Black oak 4, p.1
Black Oak 4, page 1
BLACK OAK #4: HUNTING GROUND
By Charles L. Grant
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2016 Kathryn Ptacek
Copy-edited by: Duncan Douglas
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
Photo by Jeff Schalles
Charles L. Grant taught English and history at the high school level before becoming a full-time writer in the ’70s. He served for many years as an officer in the Horror Writers Association and in Science Fiction Writers of America.
He was known for his “quiet horror” and for editing the award-winning Shadows anthologies. He received the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award in 1987 for life achievement; in 2000, he was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from HWA. Other awards include two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards for writing and editing.
Charlie died from a lengthy illness on September 15, 2006, just three days after his birthday. He lived in Newton, NJ, and was married to writer/editor Kathryn Ptacek for nearly twenty-five years.
Book List
Horror
Novels
Black Oak: Genesis
Black Oak: The Hush of Dark Wings
Black Oak: Winter Knight
Black Oak: Hunting Ground
Black Oak: When the Cold Wind Blows
Fire Mask
For Fear of the Night
In A Dark Dream
Jackals
Millennium Quartet #1: Symphony
Millennium Quartet #2: In the Mood
Millennium Quartet #3: Chariot
Millennium Quartet #4: Riders in the Sky
Night Songs
Raven
Something Stirs
Stunts
The Bloodwind
The Curse
The Grave
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead
The Last Call of Mourning
The Nestling
The Pet
The Sound Of Midnight
The Tea Party
The Universe of Horror Trilogy
The Soft Whisper of the Dead
The Dark Cry of the Moon
The Long Night of the Grave
Collections
Dialing the Wind
Nightmare Seasons
The Black Carousel
The Orchard
Science Fiction
A Quiet Night of Fear
Ascension
Legion
Ravens of the Moon
The Shadow of Alpha
As “Geoffrey Marsh”
The Fangs of the Hooded Demon
The King of Satan’s Eyes
The Patch of the Odin Soldier
The Tail of the Arabian, Knight
As “Lionel Fenn”
The Quest for the White Duck Trilogy
Blood River Down
Web of Defeat
Agnes Day
668, the Neighbor of the Beast
By The Time I Get To Nashville
Mark of the Moderately Vicious Vampire
Once Upon a Time in the East
The Once and Future Thing
The Really Ugly Thing From Mars
The Reasonably Invisible Man
The Seven Spears of the W’dch’ck
Time, the Semi-Final Frontier
As “Simon Lake”
Daughter of Darkness
Death Cycle
Death Scream
He Told Me To
Shapes Berkley
Something’s Watching
The Clown
The Forever House
As “Felicia Andrews”
Moonwitch
Mountainwitch
Riverrun
Riverwitch
Seacliffe
Silver Huntress
The Velvet Hart
As “Deborah Lewis”
Eve of the Hound
Kirkwood Fires
The Wind at Winter’s End
Voices Out of Time
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For Laura Anne, the patient saint.
BLACK OAK #4: HUNTING GROUND
Previously, in Black Oak
To all those who apply for a position at Black Oak Investigations, Ethan Proctor eventually asks: “Do you believe in ghosts?”
Taylor Blaine, a wealthy businessman living in Connecticut, has hired Black Oak to find his daughter, Celeste.
She has been missing for thirteen years.
Blaine promises Proctor all the money he needs to find even one small hint that she’s still alive. However, his other children, the twins Franklin and Alicia, are opposed to the idea.
“He doesn’t like you,” Lana Kelaleha tells her boss. “I think he thinks you’re just in it for the money.”
“He’s a snob,” Proctor answers. “I can handle it. Don’t worry.”
“You’d better handle it soon. Franklin has just taken over the company and fired us.”
Proctor has a dream:
A vast obsidian plain under a huge faceless moon. Obsidian trees whose stiff sharp leaves clack and clatter in the wake of a swift dark wind. The ground’s surface smooth and even, reflected moonlight giving the surface a depth that makes crossing it seem like crossing clear ice over still black water. Winged creatures in the sky, silent, gliding, leaving faint trails of gray smoke that twisted and tore and soon vanished.
Proctor knows it’s a dream.
He has been here before.
Ellen Proctor hasn’t said a word in almost seven years.
While in England, Proctor receives a telephone call from his mother’s physician:
“Proctor? It’s Paul Browning.”
Proctor can’t speak, can barely breathe.
“Proctor, you there?”
“Tell me quick,” he says, tries to swallow, and can’t. , A pause before Browning laughs. “No, Proctor, it’s all right. Honest to God, it’s all right. Your mom’s okay.”
He doesn’t know whether to be angry or relieved. “Then what’s—”
“She spoke, Proctor. Last night, she spoke. I heard her, man, I actually heard her.”
On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, a two-bit gambler named Shake Waldman talks to a female colleague:
“You’re leaving?”
“Gotta move on,” she says, her accent not quite true. “You know how it is.”
“Gonna miss you.”
“Thanks.”
“Do something for me?”
“If I can.”
He gives her a folded piece of paper. “Take care of this, okay? If something happens to me, read it, you’ll know what to do.”
“Shake, what’s going on?”
“Don’t worry about it, Petra. Just do an old friend a favor. That’s all I ask.”
do you believe in ghosts?
PROLOGUE
Hushed voices in a large room. A handful of candles in soot-black twisted candelabra throw more shadows than light, and in the background the sound of a slow steady wind.
In the darkness above, where candlelight cannot reach, the muted flutter of wings.
There are scents and odors collected in pockets where the air does not move, where drafts do not reach them—candle wax and burnt logs, sweet fruit and rotting fruit, rodent droppings winged or not, flowers of all kinds, meat cooled and raw, perfume, cologne, new clothes and old clothes, dust, flesh.
There is no telling how large the room actually is. But by its echoes and its silences a visitor knows it is vast.
And old.
The barely seen walls of dark wood made darker by the twisting smoke from the candles, from torches now unlit, and the natural aging process; the stone floor made darker by the shoes that have trod across it, the furniture dragged across it, and the natural aging process; the long table in the center, most of it dull , some of it polished by arms and hands drawn across it, has legs thick as trees and chairs with high backs carved in patterns with no discernible meaning, all of it darkened by age beyond measure.
The sharp tap of a sharp fingernail against wood, a call for attention.
When the voices finally quiet, there is only the wind, and the wings.
A full minute later a series of soft chimes sound, a chair scrapes back, and a voice clears its throat and says, “All goes as it should. We are well.”
Another voice disagrees, with deference but not subservient: “Maybe it does, and maybe we are, but he’s still alive.”
The first voice sounds amused: “You actually expected him to die?”
A soft chuckle from the complainer. “All right, maybe not, but one can dream, right?”
Laughter fills the cavernous room. When it fades, when silence returns, the first voice says, “A lost battle is not a lost war.” A pause for more laughter, and not a few groans. “He will do what he will, and believe what he believes, but in the end, just like all the rest, he will die.”
A third voice, a woman’s: “I don’t care. He frightens me.”
“And me,” admits a fourth, this one a man who sounds very young to be in a place like this.
No one else speaks, just the wings and the wind, until: “Fear is neither a sin nor a crime. It will keep you alert. It will keep us all alive.”
“Maybe so,” the woman answers, “but I still want Proctor dead.”
ONE
5 January
They say the beach is haunted.
When midnight slips into the dead hours of morning, the Boardwalk is deserted more often than not, the Atlantic City streets empty and cold. A patrol car cruising the side streets, trailing faint static; a desperate hooker in fake fur clinging to the shadows; a corner bar with sputtering neon; a vacant lot strewn with rubble and garbage; a dead rat in a gutter, matted fur slick with oil.
The glow of casino lights reaches over the sand, doesn’t quite reach the ocean. Streetlamps along the boardwalk aren’t bright enough to reach each other. And a flurry of headlights from automobiles leaving a multitiered parking garage aim west, not east. This isn’t Las Vegas; night and day do not blend.
It’s winter, and the wind off the Atlantic is dull and cold and damp. Flapping pennants sound like crackling ice, and footsteps sound as if they tread on hollow wood. An icicle hangs from a back corner at Caesar’s, another from one of the garish turrets at the Taj. It hasn’t snowed yet, but it feels as if it has. Many of the tourists, day-trippers and weekenders, wish it would, if only to cover the rest of the city so it would be easier to pretend they’re someplace special when their wallets finally empty.
Once in a while a gambler leaves one casino to hustle up to another, shoulders up and head down, hands in pockets, paying no attention to the sand that stretches into the dark. Once in a while lovers, bundled for the season, stand arm in arm at the boardwalk railing and watch the flashes of white out there in the dark, early cresting waves pushed toward them by the wind. Once in a while a lone man or woman will take the stairs down to the sand, peek under the boardwalk, look over at the waves, and climb up again, quickly, with a shivering that has nothing to do with winter winds.
They say the beach is haunted, and they’re right. But not quite.
“Listen, Murray, I don’t want to be the wet blanket,” said Fred Dailey, “but in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s goddamn cold out here.” To prove his point, he stamped a foot hard on the boardwalk as he walked beside his friend. “Frozen, see? Damn foot is frozen solid. I’ll have to thaw my shoes just to get them off.”
Murray, twice his normal size in a Russian greatcoat almost as long as he was tall, adjusted his Russian lamb’s wool hat with one gloved hand, and walked on without responding. His cheeks and pointed chin were red, the condensation of his breath had frozen on his mustache, and his eyes were half closed against the wind that nudged and poked him.
Fred, taller, thinner, his bloodhound face just as red, glared over Murray’s head at the sand off to his right, men out to the ocean. It’s too cold, fifty bucks gone, only one hundred left, what the hell kind of a way to celebrate a birthday was this?
“Murray.”
“Fred, we’re going, we’re almost there, why complain all the time? You don’t like it, go back. Or sit on one of these benches, they look very nice.”
“I don’t like it, it’s too far to go back, it’s too cold to sit, we’ve already passed four very respectable hotels … I don’t get it.”
Murray lifted a hand, pointing at the sky. “They didn’t feel right.”
“What, they were too warm?”
“They didn’t have the feel, Fred, you know? They gotta have the feel.”
“Well, I feel like ice, what do you think about that?”
“I think you should’ve gotten a better coat,” Murray said, and laughed so hard he veered into the steel railing at the boardwalk’s eastern edge, ricocheted off, and bumped into his friend. Laughed again, a series of wheezes that ended in a violent coughing.
Fred, resigned, patted the other man’s back gently until the spasm passed. More gently now: “Murray, this is crazy.”
But it wasn’t just this that was crazy. The whole idea was crazy: Two old men drive all the way down here in a car that should have been junked when Moses was pulled out of the reeds, get a room too expensive by half, eat enough fatty food to kill an elephant, and proceed immediately to start giving the casino all their money. And for what? So former New York City police detective Murray Cobb can celebrate his sixtieth birthday in the vain and futile hope of turning one whole pension check into a fortune.
“A onetime thing,” Murray had argued when Fred protested. “A onetime thing. You’re my friend, you going with me or you staying in Queens and watch the sidewalks rot?”
The sidewalks rotting, Fred thought now, was a better bet than anything Murray had bet on tonight.
Still, it was his pal’s birthday, and what was a little frost-bite between men who’d been friends for almost half a century.
Murray, the coughing finally done, scrubbed a hand under his nose and spat over the railing. Then he grabbed the top rail and leaned against it, lifted his chin to point at the surf. “You ever go out there, Fred? Cruise ship, I mean. You ever go on a cruise?”
“Nope.” He looked around nervously. They were in one of the dead spots along the Boardwalk, a place where the casinos’ light didn’t fully reach because the distance between them was too great. It wouldn’t have been that bad if all the Boardwalk streetlamps were lit, but they weren’t—burned out or shot out, only one working dimly a few yards up ahead, it didn’t do him much good at all, here in the dead spot.
Behind him were a dozen or so summer shops boarded and chained until spring, the two-story building they were in so run-down, it was a wonder it hadn’t been condemned already.
It was too dark here, and too cold. He adjusted his scarf, checked to make sure all his coat buttons were fastened, and looked north and south, positive there were gangs of muggers out there, just waiting for a chance to knock guys like him and Murray off.
Then Murray asked a question, and he said, “What?”
“You hear one word I say?”
“I’m making sure we don’t get murdered.”
Murray laughed, wheezed, coughed but controlled it. “What I said was, cruises aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. And if you hate it, you can’t walk away, go home, have a better time.”
Fred closed one eye. “The point being?”
“The point being,” Murray said, a finger raised to the sky, “that I forget what the damn point was, you got me off track by not listening.” He leaned over and spat again. “Son of a bitch.”
“Hey,” Fred said. “No call for that. My mind was wandering, that’s all. To, I might add, someplace warm.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Murray began to sidle along the railing, looking over every few feet, then checking to his right to judge the distance left to the next set of stairs. “I wasn’t talking about you.”
“I’m blessed.”
“Think there’s a body down there.” He began to move more quickly, leaning over the rail almost all the time now. “I think there’s a body down there.”
Fred followed slowly, putting a shoulder to a gust that tried to knock him into a shop. “Murray, there’s no body down there.”
