The Hook End Horror

By Brian Sellnow

          We were all hanging out at the pizza place, because that’s what we did on Friday evenings. There wasn’t much else to do in Hook End. It’s a really small town, up on the northeast edge of the United States. Small enough that you don’t need a car if you live in town. If you had a car, you could drive for an hour and get somewhere else, if you really wanted to. It’s the kind of place that would be called “quaint” in a tourist guide, but Hook End isn’t in any tourist guides. It’s not a place that people come to visit, and the people who live here rarely leave. It’s not like we’re unfriendly, and visitors to our town would be welcome. There aren’t any.

It was me and Suzie, and Fred and Alan. My name is Caroline, but I just use the Carol part. We’re seventeen and eighteen years old, the only four in town in that age bracket—I guess no one wanted to have kids nineteen years ago. There are a few who are fifteen or sixteen, and a bunch of younger ones, but they don’t get to hang out with us. The younger kids went to school on a bus that came and took them to a neighboring town early in the morning. After a certain age, the residents of Hook End don’t feel comfortable anywhere else, so we were done with the bus. We studied in the library, took the same tests the students in the high school did, got the same diplomas. Alan had gone to Florida last summer, to spend a couple of weeks with his uncle. He’d come back after three days—he had nightmares there that wouldn’t let him sleep. We don’t do well if we leave home.

The pizza place was a Chinese restaurant, once upon a time. Suzie’s father, Mister Wu, had come to Hook End with big plans. He was going to open the only Chinese restaurant for miles around. Everyone thought it was a great idea, and the food was good, but the restaurant still went out of business. It just wasn’t right for Hook End. Now Mister Wu worked in the hardware store, and the Chinese restaurant had turned into a pizza place and Suzie ate pizza in the restaurant that used to be her father’s. They usually served more beer than pizza. Mister Wu and his wife made some noises about going back to the city, but they never did. They’d been Hooked, people would say. They were part of the town now, couldn’t leave if they wanted to, stuck there forever. I knew Suzie wasn’t Hooked, but she had this family responsibility thing going. If her parents were going to stay, she would stay and help them. So she was as trapped here as anyone else, and that’s just how it was.

The topic of conversation tonight was the killings. They’d started again, first with old Widow Lafferty. She’d lived by herself in a run-down house at the edge of town. Her only son joined the Army and never came back, then her husband had a heart attack, and she stayed in the house alone with her little garden and her chickens, getting more sour and mean as the years went on. Her relatives wanted to move her to a senior living center somewhere, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Although she wouldn’t be missed, much, the next person was Todd Womack. Todd was the barber’s son, had taken over mail delivery and planned to move somewhere else. He wasn’t going anywhere now. Then, a couple of days ago, a lady named Emma went out for an evening stroll and never came back. The killings usually happened a month or so apart, but this was less than a week after Todd got killed. And no one just disappeared in Hook End.

People in the town don’t talk much about the killings. You could hear as much as you wanted to about the Potter’s marital problems or that scandalous dress that Phillipa Brooks wore to church last year. Not about the killings. There’s no way to stop them, and talking about it makes people feel uncomfortable, so why not talk about something else more pleasant. It was just part of living here. Florida has hurricanes, California has earthquakes, and we have something that kills a few people every quarter century. I’d had nightmares about it when I was a little girl. Emma disappearing was different, so we were talking about it. Suzie didn’t know the history of Hook End, she’d missed the stage where little kids tell each other ghost stories, and it had been almost twenty-five years since the last time.

“Every twenty-five years?” Suzie looked like she couldn’t believe it, or didn’t want to.

“Sometimes twenty-two, sometimes longer,” Fred told her. “Like, it skips a generation.”

“It was almost thirty years, once,” Alan added. “Everyone hoped it had stopped, had almost forgotten about it.”

“And they never catch the guy who does it?” Suzie asked.

“Once.” Fred sipped at his beer. “They caught one, after he killed two people. And then it started again just fifteen years later.”

Four or five, maybe six victims, and then the killings stopped for a while. Until they started again. That was the pattern. The killings were random, a few weeks apart, and there wasn’t any sign of violence. The victims would be found, dead, eyes open in horror. Slumped wherever death had found them, at home or at work or somewhere else.

Fred and Alan went on for a while, and Suzie looked more and more scared.

“Why live here, then? Why don’t people just leave?”

I knew I’d go crazy if I were forced to leave Hook End. But I couldn’t say so.

Alan picked up a slice of pizza, looked at it, and put it back down.

“Why did your family stay here?” he asked quietly.

But we all knew the answer. They’d been Hooked.

I’d looked up the history when I was younger. A lot of people do, so the librarian keeps a special collection handy. It started a long time ago, when Hook End was more prosperous and well-known. It had a thriving fishing fleet, and served as a port for sailing ships. A merchant captain named Morrison had returned from a trip to the Malays, sold his ship and retired. He was wealthy, but rumors started spreading that he’d picked up some strange religion. He built a nice house, married an Irish widow with three children, and then a few months later murdered them all in a rather gruesome manner before hanging himself. “Hook End Horror” the newspaper headline read, and after that Hook End wasn’t so prosperous and popular.

Twenty-two years after that, the first killings happened, although no one called it that. Four people dead, no apparent cause of death, and then it stopped. People blamed it on a mysterious disease, or coincidence, and forgot about it. Until twenty-six years later, when it happened again. And again after that. People began to realize that Captain Morrison had brought Something to Hook End, and it wasn’t going to just go away. Police and doctors investigated the deaths, and never came up with anything they hadn’t thought of a hundred years before.

Forty years ago, they caught someone. A woman had gone to her neighbor’s house to borrow a cup of molasses, walked into the kitchen and found a man standing over the neighbor’s body. He’d been a school teacher but ended up in an asylum raving and screaming, and died a month or so later. The next wave of killings came again in only fifteen years, and the residents of Hook End never knew which person among them was a killer. And no one knew who it would be this time, except the person doing it. I learned the full truth later, and I still have the nightmares.

But we were talking about Emma, and her just vanishing was a mystery. Nothing like that had ever happened here before.

“What’s Dwayne doing about it, anyway?” Suzie asked.

Dwayne was the town constable, but he wasn’t real enthusiastic about it. There normally wasn’t much for him to do, and fishing was more fun than fighting crime. “Emerson Ducks” people called him sometimes, as if anyone would go to the bother of shooting at him. A few years back, a trio of vagrants had taken up residence in the abandoned farmhouse that the Shackletons used to live in. Dwayne ran them off, and so far that was the highlight of his career. That made me think about the one place no one had probably looked.

“I wonder if he’s taken a look at the Shackleton place,” I said.

“Probably not, probably won’t,” said Alan, and Fred got a thoughtful look on his face.

“We could go look tomorrow,” said Fred. “Too late tonight.”

So that’s what we had decided to do.

###

The Shackleton house had never been impressive, and got less so over the years. It had been abandoned for two generations now, the fields gone back to nature. The oldest son had died, the younger one went off to college and lost interest in farming or returning to Hook End. The Shackletons finally hired an auctioneer to sell off the livestock and equipment for what they could get, and moved into town. The property changed hands a couple of times, and once there was some noise about turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. That was a long time ago, and now the house just sat there, slowly falling apart.

The paint had long ago weathered to gray, the front door was missing, and the two upper story windows were devoid of glass. If you squinted just right, it looked like the head of some gap-toothed old geezer, staring at you and mumbling about being forgotten. Fred parked near the front door, in the knee-high grass.

“We’ll stick together, okay? Just see if anyone has been here, and then we leave.” Alan looked less confident than he sounded, but Fred nodded grimly. Suzie just looked nervous.

We walked up onto the creaking porch, and Alan shined his flashlight around. The living room was empty, so we went in. Fred and Alan first, of course, while Suzie and I stayed near the front door. Dust motes danced in the air, and I could smell the mice that had taken up residence. The fireplace hadn’t been used. That’s what gave the vagrants away, smoke coming from a house that no one was supposed to be in. Fred and Alan went to look at the kitchen and found nothing interesting.

“Let’s go look upstairs,” Alan said.

Suzie shook her head. “There’s no one here. Let’s just go.”

“We’ll be right back,” Fred told her. “You girls stay here.”

They climbed the shaky old staircase, trying and failing to be quiet. I could hear them walking around up there, and then one of them yelled.

“Holy fucking shit!”

I ran up the stairs, to see Alan in the hallway, staggering and pale. He looked like he was going to puke. Fred stepped out of a room, backwards, staring at whatever was inside. He tried to keep me away, but I pushed past him to see.

It was Emma, or what was left of her. Someone had taken her apart and used her to decorate the room. I didn’t try to get all the details, but her head was in the middle of the floor. It was facing the doorway, and her eyelids had been removed. Her dead eyes stared at me in silent accusation. And then I felt Something Else in the room as well. It was angry.

I felt a twinge of fear and maybe a little remorse for poor dead Emma, her body mutilated like that. But mostly what I felt was anger. Someone had done this to us, to our town, and I wanted to make them pay. Then we heard the short scream from downstairs.  Suzie hadn’t followed me.

We ran down the rickety staircase, and she wasn’t there. I knew where the son-of-a-bitch had taken her though, where he had been hiding.

“The basement!” I yelled.

The door was in the kitchen, and Fred and Alan ran for it, me right behind. Alan shined his flashlight down the narrow steps. There were footprints in the dust.

Alan went first, not quite running down the stairs, and he suddenly disappeared as the steps gave way beneath him. Fred barely stopped himself from falling as well. He peered down.

“Alan?”

“Fuck, I think I broke my leg.” I could hear the pain in his voice.

“Hold on,” said Fred.

He gripped the sides of the stairway and lowered himself into the hole, dropping the last couple of feet. Looking down, I could see Alan on the floor, moaning and holding his leg. The flashlight was next to him, shining on the wall. It was a small storage area, with a door to the rest of the basement. Fred tried the door, but it didn’t open.

“Shit, it’s locked.” He tried kicking it, and that didn’t do anything.

I looked at the stairs. Someone had sawn through the boards, leaving just the edges. The asshole had set a trap. Now Fred and Alan were stuck, and it was just me and him. That was fine. I made my way down the stairs, hugging the wall.

The door to the storage area wasn’t just locked. He’d piled a bunch of crap in front of it, and Fred and Alan weren’t getting out of there anytime soon. I looked around at the rest of the basement. It was dark, and it stank of rot and mildew, but that wasn’t a problem. I walked around a wall, and there was Suzie, lying on the ground with a bag over her head. She was still alive. Asshole was standing over her, a knife in his hand and a wicked grin on his face. He looked up at me with crazy eyes, and I could see the sickness in his soul. He took a few steps in my direction, and I ran.

Up the stairs, over the hole, to the kitchen, then up again. I could hear Asshole’s steps on the stairway behind me. Not the bedroom where poor Emma was Resting In Pieces, because Fred and Alan had already looked in there. I slammed a different door open, and walked in. There was furniture in here, a ruined dresser and a moldering bed with a rotting mattress. The window held a few shards of glass still, and I stood before it, waiting. The afternoon sun behind me cast strange shadows on the floor.

He came through the doorway, slowly, savoring the terror he expected me to feel. Well, I was kind of nervous and frightened, but it wasn’t a sensation I can explain. I felt the hunger take over, and I wasn’t in control of things right now.

When he got close enough, I stepped toward him. That confused him, and he stood still while I placed a hand on his chest. Maybe he thought another death or two would go unnoticed, or maybe he just thought it was okay to come here and murder someone. But this was my town, these were my people, and he had no right to come and take them from me. His twisted smile changed to shock, and then fear, but it was too late by then. I drained the life from him, just like I had done with Old Lady Lafferty and Todd Womack, and he slumped to the floor, eyes bulging and his face gray with death.

Fred and Alan hadn’t seen him. Suzie probably didn’t either, a brief glimpse at best before he put that bag over her head. It would just be another killing, unexplained, and I would tell everyone how I found him here. I’d have to go help Suzie, and tell her that whoever attacked her got away. And rescue Fred and Alan from that storage room. The asshole had satisfied the hunger for now, but there would be another killing or two before it was done. Maybe even Fred or Alan, but maybe someone else. Because this was Hook End, and monsters have to be fed. And that’s just how it was.

THE END