grasses blowing in the wind. Joaquin wasn’t sure whether the bullet had found its target or not. The sun, as it set, turned the sea of pampas grass blood red, and its rays, shining directly now in the men’s eyes, blinded them.