The Siege
THE SIEGE
Originally Published as Moon Walker
By Rick Hautala
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2013 by The Estate of Rick Hautala
Partial cover image courtesy of:
fairiegoodmother.deviantart.com
Cover design by: David Dodd
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 person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Under his own name, Rick Hautala wrote close to thirty novels, including the million-copy best seller Night Stone, as well as Winter Wake, The Mountain King, and Little Brothers. He published three short story collections: Bedbugs, Occasional Demons, and Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala. He had over sixty short stories published in a variety of national and international anthologies and magazines.
Writing as A. J. Matthews, his novels include the bestsellers The White Room, Looking Glass, Follow, and Unbroken.
His recent and forthcoming books include Indian Summer, a new "Little Brothers" novella, as well as two novels, Chills and Waiting. He recently sold The Star Road, a science fiction novel co-written with Matthew Costello, to Brendan Deneen at Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's.
With Mark Steensland, he wrote several short films, including the multiple award-winning Peekers, based on the short story by Kealan Patrick Burke; The Ugly File, based on the short story by Ed Gorman; and Lovecraft's Pillow, inspired by a suggestion from Stephen King.
Born and raised in Rockport, Massachusetts, Rick was a graduate of the University of Maine in Orono with a Master of Arts in English Literature. He lived in southern Maine and is survived by his wife, author Holly Newstein.
In 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.
For more information, check out his website www.rickhautala.com.
Book List
Novels and Novellas
Beyond the Shroud
Cold River
Cold Whisper
Dark Silence
Dead Voices
Follow
Four Octobers
Ghost Light
Impulse
Little Brothers
Looking Glass
Moon Death
Moonbog
Moonwalker
Night Stone
Reunion
Shades of Night
The Mountain King
The White Room
The Wildman
Twilight Time
Unbroken
Winter Wake
The Body of Evidence Series (co-written with Christopher Golden)
Brain Trust
Burning Bones
Last Breath
Skin Deep
Throat Culture
Story Collections
Bedbugs
Glimpses: The Best Short Stories of Rick Hautala
Occasional Demons
Untcigahunk: The Complete Little Brothers
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Dedication:
To Jesse—for adding new light to my life… every day.
THE SIEGE
CONTENTS
Introduction by Matthew Costello
Part One
Chapter One: “Heading North”
Chapter Two: “The Secret Place”
Chapter Three: “Some Unanswered Questions”
Part Two
Chapter Four: “A Visit to the Home”
Chapter Five: “Funeral Time”
Chapter Six: “Larry Talks”
Part Three
Chapter Seven: “Back to the Home”
Chapter Eight: “Trapped”
Chapter Nine: “Under Attack”
Part Four
Chapter Ten: “Wait Until Dark”
Chapter Eleven: “A Narrow Escape”
Chapter Twelve: “Endings and Partings”
Other Rick Hautala eBooks Available from Crossroad Press
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Love and thanks will always go to the boys first. What they had to put up with to get this one done would make a horror novel of its own. When… oh, when will it get easier?
The Buddhists say, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I want to thank three teachers I have had for “appearing” when I needed exactly what they had to offer:
Frederick Ives, my junior high school social studies teacher, who by giving me a copy of Tarzan of the Apes one day, turned me into a compulsive reader… something every writer must first be!
Judy Hakola, an English professor at the University of Maine, Orono, who inspired—and continues to inspire—an appreciation of the variety of literature, both “great” and “popular.”
Burton Haden, Department Chair at the University of Maine, Orono, who introduced me to the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, and all the doors those books can open.
For this particular book, I also owe a big THANK YOU to Charles Waugh, who got the whole thing started with a casually tossed off “What if…?” It was one of his best yet!
Also, a special thank you to Leslie Geibman. A good editor will always make the author dig the story out of the story, and once again, Leslie asked the right questions and pushed hard on all the soft spots and bruises in my original outline. She was the spark; I was the tinder… all I had to do was burn!
Introduction
What scares you now?
Now – hang on a second. Think on that question, what I'm getting at. Basically, I’m asking you to think about when you were a kid, a teen – younger than you are now.
What sort of things frightened you, what kind of stories spoke to that fear, and let you almost – in the strange and wonderful way of horror – let you play with it?
Alright. So there you are. Perhaps in a world of mummies shuffling along, or a classic vampire observing all the vampire rules. Maybe surrounded by shape changers and body possessors…and all the odd and evil (and fun!) things that the human imagination can summon.
For some, maybe ghosts?
The dead somehow lingering, sticking around?
What a concept.
As if…
Good. So then, what scares you now? This moment. Your fears of real things, your worries about loved ones, all the things that could happen, have happened. Those things that – maybe for some of you – have pushed the grotesqueries of monsters and myth off to the side, where they begin to fade away, like beloved memories of past events.
There is “then.” There is “now.”
And yet which of us wouldn't like to once again experience those moments of being happily scared, flipping pages, lost to the tale, the events, the very flipping of those pages a roller coaster, one of life’s sweetest treats?
That is…what you have here.
You might call this book, Rick Hautala’s The Siege, an artifact. Something from decades ago, a time when he and others began playing with those delicious frights, hoping to give other people the ride we all loved so much.
I think…that’s why we became writers. I know it was with Rick. Inspired by everyone from Serling to Bradbury, Frank Herbert to good old Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rick lived and breathed storytelling.
Not a religious man, but if he had a religion, it was writing and storytelling.
And unlike many of us (I'm imagining here) Rick didn't let those works merely seep into the past. They actually didn't become artifacts, because he would tinker and edit works that had been published, novels that had done their turn on the racks, and then slumbered, awaiting the eBook revolution.
He'd play with them, using skills he developed to sharpen the story, make the vision more intense, and even – as in the book you now have – change the title with its sharpened focus.
For Rick, the distance between fears then and now, writer then and now, was a distance to close. For me, to see that process, to talk with him about it, was always something pretty remarkable. We were different that way. For him, any Hautala story could be re-opened and examined under the light of his current view and talent as writer.
And yes, you probably know that this tale of zombies, circa 1989, predates the zombie-infused world we now live in. It is classic Rick, with character paramount, and you sense that his characters are as real to him as anybody he’d meet on a summer’s walk through his town.
Maybe – more real.
And the zombies, they’re different here – though I’ll let you discover that. For some, this book will be new. Readers will find themselves experiencing what horror was back – as we say – in the day. And yet it is something that in true zombie fashion continues to live.
Undead.
Maybe as all writing should be.
And my hope, for the writer as well.
But for now, feel the decades, feel the fear – and most importantly, turn the lights down and enjoy The Siege.
Matthew Costello
November 8, 2013
PART ONE
“And then I dived,
In my lone wanderings, to the caves of Death,
Searching its cause in its effect; and drew
From withered bones, and skulls, and heaped up dust,
Conclusions most forbidden.”
—Lord Byron
“Run to escape, for they hurl their ghostly tracking against you, serpent-fisted and blackened of flesh, offering the fruit of terrible pain.”
—Euripides
Chapter One
“Heading North”
I
—Who’s dead now?—
That was the first thought in Dale Harmon’s mind when the harsh ringing of the telephone sliced into his sleep. Through sleep-blurred eyes, he saw the glowing red digits of his alarm clock—
2:37 A.M.
“Damn!”
The numbers were swimming in his vision as his hand fumbled for the receiver. He knocked the empty water glass from his bed stand, but luckily it didn’t break and went skittering off somewhere into the darkness. Finally, after one more nerve-jangling ring, he found the phone and, grunting, rolled into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Chills darted up the back of his legs when his feet hit the cold floor.
—Who died this time? his mind screamed.
Angie was safe in bed, he knew that much even through the haze; so how bad could it be?
A dash of fear, as cold and numbing as ice, seemed to jab at him from the surrounding darkness and slam into his stomach. Suddenly, in his confusion, it was eight and a half years ago
That telephone call had come at 11:30 P.M., more or less. It was back in the days when he didn’t have a digital wristwatch, and he rounded off time to the nearest quarter hour. Even back then, though, any call after ten o’clock usually meant some kind of trouble, unless it was his brother, calling from Omaha and not keeping the time difference in mind.
That telephone call hadn’t caught him asleep because he had been sitting up watching Johnny Carson… watching and waiting! Angie had been just shy of four years old then, and she had been blissfully asleep for hours, but not Dale… not as long as Natalie still wasn’t home.
Her class at the University of Maine in Augusta should have been cancelled as soon as the storm started; and even when the forecasters said it wasn’t going to amount to much, Dale, especially with 20/20 hindsight, knew he should have pushed harder to make her stay home. How serious could it be to miss one class? She had the highest grade going into the final week of the semester, and he had seen no sense taking any chances on the hour-long drive from Thomaston to Augusta and back, especially if the roads near the coast iced up.
And then that telephone call had come…
—“We’re sorry to tell you this, Mr. Harmon, but there’s been an accident.”
—“What happened?” he remembered saying, although even before the state trooper told him Natalie was dead, he knew it… he felt it coming like a hammer-fisted blast of wind.
—“… lost control on Route 17… just outside of Coopers Mills.”
“Is she… all right?” Dale had asked, his throat raw. He wasn’t even hearing what the trooper was saying. The details—such as the exact time and place could wait. What he wanted… what he had to know was…
—“killed instantly, I’m afraid…”
The words drove into his brain like an overheating drill. Dale remembered looking at the television and seeing mouths move but not hearing what they said because of the rushing sound in his ears. His vision had blurred until Johnny Carson’s face looked like watercolors left out in the rain.
—“…trucker never even saw her. The snow must’ve masked her headlights.”
The state trooper had spoken some more, had offered to come and pick him up, but Dale’s mind had blanked, and he couldn’t think of anyone he could call to have come and sit with Angie while he went down to the police station. Probably the person closest to him, someone who wouldn’t mind getting a call to help out at this late hour, would have been Larry Cole, his co-worker. He didn’t live too far away.
…That was eight years ago…
“Hello, Dale?” the voice on the phone said.
“Uh, yeah,” Dale replied sleepily, his eye still fastened on the glowing red digits. He recognized the voice on the other end; it was Bob Nichols, his boss at the Department of Transportation.
The receiver was slick in his hand as he groped for the light switch with his other hand, found it, and snapped it on. Yellow light filled the room, hurting his eyes.
“Sorry to call you so late,” Nichols said gruffly.
Still staring at the clock—2:38 A.M.—Dale said, “ ’S not late; it’s early.” His hand muffled his voice as he rubbed his face, trying to pull his awareness up to the surface.
“There’s been an accident up north,” Nichols said, and for the first time Dale registered just how strange his boss’s voice sounded. It was wound up so tight Dale was fearful it would crack. He tried to imagine gruff old Nichols so upset his voice almost cracked.
“What?” Dale said, confused. As far as he knew, there wasn’t any major construction up north. All they had going now was the preliminary survey work on the road between Haynesville and Houlton, and that was being handled by…
“Oh, no,” Dale said as a chilling thought filled his mind. “Not Larry!”
“ ’Fraid so,” Nichols said. “He lost control on one of the back roads and went straight into a tree.”
“Is he—?”
“I’m afraid he’s dead, Dale,” Nichols said, and now it happened his voice did crack, and Dale clearly heard his boss begin to sob.
“Jesus Christ!”
“I’m sorry I have to be the one to tell you,” Nichols said, fighting to control his voice. “I know how close you and he were.”
“Yeah,” Dale said, feeling numb all over as the realization that he’d lost not just a co-worker, but a close friend as well, worked deeper and deeper into his mind.
—First Natalie!… Now Larry! Christ!
“I haven’t got all t
he details yet,” Nichols said, “but I assume, since he was from up that way, he’ll be buried in his hometown. Where was he from?”
“He, uh, he grew up in Dyer,” Dale said. Coming through the receiver, his own voice sounded oddly distorted, as if someone else was using his mouth to talk.
“ ’Course, I figure you’ll want to go up there for the funeral. You’ve still got two weeks vacation coming, right?”
“Huh?”
“You have some time off coming,” Nichols repeated. “I assume you’ll drive up for the funeral.”
“Yeah… I will,” Dale said. Now, even though his eyes were fully adjusted to the bright light, he noticed that the red digits on the clock were shimmering and shifting. The minute number changed, and he assumed it had turned to 2:39, but he couldn’t be sure; warm tears made it impossible for him to see.
Nichols was respectfully silent for a moment, then he cleared his throat and said, “I wish I could make it, too, but we’ve got that budget meeting on Tuesday morning. You’ll have to represent the department. ’Course, well send flowers and condolences to the family.”
“There’s just his mom left,” Dale said, surprised he could still talk through the jumble of memories flooding his mind. And at the bottom of it all was the icy thought that it was all over—
Larry was dead and would be buried in two days!
No more chances to store up any more memories, not even the slightest ones.
It’s horrible how life can suddenly turn like this! he thought. Already he could feel the anger, just like when Natalie died, stewing with the empty feeling of grief and loss.
“Thanks for letting me know,” he said.
Nichols started to say something, then stopped himself and simply grunted. For some reason, that made Dale like him all the more; his boss knew there was nothing he or anyone could say to take away the razor-edged pain.