by Joseph Fink
“Okay, here’s the plan,” Esther said.
Mr. Gabler turned back to the camp. He pulled from his pocket the small, sharp stone that had started this night by waking him up. The stone had brought back memories he hadn’t wanted to think about in years, but it was also a reminder: He could do this. He had done this before. But he would need one major distraction.
It turned out he wasn’t the only one who had realized this, because Esther and Agustín and Sasha came running into the clearing. All three of them shouted and waved their arms.
“Hey, weirdos! Over here!”
“You can’t catch us!”
Everyone in camp turned to see what the ruckus was about. Dan rolled his eyes. The trick-or-treaters clicked and buzzed, seeming unsure of what to do. The queen went red with fury.
“Get them! Bring them to me!” she howled.
Most of the trick-or-treaters dutifully squirmed their way across the camp toward the three kids, who disappeared back into the brush. Dan and Ed glanced at the queen, and, seeing her mood, also ran in that direction.
Mr. Gabler was annoyed and worried, and at first he started down to help the three of them escape their pursuers. But he realized that then they would all be right back where they had started. No, as bad an idea as it had been for them to try to help him, they had given him an opportunity, and it would be wrong not to take it. He closed his eyes, slowing his breath and his heart rate, the same way he would before any big job back in his days of stealing from museums and wealthy collectors. Then he opened his eyes and slipped gracefully down the hillside.
He kept to the shadows, moving when the fire guttered in the wind, so if anyone saw him, he would appear to be an aspect of light. The few trick-or-treaters left in camp were staring off in the direction that all the others had run. The queen, too, was standing atop her throne, trying to see what was going on. Halfway through camp he started to get confident and moved into a run. Which was when he almost smacked right into the back of a trick-or-treater dressed as a robot. The spray-painted cardboard boxes that made up its body were soggy and seamed with black lines of rot. Up close, Mr. Gabler caught a whiff of a pungent odor like a sponge left wet for too long. Cleaning fluid and mold. The thing started to turn, and Mr. Gabler fell backward, landing softly on his hands and rolling under one of the cots holding a child. The trick-or-treater shuffled over and made a series of wet popping sounds. Mr. Gabler held his breath.
“Faster!” Esther shouted from far away. The robot-costumed creature turned at the sound and shuffled away. Mr. Gabler hoped that the kids were still safe. He rolled back to his feet and started again for the throne. This time he was careful, but he also knew his window was closing. He didn’t have much time left.
He reached the throne, crouching behind it.
“Bring them now! Bring them now!” the queen shrieked from just above him. How was he going to get the box out of her hands? This was a nearly impossible problem that he had less than a minute to solve. He looked frantically around him.
On either side of the throne were piles of fruit, Dan’s red apples on one side and Ed’s enormous orange pumpkins on the other. Mr. Gabler reached out and grabbed one of the pumpkins. He wondered if it would work for him, or if it was somehow tied to Ed, but no, the pumpkin caught afire, flames as cartoonishly orange as the fruit they sprouted from. Mr. Gabler squeaked in pain and surprise, and without thinking through the repercussions, he tossed the projectile directly onto the queen’s throne.
The throne, made of dry organic material, went up in seconds. A roaring pillar of flame. The queen leapt off, but parts of her dress carried the fire with her, and she swatted at them, yelping. This was Mr. Gabler’s only chance. He darted through the smoke, shoved her over, and yanked the box out of her hand as she fell.
“How dare you!” the queen squalled, but Mr. Gabler was already sprinting. There was no time for stealth now. His ankle felt like a sharp jangle of broken glass, but he ignored it, put his head down, and dashed into the night.
“Back to me! Back to your queen! Get the thief. He has stolen the moon! He has stolen the moon!”
Her voice no longer sounded quite like a person’s. Her rage was distorting it, and there was something larger and older than humankind in her voice. If the night could talk, it would sound like that. If Halloween could talk, it would sound like that.
“Esther! Agustín! Sasha!” Mr. Gabler shouted as he flew. Miraculously, the three of them popped out of the brush thirty feet down the path. He looked back and saw that the trick-or-treaters were all swarming after him. Most terrifyingly of all, he felt the subsonic boom of the giant scarecrow. Its towering silhouette loomed out of the night from the trees next to him.
“Quick!” said Mr. Gabler. “Catch!” And he launched the box, hoping it would be visible enough for them to retrieve. Esther reached out her hands and, with no athletic ability and never having played an organized sport, managed to catch it in her wild arms. She started forward to join Mr. Gabler, but he shook his head frantically. “No! Get out of here!”
Just then, as if to emphasize the point, the giant’s hand flung itself out of the woods and scooped him up. Mr. Gabler was held, squirming, up to the hollow sack eyes of the scarecrow’s massive face. A little sharp stone fell from his pocket to the dark path below, the last bit of luck leaving him. As it fell, it glowed a bright and vivid orange, a tiny shooting star until it fizzled out in the dirt of the path.
“No,” Sasha whispered.
They could hear the deep drone of the queen’s new voice though the trees and the brush and the hills.
“Into the Dream. I banish him into the Dream.”
As quick and indisputable as a door slamming shut, consciousness left Mr. Gabler, and he was as gone as every other adult in town. Deep in the restless sleep of the Dream.
“MR. GABLER!” CRIED ESTHER, but Sasha and Agustín were already pulling her down the trail.
“Come on, Est, we’ve got to go,” said Agustín. “Mr. Gabler wouldn’t have wanted us to get caught.”
“Because then who would be around to rescue him?” said Sasha.
They were right. Esther, burying the shame it gave her, turned away from the camp and ran. The pack of hungry trick-or-treaters took after them, horrible clicking and snuffling sounds coming from beneath their masks and robes. The giant, at least, had turned and was lumbering back to camp with the sleeping body of Mr. Gabler.
“To the street!” Esther said, not sure that the street would be any safer. But she wanted out of the dark pathways of this canyon, back to the familiar lights of her neighborhood. At least there she would know where she was. At least on the street there wasn’t the possibility of one of the dirt trails turning some unfamiliar corner and drawing them onto darks paths that only existed at night, from which they would never find their way home. No, it was better to be out on the asphalt and concrete of a small and simple place that she understood well.
So they sprinted up the steep slope to the gate of the canyon, spilling out into a cul-de-sac. Waiting for them, engines purring like contented predators, were two ice cream trucks, one with the picture of an apple, and the other with a picture of a pumpkin.
“Good to see you,” said Dan.
“Yeah, good to see you,” said Ed.
Dan shot a glare at his brother. “I already said that.”
“Well, I can say it too. We can both say it.”
“Find your own thing to say.”
“I did. It happened to be the same as yours.”
“Unbelievable.”
Maybe they would have bickered all night, letting the kids sneak past, but a howl of fury came from the darkness of the canyon. This caused the brothers to snap their attention back to the situation at hand. Esther grasped tightly to the mysterious box that Mr. Gabler had sacrificed his freedom to retrieve. Whatever was inside it was the key to this never-ending Halloween, and she wasn’t about to let down her friends by losing it.
As if read
ing her mind, Ed’s eyes rested on what she was holding, and he frowned.
“Not yours,” he grunted. “Stealing.”
“Very naughty,” agreed Dan. He produced a shiny red apple from his pocket, and with a friendly wink at the children, caused shiny razor blades to grow from it. Ed took up a pumpkin by its stem, and it bloomed into flame.
“Time to give it back,” said Dan, and Esther tensed herself for the onslaught. She wasn’t sure what she would do, only that she wasn’t going to go down without trying something. Her mind raced for ideas, but she found every avenue of her brain disconcertingly blank. She didn’t seem to know what to do at all.
And then: “Yergeherrer!” someone called, a nonsense phrase of adrenaline and aggression, and someone’s body launched itself at the brothers, a lanky cannonball. It was Sasha.
“Sasha, wait!” shouted Agustín, but there was no waiting for Sasha. She had years of anger at the way the world had treated her, and for once she wasn’t taking out that anger on an innocent bystander.
“What is the child doing?” whispered Ed.
“I don’t know,” Dan whispered. There was a sour note of panic in his voice, and he tried to cover it with his usual smoothness, but it wouldn’t quite go. “No child has ever done this before.”
Which was when Sasha reached him and, with the years of experience being the most aggressive soccer player on her team, swept his legs out from under him.
“Agh!” cried Dan. To his complete shock, he found himself on his back, with this little girl on his chest, kicking and punching. Where had his apple gone? He couldn’t seem to find it. Well, never mind, there was an infinite amount in his truck and in his pockets. But—and this was some concern—he couldn’t seem to reach either of those. So he didn’t have any way of stopping his attacker from continuing to hurt him quite badly.
Ed had been struck utterly still with surprise, but he recovered himself. He couldn’t throw the flaming pumpkin, not with his brother right there, so he tossed it aside and went to grab Sasha. At that point, unfortunately for Ed, Agustín had gotten the idea, and he rammed his shoulder into Ed’s side.
“Whoa, I had no idea I could do that,” said Agustín. He had laid Ed out flat without thinking through what he was going to do at all.
Sasha was now jumping up and down on Dan, and Dan didn’t like that one bit. He tried once more for his apples, and retrieved one, but before the blades could sprout, Esther ran up and kicked it out of his hand.
“Come on!” shouted Dan in frustration.
“Come on!” shouted Agustín to his friends, as he pushed Ed back down before the big man could get up and grab any of his flaming squash.
The three of them ran away past the trucks, as the two brothers slowly pulled themselves up, cursing, wondering what had just happened to them.
Esther gestured the other two into the side yard of a house where they hid to study the box. “I think we’ve lost them for a moment. We need to get this open.”
The latch was a complex series of cubes that seemed on the verge of opening but would not budge. Esther felt a mix of panic and frustration fizzing through her as she started fumbling with the cubes.
“Hold on,” said Agustín. “I used to have a puzzle like that. I think I know the trick.”
He took the box up, studied the latch carefully, nodded to himself, then yanked at the lid as hard as he could, and the box snapped open with a loud crack.
He shrugged. “I was never great at puzzles.”
The interior was a rich red velvet. At the center was a moon rock, stolen from the Bennington Museum of the Unusual and Rare (before which it had been stolen by a petty thief named Gene Gabler from a van in a UCLA parking lot). A little label in the box identified it as Sea of Tranquility. 1971.
“Whoa,” said Esther. She pulled the rock out of the box and held it up.
As if responding to her touch, or maybe to her voice, or maybe to the light of the moon, the moon rock glowed a dazzling orange. Esther felt herself drawn to the rock in her hand. She felt dizzy.
“Oh no,” she said.
“What’s happening?” said Sasha.
“Yeah, what’s—” started Agustín, but he never got to finish.
All three of them fell fast asleep, and right away began to dream.
ESTHER GOLD LOVED HALLOWEEN.
She loved looking in the mirror and seeing a monster looking back at her. She loved the weight of a heavy bag of candy in her hands. She loved jack-o’-lanterns and plastic gravestones with bad puns on them. She loved movies in which people made poorly thought-out decisions and then were immediately punished for those decisions by a supernatural creature or a masked maniac wielding a machete.
And today she was happy, because today was Halloween.
“Have fun trick-or-treating,” her dad said. He was at the piano. She loved when he played piano. Instrumental improvisation on some pop song from the seventies, or sometimes just scales for hours at a time. Her earliest memories were lying in bed, faintly hearing her father playing scales late into the night. She was so glad that he was back at an instrument she liked hearing.
“Yes, honey, we can’t wait to see what costumes you make when you go out next year,” her mom said. Her mom, usually stressed out about work, seemed so relaxed, like Esther rarely saw except when the family went on vacation. Her face was loose, her smile easy.
“You don’t mind me still trick-or-treating next year?” Esther said.
“Oh no, of course not,” her dad said, playing a series of rising major chords on the piano.
“And the year after that, and the year after that,” her mom sang in tune with the piano. In fact, Esther realized, everything that her father and mother had said so far had been sung. Esther thought that there was something wrong here. She struggled to figure out what it was.
But she couldn’t hold on to the thought. The moment she had it, it was already gone.
“Say, want to hear me play saxophone?” her dad sang, pulling the saxophone out of the open top of the grand piano.
“Oh, Dad, that’s okay,” she said, edging toward the door, but he already had it to his mouth. And he played, and it was beautiful—perfectly modulated notes, on pitch, a clear tone. She could have listened to him for hours. He played a short song, a catchy, upbeat tune that she didn’t recognize.
“See. I finally got it. No more torturing you all with my practicing. I have it perfectly now.”
“I love it,” her mom trilled, without a trace of sarcasm. She leaned back in the dining room chair and sighed. “Isn’t life great?”
“Plus I wrote that song,” her dad said.
“He wrote it,” her mom said. “Isn’t that lovely?”
“That’s really cool!” Esther said. Her dad always liked writing music, but he had trouble finding the time or inspiration. He would sometimes be down on himself, a musician who only made a living playing tired dance songs from decades ago for partygoers who didn’t know good music from bad. He had always wanted to be a songwriter, an artist with a capital A.
“I wrote that!” he said again. He seemed years younger. Like, literally years younger. Esther realized that both he and her mom were in their early thirties at most. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t the age they were. But again, she couldn’t hold on to that thought. What was I just thinking? she wondered, but brushed it off. If it was important, she would remember.
“Alright, I’m going!” she said.
She felt a weight in her hand and realized that she was holding a weird gray rock. She studied it. It was familiar, but she couldn’t place where she had seen it. Oh well, she thought, I’ll figure it out after tonight, and slipped it in her pocket.
As she went to the front door, she looked in the hall mirror and gasped in awe. This was her best costume yet, by far.
In the mirror, she was ten feet tall, in a dark reaper’s cloak. Her face, such as was visible under the cloak’s hood, was covered in thin, pale skin, almost transparent, h
er teeth protruding and sharp, her muscles and veins visible. She was a horrifying apparition, from the depth of her worst nightmares. When she looked down at herself, she was just her, at her own height, with her own body, but in the mirror she loomed. In the mirror, she was a creature from the best kind of movie. It was everything she had ever wanted from a costume.
She opened the door and practically skipped outside. She couldn’t remember a time she was ever this excited to get started. But she stopped, confused. This wasn’t her neighborhood. She was at the top of a tall cliff, all dark rock, no vegetation, a barren, lifeless landscape. There was a single dead tree next to her, as black as the rock, burned or petrified into a skeleton, its branches zigzagging against a sky that seemed to have no stars at all, only a faint, even gray glow. And, looming over all the rest, a giant orange moon, bigger than she thought was possible. It took over the entirety of one hemisphere of the sky, an angry orange, so close she could see its craters and valleys. Below, at the bottom of the impossibly tall cliff was a deep and churning ocean. Its water swallowed light, an impenetrable darkness, with only the rumble of waves crashing into rock, vicious and dangerous, to let her know what was down there. The only visual clue was the reflection of the moon, which scattered out over the surface, turning the massive waves orange and then not. Orange and then not. Like a light turning on and off. She couldn’t breathe. Where was she? She whirled around, desperate for any way down from this lonely perch and—
She was standing at the bottom of the front steps of her house. Cradled in her hands was an orange bag with a jack-o’-lantern pattern.
“Well go on,” her dad called to her from the front door. “Go out and get that candy.”
Esther tried to clear her head. There had been something else, after leaving her house. She had just seen something wrong, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She decided to forget it and headed to the first house down the street.