Quarter to Midnight: Fifteen Tales of Horror and Suspense

by Darcy Coates

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

You discover a door behind your bedroom's wallpaper. It's probably just a small crawlspace. There's nothing unusual about it... except for the quiet tapping noise you hear late at night.

A young child went missing while exploring a disused cemetery in 1965. More than fifty years later you face the gate to the abandoned graveyard, armed with a clue that could lead to answers about the boy's fate.

A mannequin is stored in the back of your rented basement room. Sometimes its dust cloth falls off. Sometimes you feel it watching you. And sometimes it moves while you're asleep...


Quarter to Midnight collects fifteen gothic and macabre horror stories from USA Today bestselling author Darcy Coates.

Release date: May 1, 2015

Publisher: Black Owl Books

Print pages: 225

Sample

Chapter 2

 

CRYPT

 

Part 1

 

 

My sleepy little town has a few noteworthy attractions. A novelty giant plastic banana sits just within the town limits, a sad attempt to lure families into stopping on their trips upstate. We host an annual carnival that boasts not one, but two hayrides. And now, according to Julie Haze, we have a vampire in our graveyard.

 

Julie used to be pleasantly plump, but age, a diet rich in sugar and fat, and a predisposition to spending her day in her stuffed recliner left her more bulgy than curvy. Still, she manoeuvred through her tiny trailer with relative ease. Her three cats were attempting to out-weigh her, and, although she gladly joked about her own size, she wouldn’t hear a word of criticism against her pets.

 

When she’d been more mobile, she’d spent her life in the village, drifting from the restaurant to the park to the café, going anywhere she could find a soul to talk to. But with a bad hip and a hundred extra pounds weighing her down, she relied on visitors to her caravan to keep her company. And she made it very worthwhile to call in for an hour.

 

Julie seemed to know everything about everyone and had the town’s entire history stored in her brain. Through her, I’d learnt a bunker had been built under the church during the war but never actually used, that the mayor’s family had enough skeletons in their closets to start their own graveyard, and that the music store’s owner once had a whirlwind romance with a semi-famous actress.

 

I visited her at least once a week. Making friends had been difficult when I first moved into the tight-knit community, but Julie had embraced my company with open arms. In turn, I loved listening to her stories.

 

She shuffled through the caravan, tipping packet biscuits onto a plate and filling a pitcher with iced tea while the cats wove around her legs. “I’m afraid, Sara,” she said, placing the snacks on the folding table between the two overstuffed armchairs beside the window, “I’ve told you just about all of my best stories.”

 

I took a biscuit and nibbled on its corner while Julie settled into her chair. “Maybe you can retell some of the better tales? I wouldn’t mind hearing the one about the priest’s cat getting stuck in the drain again.”

 

Julie waved away my suggestion. “Don’t be ridiculous, honey. I said I’m nearly out; the well hasn’t run dry just yet. I spent all of this morning racking my brain for a good story to tell you, and I’ve remembered one I haven’t thought about in decades.”

 

I sat forward as Julie handed me a drink. “It’s a classic, then?”

 

“Well, it’s old, at least. And a lot of it is conjecture and guesswork, and I’m afraid you’ll have to suspend your disbelief from the rafters to get through it. But I think you’ll enjoy it.”

 

Julie settled back in her chair as one of the cats leapt into her lap. Her eyes were focussed on the window, where the off-white lacy curtains filtered the morning’s sun and created a mosaic of shadowy patterns across her face. She was silent for a moment, seemingly to collect her thoughts, then she wet her lips and began speaking.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It started, well, it would have to be a little more than fifty years ago. The town was smaller then and not so well connected to the cities. Most people didn't have telephones, but we all had guns. A good number of wolves and bears would find their way into town, you see, and people needed a way to protect their families and livestock.

 

I was twelve at the time, just a few years older than Jack Suffle. The Suffles were one of the town’s founding families, though there aren't any of them left anymore. Their father had died when I was a little girl, and the mother inherited his business. They were merchants—quite well off.

 

Jack and his younger brother, Charlie, played in the town square most days. I don't remember much about Charlie, except that he was a roly-poly little thing who tagged along after his brother every chance he had. He cried at the slightest provocation. I used to think he was a baby, but then, he was very young.

 

Jack involved himself in some insane antics. He got himself stuck in the well one time, and he very likely would have drowned if Charlie hadn't run for their mother. Jack used to brag about going into the woods on his own, too, and say he'd shot wolves the size of horses. That was a load of bull, of course, but I suppose he liked to imagine himself as the man of the house, a real hero who'd protect his mother and brother, though he frequently caused more harm than good.

 

On this particular day—it was winter; I remember that because I'd gotten a new coat as a gift and was showing it off—Jack and Charlie came marching through the town. Jack had a shotgun over his shoulder, which wasn’t so unusual back then as it is now, and Charlie looked on the verge of tears. I asked where they were going.

 

“To the cemetery,” Jack said, sounding so proud of himself. “Charlie and me are going to hunt the ghouls there.”

 

I laughed, mainly to pretend that I wasn't so impressed. Most of the town avoided the cemetery, except during funerals. The area was divided into two parts: the modern section—modern in that day, at least—and an older section full of cracked headstones and crypts. Our town was built over the ruins of a ghost town, you see. No one really knows who the original settlers were or where they came from, just that their homes had been long abandoned by the time the valley was claimed for our own town. All of the original buildings were demolished, except for the old cemetery, which the founders left intact when creating the new graveyard beside it.

 

Charlie was sniffling and saying he didn't want to go, but Jack kept saying, “Go back to Mother if you're scared.” Of course, the boy wouldn't. He loved Jack. Would have followed him to the ends of the earth, I imagine.

 

I followed with them past the town centre and into the farming territory. The cemetery was a short walk into the woods, hidden from the town, so I left them there and went home. I assumed they would fool around amongst the gravestones for a few hours before coming back.

 

When I came down for breakfast the following morning, my mother told me little Charlie Suffle had gone missing. I was shocked. It felt… what’s the word? Surreal. I remember digging my nails into the back of my hand until I drew blood because I was certain it had to be a dream. I asked what had happened, but my mother didn't know. I told her about running into Charlie and Jack before they went into the woods, and my mother said she supposed a wolf had gotten him.

 

You can imagine how I felt. Sad—mostly for his mother’s sake—shocked, and very, very curious. Back in those days, an alley ran behind the pub, where we could wriggle into an alcove next to one of the air vents and listen to the men talking inside. All of the most important bits of news were aired in the pub. I went there as soon as I could after breakfast, but the alcove was already occupied—by Jack Suffle.

 

He'd been crying but was pretending he hadn't. “They don't believe me,” he said before I could even open my mouth. “They think I'm making it up.”

 

“Making what up?” I asked.

 

“The vampire.”

 

I put two and two together. “Is that what got Charlie?”

 

Jack nodded, and though he wouldn't look at me, he beckoned for me to sit next to him. “It was in the crypt—the one in the old part, you know? I saw it first and fired my gun at it, but that just made it angry. I told Charlie to run. I thought he was behind me, but when I got to the crypt door, he wasn't there. They don't believe me. Not even mother.”

 

He was doing an increasingly bad job of hiding his tears, and I'm afraid to say I wasn't much comfort. We sat for a while and caught snatches of conversation from inside. Men were arguing about what to do and whether they should arrange a second search of the forest. Apparently, a group had already looked for the lost boy shortly after Jack had returned home without his charge, but they had been forced to abandon the search when nightfall had made the woods too dangerous. Some of the men thought Jack had lost his brother during the walk and that there was a chance the boy was still alive in the forest. Others thought Jack may have accidentally killed him—maybe a slip of the gun or the child had fallen off a cliff—and was too ashamed to tell the truth. A third faction was in favour of believing at least part of Jack's story and searching the graveyard.

 

I left before the men reached a consensus, but from what I gathered in the following days, the third faction eventually won. A half-dozen men armed with guns scoured the cemetery, paying special attention to the crypt where Jack said he’d lost Charlie. They didn't find so much as a hair from the boy’s head.

 

Jack's mother was beside herself. She begged them to search the woods—and they did for the remaining daylight hours that day and for two days following. The woods were wild, remember. It was slow progress with just six men and Jack's mother.

 

On the third day, they found Charlie’s body washed up on the shore of the river, quite a distance from town. He wasn't much recognisable, except for his shoes, which his mother remembered buying. They gave him a respectful burial—the carpenter had to make a special casket because the boy was so small—and agreed that it had most probably been an accidental drowning.

 

Jack, meanwhile, stuck to his story with the stubbornness of a mule. No, they’d gone nowhere near the river, he would say. No, Charlie didn't wander into the woods on his own. They’d gone to the graveyard, and a vampire had caught him.

 

Maybe things would have come out differently if people had believed—or at least pretended to believe—Jack. He was adamant and desperate for someone to take him seriously—and the town ridiculed him for it. Some of the other children found a cloak with a high collar and took turns jumping out from around corners wearing the cape and paper fangs. This went on for about a week before Jack lost it and attacked one of the children. Broke a nose and some ribs. My mother told me not to spend any time around him after that, so I really only saw him from a distance.

 

From what I understand, Jack’s mother was patient and kind towards him, but she also believed her son had drowned in the stream. Over several months, Jack became less and less adamant about his story and started using phrases such as “I thought” and “it seemed like”. He stopped exploring and became shy and withdrawn. I sometimes bumped into him at the grocers, but he never spoke to me.

 

By the time I was nineteen, I had almost completely forgotten about the entire ordeal. I was engaged to my husband—rest his soul—and eagerly looking forward to my wedding the following month when Jack Suffle approached me.

 

Since Charlie's death, the family had withdrawn from town social life. The mother, Mrs Suffle, still ran her late husband's merchant business, but mostly by correspondence. I sometimes saw Jack in town, but he didn't seem to have friends. I'd just finished selling some of our hens' eggs to the grocer when I felt a tap on the shoulder.

 

“Can we have a word?” Jack asked.

 

I saw him so infrequently that it took me a second to remember his name. “Of course,” I said then followed him out of the store and to a quiet alley.

 

Watching his feet, he wouldn't meet my eye. He kept opening and closing his mouth, and I was more than a little frustrated by the time he actually spoke.

 

“You remember the day Charlie died?” he asked.

 

“Yes,” I said, scrambling to recall the details. He’d drowned, hadn't he?

 

“Do you remember talking with me behind the pub?” Jack chanced a glance at my face.

 

It was coming back to me quickly. “Oh, yes, you were upset because they wouldn't believe you.”

 

“That's what I want to know. What did I tell them? What didn't they believe?”

 

I was becoming uncomfortable, but I answered him regardless. “You said a vampire took Charlie.”

 

He let his breath out in a great whoosh, as though he'd been holding it for hours. “Good. Good. That's what I remember. I just… good.”

 

I was starting to regret agreeing to talk to him, but I was too fascinated to stop myself from asking, “Didn't you remember?”

 

He said, “Ha!” But it wasn't a proper laugh, more of an imitation of emotion. “I thought I did, but mother says... she thinks I made it up later... I just... wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy. This has been hanging over me for so long. I think I need to confront it before I can move on, you know?”

 

I didn't really know. Still, I nodded to keep him happy. Jack gave me a tight smile then abruptly walked away. That was the last time I saw him.

 

His mother says he came home, took the gun off the wall, and left again. She didn't think anything of it, as he sometimes went out hunting when he'd finished his chores. A few of the farmers say they saw him walking to the edge of the town by the road that led to the cemetery. He never came home.

 

Just as they had when Charlie went missing, the townspeople searched the woods for several days. They didn't find his body, though. After a few weeks, they held a discreet funeral for him. I attended, but not many other people did.

 

The popular opinion is that Jack killed himself. Charlie, his baby brother, had died while under his care, and the grief and guilt had grown stronger and stronger until he was unable to escape it. His mother believed he’d taken his own life, too. He'd brought up Charlie's death that morning, she said, during breakfast.

 

Everyone agreed it was a tragedy. Some thought the family was cursed with premature death. Mrs Suffle didn't live more than a year after losing Jack. She died in her sleep. She'd had a hard life. Her husband and her two children had passed in their prime, and money can't replace family.

 

Well, I have a slightly different theory about what happened to Jack. I think Jack was telling the truth about the vampire. I agree that the grief of Charlie's death had been eating at him, but instead of choosing to end his life, he confronted his monster… and lost. They searched the woods, but no one thought to search the cemetery. I often wonder if they might have found his body in that big old crypt.

 

There’s one particular reason I’m inclined to think that. No one else paid much heed to it, but that river they found Charlie in—well, it runs right past the north border of the cemetery. Yes, I think Charlie may have breathed his last in that crypt, then the monster dragged him to the river when it was done.

 

Part 2

 

 

That was a very, very different story to what I'd been expecting to hear from Julie. I frowned at her, trying to decide if she actually believed it. She was sitting back in her chair, sipping at her tea, watching me, clearly pleased with the effect of her tale.

 

“And no one searched the tomb after he went missing?” I asked.

 

“Nope. No one seemed to think of it. The search of the woods was mainly a token gesture for his mother, really. He wasn't a precocious child anymore; he was a depressed, sullen young adult who had gone into the forest with a gun. No one had much hope of finding him alive, so they had a quiet funeral and called it a day.”

 

I thanked Julie, finished my tea, and left her trailer. It was past midday, so I stopped in at the smallest of our town's three cafes and chewed my way through a greasy burger. I'd seen the Suffle name on a few plaques around town and assumed their family had either moved away or hadn't had any children. Knowing the tragedy Mrs Suffle had gone through, I thought I would be less likely to overlook their monuments in the future.

 

Every town has tales about mythical beasts lurking just out of sight, for men to spread over a pint of beer or for children to whisper to each other during recess. I supposed the vampire was one of ours.

 

Still, the story niggled at me. Julie had made it sound as though Jack were approaching insanity on the day he disappeared, and the insanity had centred on the belief that a vampire had taken his brother. I didn’t think it too far-fetched that he'd walked to the crypt, found it empty, then been overcome by depression and taken his life. It bothered me that no one had searched there.

 

I finished my lunch and began the drive home. It was a Saturday, and I didn't have anything to do except a bit of neglected housecleaning. I toyed with the idea of going to see a movie or driving to the larger library in the next town. While I was chewing over my limited options, a third, more exciting possibility snuck into my mind: Why don't I visit Jack Suffle's crypt?

 

I almost laughed at myself then thought, Why not?

 

More than forty years had passed since the events in Julie's story had taken place. Even if there was a body to find there—and that was a very big if—it would be a skeleton. Best case, I would have an exciting afternoon, solve a long-standing town mystery, and give Julie a new tale to tell. Worst case, I would find an empty tomb.

 

I turned my car towards the cemetery.

 

The graveyard had grown from what must have been a few dozen plots during Julie’s childhood to a few hundred. A stone wall and a dense band of trees divided the old section from the new. I navigated my car down the narrow lane to the cemetery, admiring the dense pines that lined the road. Surrounded by mostly untouched natural woods, the graveyard was a few minutes’ drive from the outskirts of town. It was shady under the huge trees, and the temperature felt several degrees cooler.

 

I parked off the road, beside the wall that surrounded the new section of the graveyard. Lichen and moss covered the wall, but it was still stable. The caretaker left the gate open during the day, so I let myself in.

 

A couple of the modern graves had wilting bouquets laid carefully under the headstone, and the caretaker kept them tidy and weed free. I didn't have any family or friends buried there, so I made my way through the graves at a quick pace.

 

The tree divider grew unchecked at the back of the cemetery, hiding the old section of the graveyard. I pushed through the shrubs and found myself facing another wall. This one was very different to the sturdy, lightly aged wall facing the road; it was taller than my head and must have been centuries old. Sections had crumbled, showing slate-grey stone under the moss and vines. There was no gate.

 

I paced up and down its length then eventually settled on one of the crumbled areas. Using some of the dislodged rocks as footholds, I clambered up its side, gripping vines until I could pull myself onto the top. The moss was soft and slightly slimy under my hands and would probably stain my pants. I wasn't wearing my hiking shoes, so took my time letting myself down the other side, aware that if I slipped and broke my ankle, it might take days or weeks to be found. That thought stuck in my head as my feet touched the weedy ground. Could Jack have fallen and broken a leg? He’d probably gotten in the same way I had, and he would have been hampered by his gun. I walked up and down the inside of the wall, looking for clothes or bones that might tell the story of a man’s last miserable days on earth, but I found nothing.

 

That was a relief, at least. It would be a horrible way to go.

 

The old half of the graveyard hadn’t been touched in decades. Dry weeds grew up to my waist in sections, and almost all of the headstones were collapsed or overgrown. Gothic statues—some of angels, some of humans, and a few that seemed to depict monsters—sprouted from the underbrush.

 

Julie had said the graveyard had already been there when the town was settled. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but as I wandered amongst the last records of passed souls, I became aware of how strange it was that a town with nearly a hundred graves could have been so thoroughly forgotten.

 

I pushed the weeds away from one of the unbroken headstones and tried to make out the worn-down inscription. Elizabeth Claireborne: Beloved mother and wife. May her soul find rest.

 

Insects scurried out of the weeds and began climbing up my arms. I flicked them off with a shudder and moved farther into the cemetery.

 

I found the crypt from Julie’s story near the back. Made entirely out of black stone, it was almost as big as Julie's caravan, but much less welcoming. Heavily weathered and a haven for weeds and spiderwebs, the doorway loomed out of the gloom like a tribute to gothic masonry. The light penetrated no more than a few paces past the opening.

 

I pulled my car keys out of my pocket and pressed the button on the small LED light attached. The light was laughably weak, but it was better than being blind. I walked through the archway and took four steps before the floor disappeared.