by Joseph Fink
She led them over the fence, darting across the street before the trucks could turn the corner, and over the fence again into Mr. Gabler’s yard.
“Alright, inside,” she said.
They ran through the sliding back door of the Gabler house, and shut it. Then, working together, they did their best to push furniture against doors and windows, leaning the couch up against the front window, until they created as much of a barricade as they could. Of course, the trucks could just smash through those walls like they were nothing, but that hadn’t happened yet. They could hear the engines idling outside, seemingly happy to let their prey stay holed up.
After this flurry of activity, they stood in the Gabler family dining room, the furniture all rearranged, the table wedged under the front door.
“Okay,” said Agustín. “What now?”
“I guess we wait to see what they do next,” Esther said. She looked at Mr. Gabler, the adult, to see if he approved or disapproved of this plan, but he just shrugged.
“I guess we do,” he said.
AT FIRST THEY STOOD ALERT by the doors and windows, waiting for the attack. But nothing happened. The trucks idled threateningly outside, but neither of the men seemed interested in getting in, merely in preventing them from getting out. So eventually they left Mr. Gabler to keep an eye on the door, and the three of them went into the kitchen for a late-night snack. Fleeing for their lives had worked up their appetite.
“Turkey in the fridge, bread on the counter. If you make a mess, you clean it up,” Mr. Gabler said. He sat in the one chair in the living room that hadn’t been conscripted into the barricade.
They wolfed down their sandwiches, not noticing until then how hungry they had been. Esther was unsure how much time had passed since her last meal. The measurement of time had become difficult, and she wasn’t sure she trusted the red digits of the clock on the stove. Sasha tried turning on the TV, but there wasn’t any signal coming through.
A few hours passed, with no change and no movement from outside. The tension within them unwound a bit. Still present and accounted for, but not so intense as to make other thought impossible. Esther even found herself getting bored. She went into the upstairs bathroom and looked in the mirror. The gory face of a killer looked back at her.
She peeled off the wounds, leaving them in a stack by the sink, and wiped off the makeup using remover that presumably belonged to Mrs. Gabler, until it was only her face, the face of a thirteen-year-old girl, looking back. She thought about what that face would look like when she was twenty, or thirty, or even as impossibly old as forty. Where would the wrinkles go? Here at the corners of her eyes? Here on her cheeks?
The distance between her face and any face she might have in the future seemed an astonishing and impossible gap, and she wondered how it ever happened to anyone.
She came back out of the bathroom and leaned over the landing. Sasha was in the living room downstairs, flicking idly through a dental trade journal.
“Where’s Agustín?” Esther said.
Sasha rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. Up there, I think?”
Esther looked around. One bedroom door was closed. She assumed that Mrs. Gabler was sleeping an unwakeable sleep in there. The other bedroom’s door was open.
“Agustín?” Esther said into the dark doorway.
“Yeah. I’m in here.”
He was sitting on the bed, looking out the window. Esther supposed he was looking at the moon. Orange and huge and low to the horizon, it cast everything in the dark room in the faint hue of a pumpkin. She sat down next to him.
“How are you doing?” she said. She didn’t know how else to talk about everything they had just gone through.
“It’s not moving,” he said.
“What?”
“The moon. Hasn’t moved. It’s been hours.”
She looked again. He was right. The moon was exactly where it had been when they started trick-or-treating.
“That can’t be good,” she said.
“I told you Halloween sucked.”
“Shut up, it’s not Halloween’s fault.”
“None of this is real, right?” he said. “This is just a dream we’re having?”
She pinched his arm.
“Ow!”
“I think if we were talking in a dream we’d know. It wouldn’t feel like this. It would feel different.”
“Maybe,” he said.
They sat in silence for a while. The silence was comfortable. It was almost welcome after all the noise and panic of the chase.
In that silence, she found herself thinking about something she had been turning over in her mind for the last few weeks.
“Gus, do you think we’ll still be friends like this in high school?”
He looked at her. Their eyes had adjusted enough to the darkness that they both were visible, but in soft focus. Fainter, less flawed versions of what they really looked like.
“Yeah. I mean, sure. Why wouldn’t we be? We’re still friends in junior high.”
“I feel like high school might be different. Or . . .” She put her face in her hands. “I’m not making sense. I just don’t know what high school is going to be like. It’s a blank for me.”
“I think it’ll be what we decide to make it. That’s what my mom always says. She says fate isn’t real, that we decide what happens in our own lives. Like we’ll stay friends if we want to stay friends. And we want to stay friends, right?”
She frowned. “People say that the future is what you make of it. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it just comes, and maybe you get some choices, but above all the future is change. You can’t control change.”
“Man.” He turned to face her. “You’re really freaked out about getting older, huh?”
She turned to face him too. “I guess I just see how getting older works with my brother, and my parents, and my grandma Debbie. Each year everything becomes more complicated and less easy.”
Then they were facing each other, and silent again, and now the silence wasn’t comfortable. In the unnatural orange light, he had never looked less like himself, but still she recognized the person she had spent the most time with in the last few years. This wasn’t a dream. If this were a dream, she might be able to say the things that she was realizing she wanted to say. But she couldn’t say that stuff here, in the real world, where it was the two of them in their three-dimensional, oxygen-needing bodies, waiting awkwardly through the silence.
He smiled and indicated the trucks lurking outside. “You really think we’re gonna make it to high school, anyway?”
And in that moment, she knew she was going to say it after all. Here in this real world, right in this real moment, she was going to start talking to him about it.
But when she opened her mouth, the window in the room collapsed inward in a violent explosion of glass, and instead of words she only screamed.
They jumped up off the bed, backing away from the broken window.
Click. Click. Click. Insect legs. A whirring.
A shadow in the window, against the orange bright of the moon. The shadow was a trick-or-treater in the white sheet of an old-fashioned ghost costume. The sheet was torn and stained with red-brown splotches. The trick-or-treater tilted its head and buzzed at them.
“Run,” said Agustín, but Esther was already running.
ESTHER SPRINTED DOWN the dark and unfamiliar hallway with the buzzing of the ghost trick-or-treater in the room behind them, like a chorus of every angry wasp that ever chased a well-meaning child.
“Sasha! Mr. Gabler,” she shouted as she made it to the stairs and saw dust plume out from the fireplace in the living room below. Scuffed tennis shoes emerged from the chimney, attached to the trick-or-treater in a ragged dinosaur costume.
“We’re here,” said Mr. Gabler from the kitchen. “Can you make it to us safely?”
“Yes,” said Esther, not at all sure they could. She looked at Agustín and opened her mouth, but
before she could say anything, there was a blur from behind her. She turned to see the trick-or-treater in the ghost costume scrambling at them on all fours down the hallway, a sickening whirring sound coming from its throat.
Without thinking, she took Agustín’s hand and hurried them both down the stairs. The dinosaur, still with one arm in the chimney, lunged at her, clicking wildly. She dodged away from it and into the kitchen. Mr. Gabler and Sasha were sitting on the floor. Sasha was absolutely determined not to cry, a determination so absolute she was in tears from the effort. Mr. Gabler looked confused and angry. He held a kitchen knife in front of him.
“Okay,” he said. “This is enough.” He stood up and faced the living room. The dinosaur was lurching toward them, leaving ash footprints on the carpet. The ghost ran directly into the railing at the top of the stairs, hitting it hard and flopping over, landing in a pile in the middle of the living room. Then it rose, a little bent from the impact, and continued coming for them.
“I don’t know who . . . what you are,” said Mr. Gabler. “But I bet a knife works on you just the same.” He put one arm out to shield the children. “So come on, give it your best shot.”
Which was when two dirty, costumed arms smashed through the kitchen window behind him and pulled him outside. With a single shout of surprise, he was gone.
“Mr. Gabler!” called Esther, but there was no answer. A trick-or-treater looked in from outside the broken window, wearing a cheap rubber mask of a pirate captain with an eye patch and a big grin. The pirate buzzed, and the dinosaur and ghost buzzed back at it. The two intruders were at the kitchen door now.
“What do we do?” said Agustín.
Esther didn’t know. So she moved without knowing what she would do next. She put down her head and charged the two trick-or-treaters at the kitchen door and barreled through them. Unprepared for the velocity of a thirteen-year-old full of adrenaline, the two trick-or-treaters were shoved aside. Agustín and Sasha sprinted after her.
Esther made for the front door. As she turned toward it, the front door opened. For a moment it felt like her sheer desire to escape had cleared a path, but then she saw what had actually opened the door. A trick-or-treater dressed as a clown. This one didn’t buzz. This one laughed, a sickly, wheezing giggle.
She screamed, pivoted, and went upstairs with Agustín and Sasha scrambling behind her. This, Esther knew as a longtime viewer of horror movies, was the wrong move. There was no escape upstairs. But there did not seem to be escape anywhere, and at least upstairs didn’t have a scary clown. Yet.
Unwilling to go back into the bedroom where they had first been attacked, she instead opened the door of the master bedroom. There was Mrs. Gabler, sprawled on her back with her mouth wide open, snoring.
“Mrs. Gabler, wake up!” Esther tried.
“But they can’t—” said Agustín as he and Sasha caught up.
“It seemed worth trying.” Esther slammed the door shut and started to look for something to barricade it with. There wasn’t much furniture. The Gablers were minimalist in their decorating style. The only possible choice for a barricade was a dresser.
“Help me,” she said, pulling at it, and Sasha and Agustín went around to push. But earthquakes are common in California, so the Gablers had wisely anchored the dresser to the wall.
“Oh no,” said Sasha.
“Oh no,” said Agustín.
“Aaaah,” screamed Esther again. This last time because the door had slammed open. There was the ghost, and there was the pirate, and there was the dinosaur, and behind them the wheezing clown. “Ahhhh!” she added for good measure.
She tried to think about what a person in a horror movie would do in this situation. But what a person in a horror movie would do in this situation was die, and she didn’t want to do that. So instead she kept screaming. A person in a horror movie would do that too.
There was a click behind her. She whirled to see what new terror had arrived. Instead she saw the familiar face of Mr. Gabler. His face was freshy bruised, and he clenched the kitchen knife between his teeth. For a moment, it seemed to Esther that he was flying, but she realized that he had climbed the stucco wall of his house and was now deftly jimmying open the locked window. Once the window was open, he smoothly popped the screen out and was inside.
He twisted his ankle as he landed and winced, but he took the knife from his mouth and waved it at the monsters at the door.
“Back off!” he said, emphasizing the words with stabs at the air. The trick-or-treaters buzzed louder than ever, but they didn’t come any closer. For the first time, they seemed unsure. Mr. Gabler roared and threw himself forward. All four trick-or-treaters melted away into the air. Esther assumed they must have scurried off, but she couldn’t be sure. They were there, solid and threatening, and then they were completely gone.
Esther and the other three stood in silence, letting their breath settle back into their bodies. After a minute, the three of them turned to look at Mr. Gabler, still standing at the bedroom door with the knife, rubbing his ankle.
“How did you climb the wall like that?” said Agustín.
“Yeah, and how did you know how to open a locked window like that?” said Esther.
“And where did you learn to use a knife like that?” said Sasha.
Mr. Gabler adjusted his glasses and sighed. “I wasn’t always a dentist, you know.”
“HELLO IN THERE,” called a familiar voice from outside. They gathered around the window, which Mr. Gabler quickly shut again and relocked. Esther thought again of how easily he had unlocked it from the outside. Where in the world did someone as boring as Mr. Gabler learn how to do that? It was starting to seem that the adult world was full of more secrets and surprises than even her most favorite horror movies.
“Yes, you dummies in the house. I’m talking to you,” called the same voice again. It was Dan, a bullhorn up to his mouth. He spotted them in the window and gave them his biggest customer-service smile and a friendly wave. “There you are. Thought maybe you had met a truly unfortunate end at the hands of our friends.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Although technically they don’t have hands, exactly.” Back to the same perfect smile. “But close enough.”
“You don’t scare us,” Esther lied loudly through the window.
“Yes we do,” answered Dan truthfully. “But we don’t have to anymore. You could surrender. Then this would all be over. It doesn’t have to be unpleasant. You could just go to sleep. Like your wife, Mr. Gabler. Doesn’t she look peaceful?”
Mrs. Gabler snorted and rolled over, pulling all of the covers off one side of the bed.
“She always did burrito herself in the sheets,” muttered Mr. Gabler.
“No deal,” shouted Agustín. “Go away.”
“Ah well. Her Majesty won’t be happy about all this fuss. But we’ll have it cleaned up before she arrives. See you soon.” Dan shut off the megaphone and disappeared into the truck.
“We need to protect the upstairs as best we can,” said Mr. Gabler. “Agustín, can you help me?”
“Yeah, okay sure.” Agustín looked at Esther like he would rather spend the time with her, but he followed as Mr. Gabler limped out of the room.
Sasha sat down on the bare side of the bed and crossed her arms. Esther stayed at the window and looked at the orange moon, looming above the neighboring rooftops. She remembered what Agustín had said.
“The moon.”
“What?” said Sasha.
“It’s been hours, but the moon hasn’t moved at all.”
“Whatever.” Sasha rolled her eyes.
Esther felt some latch she had carefully set in her heart slip, and a lot of feelings came tumbling through her at once. “Of course you don’t care. You don’t care about anything.”
Sasha’s mouth went wide in surprise, then snapped tight in fury. “You don’t know anything about me. I care about a lot of things. My mom is out on the street right now, defenseless. And you’re going to lecture
me.”
Esther swung around from the window, and she and Sasha faced each other only a few feet apart. “Oh no, your mom is taking a nap in a minivan. My baby sister is missing. Just gone. I have no idea where she is, if she’s safe. So excuse me if I’m not too sympathetic that your mom is asleep.”
And with that, Sasha started to cry. Big, gulping sobs. Esther had no idea what to do. She was squared off for a fight, and her opponent was wiping tears off her face with the back of her hand.
“Hey,” Esther said. “Hey, I didn’t mean . . . I’m sure it’s scary that your mom . . . You know my parents are also . . . It doesn’t matter, we’re all scared. It’s so scary.”
“My little brother,” managed Sasha between the sobs that shook her entire body. “Edward. He was in the van. And he’s gone. I don’t know where he went.”
“Your little brother is missing?”
Sasha nodded miserably. Esther sat down on the bed next to her, and wasn’t sure what to do next. She put her arm on Sasha’s shoulders, and it didn’t feel bad at all, so she scooted a little closer, and Sasha put her face into the side of Esther’s arm, crying into her. Esther felt hot tears on her arm and started to cry herself.
“My family isn’t safe,” said Sasha, “and I’m so scared, and I’m stuck here with you and you don’t care about me.”
“Hey,” said Esther, although all of those things had been true until just a moment ago. “No, I care about you.”
“Why would you care about me?”
“Because we’re human beings. Human beings are supposed to care about each other.” Esther hadn’t known this to be a fact until that moment, but she felt certain of it as she said it.
“Oh, right,” said Sasha. Esther wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic. (Sasha wasn’t sure either.)