Late at Night

PREDICTION OF HORROR

Ernie anxiously turned the pages, hoping to come upon obvious contradictions or fallacies that would immediately confirm that the book was an eerie coincidence and nothing more. But the more he read the more he was convinced that there was something strange and inexplicable going on.

“Oh, this is just too much,” Ernie said out loud. He was really getting a case of the creeps. He was afraid to read the next chapter. What if it described “Andrew’s” walk down the beach with “Alison”! This was crazy! How could anyone have guessed what was going to happen? Maybe the author was a psychic like Andrea.

But did that mean that the bloodshed and death promised on the book cover was also going to come true?

Also by William Schoell:

SPAWN OF HELL

SHIVERS

A LEISURE BOOK

Published by

Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. 6 East 39th Street New York, NY 10016

Copyright ©1986 by William Schoell

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

Printed in the United States of America

PART ONE

Arrival

Introduction

Lammerty Island is said to be haunted.

Lying off the coast of Maine in Casco Bay, it is a rocky crag about five miles long shaped somewhat like a horseshoe. There is a long, gravelly beach on one side; elsewhere the ocean sweeps up to jagged rocks and low cliffs, or swishes into the wet lands to form marshes. Once the island was home to various species of wildlife, and a colorful array of vegetation—but very little lives on Lammerty now. The animals and birds come, as do all untamed creatures, to sniff out and explore, to test the hospitality of the island. But they always leave in time, as if something about the place, some unnatural aura, warns them away, never to return.

The bloody history of the island undoubtedly began in the dark dawn of creation, but all but the last few hundred years have been lost to us. In the 1500s a group of pirates used the island to store their booty; considering their malevolent temperament and unbelievable greed, is it any wonder that more pirates are buried on Lammerty than treasure chests?

In 1670, the island’s inhabitants were slaughtered during the “Indian Wars,” mercilessly massacred by marauding tribes of “redskins.”

During the 1700s, the island had many owners, some of whom were smugglers, and who came to bad ends. In 1750 the main house, built over one hundred years ago, was burned to the ground as an act of revenge, resulting in three fiery deaths. During the War of Independence, sea skirmishes between colonial schooners and British privateers sent many a man to a watery grave off the shore of Lammerty. The redcoats often landed on the island, resulting in violent confrontations with the inhabitants.

During most of the 1800s, the island was divided between two owners, the Eleks and the Simonsons, who feuded bitterly for decades, neither agreeing to sell out to the other. “Accidents” and assaults eventually escalated into more than one murder on both sides.

A great deal of the island’s macabre history took place after 1860, when one Edmund Burrows took sole possession of Lammerty Island. He built a new main house, with separate servants’ quarters (both of which are standing to this day). It was in the servants’ quarters, in 1872, that housekeeper Mary Lou Winters committed a frightening act of self-multilation because Burrows’s handsome son had had his way with her, promising her the sun and stars for payment and paying her absolutely no mind thereafter.

In 1880, the schooner
Mary Eliza
was shipwrecked on the rocks off Lammerty Island, with loss of all hands—one of the worst sea disasters in the New England area. The Lammerty lighthouse was erected shortly thereafter, little comfort for the drowned crew. The lighthouse still stands, but has not been in use for many years.

Then around the turn of the century, Edmund Burrows went mad. During one Fourth of July weekend, he murdered his entire family and several guests from New York City. Pursuing his victims from his mansion to the servants’ quarters to the lighthouse, he stabbed and hacked at them, then sliced them up
while still living
into unrecognizable parcels of blood and flesh. Burrows then blew his brains out. The assorted remains were discovered in the cellar, providing sustenance for a hungry horde of rats.

But the violence and horror was not yet at an end. During Prohibition, Lammerty was used as a base by a 20th-century smuggler, one Theodore Langdon, who turned the servants’ quarters into a guesthouse and added secret passages to the mansion. Much blood was spilled in the gun battles between Langdon’s men and the authorities. Langdon’s alcoholic son took over after his father’s death. During one of his drunken orgies, the main house caught fire and seventeen people died screaming before it was brought under control by a downpour and a change in wind direction.

The guesthouse was converted to the island’s living quarters by Lammerty’s next owner, who committed suicide by flinging himself off the cliffs during low tide one quiet summer afternoon after learning that his business had gone bankrupt.

It is said that when the island’s last owner, Gladys Hornbee, was found dead in her bedroom on the island in 1983, her face was frozen in a look of screaming, perpetual terror, as if she had witnessed every horror in the universe at the moment of expiration.

Maniacs, pirates, fires, suicides, murders, blood feuds, shipwrecks, smugglers—Lammerty Island had it all.

Today the island is abandoned, overgrown, ignored. Through an inheritance, it has fallen into the hands of Lynn Overman, a young woman who is entirely familiar with the island’s morbid history. In occult circles, Lammerty Island is said to be a magical, mystical place, a place where demons can be summoned forth, and witches might fly across the horizon, where there are forces just waiting to be tapped—evil forces. Late at night it is said that ancient, alien things walk the ground, looking for soul-mates, screaming in frustration for lack of victims.

There are many spiritualists, psychics, self-pro-claimed witches, demonologists (real or charlatan) who would give anything for the chance to travel to Lammerty Island, to experience what no one has experienced before. To see. To Learn. To
Communicate.
All that psychic energy, all that astral force. Just
waiting… .

Other people would like to see the island simply for its historical value, to look at a little wet slice of the past. To explore the old house, and peer with trepidation through the rotting timbers of the
Mary Eliza,
whose remains strangely resist the scourge of time and lie crumbling on the rocks to this day.

Still others would like to go to Lammerty Island for mere pleasure: rest, relaxation and fun. To them Lammerty Island promises solitude, peace and quiet, as well as peace of mind.

Yes, many people would like to go to Lammerty Island.

God help them when they get there!

Prologue

She sat across from him at a small table in the restaurant on Newbury Street. Outside it was a cool, wet Boston afternoon, and through the large windows looking out onto the street, she could see shoppers and passersby carrying umbrellas and packages. She had just been told that it was over, that they were through, no longer a couple, an item. And five minutes later she was still praying she had heard wrong.

“I‘m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you,” he was saying. “But you’ve been coming on too strong. It—it oppresses me.” His big, blue, beautiful eyes were wide with earnestness, feigning a need to articulate his feelings. “I think we had a good thing going, but it isn’t so good anymore. I can’t —can’t handle these freaky spells of yours, the strange changes that come over you. I thought I could. I thought—but I just can’t, honey. I just can’t.”

She dipped her fork aimlessly into the spaghetti, knowing full well that she could and would survive without him, but wishing just the same that things would stay just the way they were. Was this really happening to her? Her luck with men, with everything, was just terrible. And she never
did
anything—they even told her that.
It’s not your fault. You didn’t do anything.
She could recite their words by rote.
I’m the one who can’t handle it.
How many times had she heard the awful litany? What was she doing wrong? No,
she
wasn’t doing anything wrong. It was them, always them.

Bullshit!

“Can’t we just talk it through?” she protested, watching him casually lift up his wine glass, take several swallows. There, all gone. That was the giveaway. He was intense while talking, but otherwise quite relaxed. He had rehearsed all this, felt this way, for what must have been a very long time. He was pretending that he felt bad, that he would ache inside, that it was necessary, the “best thing,” but inside he felt nothing but an anxious desire to get rid of her. This lunch, hastily arranged, in a crowded public place where he hoped she wouldn’t make a scene. She wouldn’t—it was not her style. Most people got gold watches when something was ended. She got spaghetti and meatballs.

He dug into his salad,
enjoying
the food, while she sat listlessly, helplessly, feeling her appetite dwindle. Did he think she would take this so well that she would still be hungry? “Can’t we just talk it through?” she repeated. “Maybe if I explained it to you you wouldn’t find it all so ‘freaky.’ I’m really a very normal person.”

She could see the smirk on his face, the laugh held back, and wanted to slap him.