The Carousel Club

By Ron Capshaw

Writer Timothy Upshaw thought the case of the "Haney House Murders" was closed when Donald Haney confessed to killing his family and Upshaw's sister. However, when his sister, Sara is reportedly spotted in "The Haney House of Horrors" ten years later, Upshaw swiftly returns to the hometown he fled from. In the process, he learns that what happened in the Haney House was just the beginning–there's a much greater evil out there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Introverted Soul Collective Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223827511

Ron Capshaw

Ron Capshaw's work has appeared in National Review, the Daily Beast, Horror Tree, and Black Petals.  He lives in Florida with his cat.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Donald Haney looked at me as the cops led him out of the house; and from that look, I thought he could have killed me too, which was odd because up till then he had been friendly with me.

He held nothing against my sister either, who, along with his entire family, he ritualistically murdered on the night of January 14, 1977.

My sister wouldn’t have even been in his kill zone if not for my social ladder climbing parents via the Haney family of the First Baptist Church in Mullin, Texas.

To people like my parents, Ray Haney, father of Donald, was glamorous. He was an elder in the church, representing its real power because he and his carefully selected group were in charge of how much the pastor got paid.

Added to that allure was him being a veterinarian, which was akin to a big city doctor in an Old West frontier town.

Looking back, I think Ray was treated like a cult leader by the laity not just for his charisma and looks; with his wavy white hair and clear blue eyes, he looked like a distinguished senator; but because to the store clerks, school teachers (there was only one school in Mullin), and farmers, he was a symbol of them making good. Financially and thus spiritually.

Because despite being painfully Southern, the people that mattered in Mullin had adopted the elect doctrine of Puritan New England; when God had told these joyless Yankees that working hard was a way of honoring him, and when those who toiled the hardest became wealthy, it was an earthly prediction that they were going to heaven. This was a tremendous incentive for those who lagged behind to work harder.

Mullin added a component to this theory that was advantageous for those Bible thumpers who didn’t have fat wallets. Never voiced but always practiced was the notion that being friends with the elect could get your name in the Book of Life. In more cynical terms, this was a way to board the gravy train going heavenward.

I don’t know how hard Ray worked—I never knew anyone who brought their ailing pets to him—but he was clearly in the money; clearly one of the elect. He owned three sports cars and lived in the biggest house, a former plantation, on the outskirts of town.

So, this nicely dovetailed into the financial ambitions of the town; sucking up to the Haneys got them and their business social prestige—Dad sold them their three cars—and a pass into heaven.

The Haneys were unique for a lot of reasons, but the biggest one for me and Sara was how the dread charge—Mullin’s version of the Scarlet Letter—of not being from here, ruthlessly wielded against those not blessed enough to be born in Mullin, was not applied to the Haneys.

Dad, who helped run the wealthy Jackson family out of town for having the wrong skin color, actually looked heavenward when he said that God had smiled on us when HE had the Haneys move next door in the early 1960s, shortly after Sara and I, fraternal twins, were born.

But if one bought into his God, then the Lord was not smiling on us but putting us in the kill range of the Haney son, Donald.

He had considerable help from my parents. After years of sucking up to them, Dad’s hard work paid off when the Haneys invited Sara to spend the night with their daughter, Danielle.

Spending the night. How quaint.

For the rest of the world; those not remaining in the 1950s but in the here and now of the 1970s; that phrase meant premarital sex.

SARA AND I KNEW IT was a naughty expression; something Travolta and Burt Reynolds did with women; and vice versa.

We knew that because from our vantage point in the shadows of the hallway leading into the TV room, we secretly watched what our parents secretly watched via Showtime.

Subscribing to Showtime, where one could watch R-rated movies from the privacy of their own den, was one of the many guilty little secrets of the Mullin establishment.

Everyone was in the know about this. All you had to do was overhear them blasting Hollywood’s latest in the vestibule of the church. Their rants were detailed and could only have come from those who had seen the movies and not just been told about them from Anita Bryant.

From our darkened perch, Showtime educated us. We knew that spending the night was the PG expression of sex. Fucking was the R-rated expression.

Once aware of both expressions, Sara and I played word games with them. Sitting there in the darkness, we kept a list of how many times the word fuck was uttered onscreen. The record-holder was the R-rated version of Saturday Night Fever. Second place was Semi-Tough, a Burt Reynolds movie in which the actor, with his deadpan, throwaway delivery, always made the word fuck sound less naughty and more rhythmic, like a conga beat.

But I didn’t hear the word voiced in all its forbidden glory until I heard Donald Haney, the future murderer of my sister, say it even more eloquently than Reynolds. For some reason, that memory, unlike so many others, does not lay dormant. It doesn’t need a car backfiring to trigger it.

My dad had left me alone in the car while he went into the 7-11. Donald, who had been pumping gas into his red Corvette, saw me and came over with all his blonde hair, beard, faded blue jeans, and KISS t-shirt (who I was told, on the playground, if you played their music backwards, you could hear them praying to Satan). He leaned into the open car window on my side, and his pale, Paul Newman eyes seemed to dance with mischievous energy.

Don’t let this place fuck you over, he said. He wasn’t grinning. But he did grin when he pulled a switchblade out of his pocket, pressed a button on it, and the blade shot out—not flipped out like other switch blades—with a snap.

I laughed when he stabbed the air like Zorro.

DONALD SAW DAD RACING toward our car; and to show Dad he wasn’t afraid of him, he did an elaborate bow, then hipster walked back to his Corvette.

Dad looked like he wanted to beat the shit out of both of us.

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