The Halloween Moon

by Joseph Fink

  “None of us are sick,” said Agustín.

  “I know. But Mr. Gabler hurt his ankle. Maybe they could help. And anyway, it feels like as safe a place as possible.”

  “Okay,” said Mr. Gabler, clapping his hands. “We need a destination, and the hospital is as good as any.”

  Agustín stood undecided, looking up at the silhouette of his mother, unreachably high in her curious perch. He sighed. “She’s probably happier this way. Finally left alone with her work.” Esther tried to touch his arm, but he turned away and started walking. “Let’s go to the hospital.”

  The hospital was many miles down the hill from their neighborhood, on the other side of the dry riverbed.

  “Mr. Gabler?” Esther said.

  He was insisting on walking quickly, his face drawn tight with the pain. As he walked, he tossed something back and forth in his palms. It was the small, sharp stone that had woken him up at the start of this strange night. He smiled a little when he saw her looking, and held it up for her to see.

  “A souvenir from a different me, a long time ago,” he said. “I haven’t thought about this in years.” He looked down at it and smiled. “But I suppose it did us all a big favor by waking me up tonight.” He put it back in his pocket and patted the pocket fondly. “There was something you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “Where did you learn how to climb up the outside of a house?”

  “I wasn’t always—”

  “A dentist, I know, but what does that mean?”

  Mr. Gabler didn’t say anything for so long that Esther started to think he was ignoring the question. She had so utterly misjudged the kind of person he was, and she wanted to understand how that had happened. She was wrestling with whether to leave him to his privacy or to push again when he finally responded.

  “I used to have a job that I shouldn’t have had. I didn’t like having that job, and I regret having it.”

  “Was it illegal?”

  He shrugged in a way that meant yes.

  “Oh my god, did you steal things?”

  “Yes, Esther, I stole things. I worked for a man, a bad man who paid me to steal for him. But it’s funny how life works.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The man I worked for got robbed himself and sent to jail just this month. I had tried not to think of him for so long. And then when I saw that article about his ‘museum,’ well, it was certainly a shock.”

  Esther was wrestling with all of the implications of this news when a tiny creature ran out into the street in front of them.

  “Ugh,” said Sasha. “A black cat. Shoo!” She waved her arms.

  “No,” said Esther. “There’s nothing wrong with black cats. We only think badly of them because some awful person made up lies about them.”

  She knelt and held out her hand. The black cat looked back at her with golden eyes, seeming to take judgment of Esther’s every deed and misdeed, and at last, finding her worthy, it took a few steps forward and nuzzled her hand.

  “Good kitty.”

  “It is cute,” said Agustín, joining Esther in petting it.

  “Okay, yes, I guess it’s cute,” admitted Sasha, watching while pretending she wasn’t.

  The cat purred at them and then cocked its head. Its ears twitched, and it dashed into the bushes at the side of the road.

  “I don’t know what it heard,” said Mr. Gabler. “But I respect its instincts. Let’s get out of here.”

  “Bye, kitty,” Esther called behind them as they left.

  What felt like hours passed and still they walked. The geography of the streets was off. Each block was longer than it’d been in the daylight. Some of the cul-de-sacs looked unfamiliar, full of old houses Esther had never seen before, teetering wooden structures that wouldn’t last through a single one of California’s earthquakes.

  “Man, this walk is tiring, right?” Esther said to Sasha.

  “I’m not a weakling. You don’t have to worry about me. Worry about yourself.”

  Esther felt a biting comeback in her mouth. It tasted like sour candy and felt like thumbtacks. She let it dissipate. Instead, she said, “Sorry. I’m just tired. That’s all I meant.”

  Sasha kicked at a loose piece of asphalt. “I’m sorry too. I don’t mean to be so defensive. But people have assumed I’m weak my whole life. So I just . . .”

  “I get it.”

  Sasha and Esther looked at each other, and Esther almost smiled, but instead she turned back ahead and continued into the night.

  Every once in a while, one of the brothers’ trucks drove by, and they would all jump down behind a fence or a wall to hide. The trucks drove slowly, and Ed and Dan both kept their windows down, staring out at their surroundings as if they had X-ray vision. Esther knew exactly who those two were looking for.

  At other times, Esther swore she saw bizarre shapes moving on distant blocks. Gamboling creatures that did not look like any animal she knew. Silhouettes that did not look like any kind of human at all. She had the strong feeling that this endless night did not belong to people. She shuddered to think what else waited for them before the moon finally set.

  “I should have tried to climb the gate,” said Agustín, startling her after they had walked in silence for the better part of an hour.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “Where my mom is. I should have tried to hop the fence. I should have tried to climb that hill. Even if it was impossible, I should have tried.”

  “We’re all doing the best we can,” said Esther. She reached out to take his hand, then stopped, suddenly nervous to do so. She dropped her hand back at her side. “You did the best you could.”

  “Maybe.” He wouldn’t meet her eye. “But she works so hard for me, you know? I could have worked a little harder for her. I get so frustrated about how much she works, and I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t. It’s my fault she works like that, and I didn’t even try to save her.”

  “Hey.” She touched his arm. “If I thought you should have done more, do you think I would lie to you and tell you otherwise?”

  He seemed to genuinely consider the question.

  “No, Esther Gold. I don’t think you would lie to me.”

  They continued on in silence, but he no longer looked behind them. Instead, Esther did.

  Even from this distance, she could still see the hill, knotted with vines, and the workshop teetering at the top, and the light in the window, and somehow also the woman in the light, and even miles away by some cruel miracle she could still hear Agustín’s mother humming through the long, long night.

  MARKING OF EXACT TIME was nearly impossible. Nothing in the sky had moved, and while their phones and Mr. Gabler’s watch continued to show times, the progress of the numbers was erratic, sometimes forward, sometimes backward, and so was not useful in measuring anything but the strangeness of the night.

  Still, the ache in their feet provided a clear sense of the distance they had traveled and how long it had taken to travel it.

  “I don’t think I’ve walked this long in forever,” Agustín said.

  Sasha thought about it. “You know, I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever walked this long,” she said. “My mom never likes me to walk.”

  Only Mr. Gabler didn’t seem that tired. “Lots of running,” he explained. “How else am I supposed to maintain this?” He patted his paunch. “Careful daily training.” He laughed. But he was favoring his left leg more and more, and Esther could tell that the pain was getting to him.

  Esther was exhausted and sore, but she didn’t want to show it. She wanted to be the one urging them on, moving them toward some kind of resolution.

  “It hasn’t been that long,” she said. “And we’re almost there. See? There’s the bridge.”

  Just before the administrative parking lot that connected to both the hospital and police station was the bridge across Calleguas Creek. Calleguas Creek was not a creek, but a broad riverbed, sandy with the occasional cluster o
f trees. For almost the entire year it was dry, and used by locals as a place to walk dogs, hold paint gun fights, and sneak to teenage hiding places in the trees. But on the few weeks a year that it rained, it would fill, startlingly quickly, with shallow but fast-moving water. The rise of the water could be frighteningly violent.

  Every kid in town had been taught to stay well away from the creek when the weather was wet, or even if it had snowed recently in the distant mountains, since the snowmelt could cause a wave of water to rush through the riverbed with little warning. They were shown videos in class and told stories of people being swept away in water like that. Only eight inches of water at that velocity was enough to knock over and carry off a full-grown adult, they were told.

  Once, Esther and Agustín had been wandering around the canyon during the dry part of the year. (Most of the year was the dry part of the year.) There was a large property owned by the Catholic church next to the river, and the property had a tall drainage tunnel leading directly into the riverbed. Often, they would climb up to it, walk through, and wander the property until some priest or other church employee caught them and ushered them irritably back out to the street.

  On this particular day, they had recently been taught about the dangers of the water and so were jumpy despite knowing that no precipitation had fallen anywhere in Southern California for weeks. Still, there wasn’t much to do in a town like theirs, so they’d walked down into Calleguas Creek and headed for the drain tunnel. Just as they got to it and were preparing to climb up, they heard the unmistakable hiss of water.

  She and Agustín had looked at each other with wide, panicked eyes. And then water had started pouring from the drainpipe. Neither of them had ever run so fast in their lives, both of them thinking about the lesson that had basically told them that a single toe dipped into water in that riverbed could be death in the fast-moving current. They hadn’t stopped running when they got back to the street, running all the way to Agustín’s house and collapsing on his lawn, feeling the dry bristling grass beneath them with relief.

  Now, a couple years later, she thought about the meager stream of water coming from the drain and understood that it had only been a groundskeeper hosing out the tunnel. But in the moment, that panic had been absolute and real. Tonight they were in a situation in which the menace was truly dangerous, and she felt much calmer. A person’s level of fear, she realized, is often totally unrelated to their actual level of danger.

  The group approached the bridge. It hadn’t rained for several weeks, so there was a sense of wrongness and unease that swept through them when they heard a roar that sounded very much like a river.

  “Maybe it snowed in the mountains,” Mr. Gabler said.

  “Maybe,” Esther said, not believing it. They stepped out onto the bridge and looked over the side.

  “Whoa,” Agustín said.

  “That’s impossible,” Sasha said.

  None of them had ever seen the river like that. Even at its highest points, Calleguas Creek was always only a few feet deep, and it rarely even spread across the entire sandy riverbed. But the river below them climbed almost all the way to the bridge. It looked like a river out of the rain forest. Water that belonged to a wet, green world, nothing like the climate they lived in. The mist from the rapids below made their clothes damp.

  “What could have caused this?” Esther said. They looked at Mr. Gabler, hoping the only adult would have the answers. He raised his hands.

  “I have no idea. Adults know less than you’d think. We certainly don’t know anything about this.”

  “There’s something on the river,” Agustín said.

  Sure enough, there were boats coming down the river. Esther and the rest realized one by one that they were actually huge tree trunks, taller and broader than any tree that grew in this part of the world. Riding on the trunks were figures in red waterproof jumpsuits, yellow boots, and red hats pulled low over their faces. The figures balanced impossibly on the trees, as easily as a tourist strolling on the deck of a cruise ship.

  One of the figures looked up. He was a middle-aged man, younger than Esther’s parents but older than any of her cousins. He had stubble and a crooked nose, but mostly what he had was one eye. One big eye in the middle of his face above his nose. He met her eyes with his eye until his tree had passed under the bridge and he was gone.

  No one said anything.

  “Okay,” Esther said. She thought of all of the things they could talk about, but the sooner they moved forward, the better. She waved her hand in front of her as though to indicate all that she wasn’t saying. “Let’s just get to the hospital.”

  The rest of them looked at each other and saw that none of them wanted to discuss what they had seen, so they all kept walking.

  Their destination wasn’t far now. They could see the tower of the hospital building, lights in the windows, signs of what could be normal human activity. In front of the tower was a thick bank of fog, unusual but not impossible for the climate. They stepped into the murk.

  The fog was absolute. They could see only a few feet in front of them, and so had no choice but to follow the curve of the sidewalk. The hospital was right down the street. As long as they didn’t accidentally turn off the main road, they would be fine, and even with the fog that didn’t seem likely.

  So they were all surprised when they ran into a tree. Literally, in Esther’s case.

  “Ow. Man. What is a tree doing here?”

  There had always been trees along the roads, planted by the city, but those had been wispy, water-starved things. This was a healthy giant, the same size as the tree trunks they had seen on the river, the ones that none of them were talking about.

  “This doesn’t seem right. Is this right? It doesn’t seem like it,” Sasha said.

  “Maybe we walked off the road?” Agustín suggested. But there was still sidewalk under their feet. The asphalt of the street was visible to their right. There was just a huge tree none of them had seen before in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “We’re almost to the hospital,” Mr. Gabler said. “We can figure all this out when we get there.”

  They went around the tree and picked their way through the fog. Soon there were more giant trees, and they had to be careful not to repeat Esther’s collision.

  “This isn’t right,” Agustín said. “We’re definitely off the road.”

  “No, look, we’re still on the sidewalk,” Esther said. And they were. Just a sidewalk next to an asphalt road. But they were also standing on a forest floor, dense with rotting leaves and moss. Both of these facts were true at the same time, even though they definitely couldn’t be. She stared at her feet, seeing both realities at once.

  “Change of plan,” she said. “Gus was right, we’ve gotten off the road somehow. Let’s backtrack.”

  They tried to, but every direction looked the same, and now there were no signs of manmade surfaces, only the forest floor and the trees. They were in the middle of thick woods, but there were no thick woods in this town, Esther thought. Only backyard lawns and community pools and orange groves.

  As if in response to that thought, she saw a tree ahead with big orange fruit. Okay, now she knew where they were. They had stumbled somehow into an orange grove. Never mind that the nearest orange grove was well up the hill from the bridge, never mind that the forest they were walking through looked nothing like an orange grove, there was an orange tree in front of them, so: orange grove.

  The fog dissipated a bit, and they saw the tree clearly, and all of Esther’s justifications failed her.

  It was another tree, like the others, but this one had branches hanging low and heavy with round orange fruit. Not oranges. The fruit hanging from the branches were jack-o’-lanterns, each one a unique carved face, each one lit from within with a single candle. When the wind blew, the tree creaked and the jack-o’-lanterns danced, the flames inside them flickering. It was beautiful. It was wrong. It scared Esther deeply. She gaped at it,
frozen by the fearful unnaturalness of it.

  She heard the soft mew of a cat.

  At the foot of the jack-o’-lantern tree, sitting with its tail wrapped neatly around its body, was the little black cat they had seen earlier.

  “Hey there, kitty,” Esther said. “Do you know what’s going on? Because we don’t.”

  The cat mewed again, and then it turned and walked into the fog. They looked at each other. Mr. Gabler shrugged, and they all followed it.

  THE CAT WAS STARK BLACK against the white sheet of fog, but even still, it was small and quick, and they had to hurry to keep up. They stumbled over roots, bumped against trees that loomed suddenly into visibility inches away from unprotected faces. Every once in a while, the cat would pause to let them catch up, and then dart away again.

  “How did this go from a trip to the hospital to following a cat through a magic forest?” Mr. Gabler asked.

  “That’s a question a lot of people ask themselves when they get to be your age,” Agustín said.

  Mr. Gabler grinned despite himself. Then he tripped on a pile of slippery leaves and landed butt first in the dirt, howling in pain as the impact jarred his ankle.

  “Alright, I’ve had it,” he said. “This was a bad plan. I don’t want to follow a cat anymore.”

  “Doesn’t look like we have a choice,” Esther said. The cat was gone. They were alone in the silent, foggy woods. Off in the gloom in front of them, eerie lights flickered.

  “Come on. I guess let’s head toward the mysterious lights,” she said.

  “Sure,” Agustín said, “that’s never a sentence that has turned out badly.” But he followed her as she marched into the mist.

  The lights resolved into the most peculiar house Esther had ever seen. Some of it looked like a medieval villager’s hut out of a movie. Straw thatching. Mud walls. A well outside with a rope and bucket system. But the windows were modern, double-paned, well insulated. There was a modern stucco chimney sticking out of the thatched roof. A satellite dish was tucked into the thatching. There was a modern mailbox a few yards from the front door.