The Jack-o-Lantern Box

by Karen Joan Kohoutek

On Halloween morning, Jessy handed the story to Karma, who tucked it into her folder, and read it during Free Reading.

  Karma thought it was really good, or at least she said she did. “It's just like a movie,” she said. Jessy said “thanks,” but really she was disappointed. It wasn't what she wanted it to be. She hadn't even gotten the pineapple-coconut juice into it, and somehow the sister didn't seem like a rock star at all.

  They talked about the Headless Horseman in class, and what everybody thought happened to Ichabod Crane. Mostly the kids fidgeted, full of their plans for that night. In the afternoon, the teacher handed out heavy plastic bags, with a black and white drawing of ghosts printed on them. One of the grocery stores gave them to the school to give away, along with handouts about trick-or-treating safety, as if they hadn’t heard all that before. Jessy had never seen anyone carry a flashlight on Halloween, but every year, that was on the list of things they were supposed to do.

  As soon as school was over, they hurried home. Walking in the door, before she could even yell that she was home, Jessy was surprised to see her mom right there, sitting at the rarely-used dining room table, having coffee with their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Andrum. She was an old lady, but she and her husband never yelled at kids when they ran through their back yard.

  “Say hello, like a young lady,” her mom said. “Mrs. Andrum brought over some pumpkin bread.”

  Jessy didn't really like the taste of pumpkin, and anyway, that wasn't what they were for. But she said hi to Mrs. Andrum, politely, and went into the kitchen for an owl-shaped sugar cookie, not interested in what they were talking about. Suddenly she overheard Mrs. Andrum saying “The Halloween Fire was a terrible thing. I was too young, but my sister Anna went to the party.”

  “Oh, that's awful,” her mom murmured.

  “She left before it happened, thank God.”

  Was it possible that Twyla wasn't making something up? If that was true, then Jessy didn't know what to believe.

  Her costume was ready, and Jessy was impatient to get started. Eventually she got out her most recent Scholastic Book Club book, a bunch of real-life ghost stories, with a spectral line drawing on the cover, white ghost over pale blue. She'd saved it to start reading on Halloween, and the stories were good, but she kept stopping to check the clock, and look out the window.

  Her mom bustled around, filling up a big bowl with candy and setting it by the door. Jessy changed into her black pants and black turtleneck and black sweatshirt, and paced around. It was a lot worse than waiting for Santa.

  At last, Karma’s parents dropped her off. They fussed over each other’s costumes, opened up their paper bags, trying to make the folds in the bottom good and firm, and reminded each other about their talismans, which they both had, in their pants pockets. By the time Corey walked over, dressed in a store-bought Supergirl costume, the air was getting dusky. They helped each other on with their batwings, and got ready to go.

  Twyla went out to light the jack-o-lanterns, and their mouths pulsed with the flames. They left the house, excited, as if they were going to fly away down the sidewalk, with Twyla walking a few feet behind them, her hands stuffed into her jacket pockets, looking annoyed. They heard a bird call, lonely sounding.

  “Is that an owl?” Jessy thought out loud.

  “It's a mourning dove,” Karma said.

  “It's just a pigeon,” Twyla said. “They live at the school.”

  She ditched them at the end of the block. They’d already planned out their cover story, about how they got separated.

  “Don’t get in any trouble,” Twyla said. “Or you'll pay for it.”

  Their first house was Mrs. Andrum's. “Trick or treat!” they cried out, merrily. It seemed like she gave them especially big handfuls of candy, probably because she knew them. The next few houses had the front lights turned off. Dusty-looking leaves whispered on their grey lawns.

  “Maybe they just forgot to turn the light on,” Jessy said. That's how Twyla had taught her to trick or treat, going to every door. It was as an excuse to be out at night, to go right up to strangers' doors, as much as it was about getting candy.

  “If they don't have the lights on, it's a waste of time,” Corey said.

  “We'll get more candy if we only go to the houses with lights,” Karma agreed.

  “Fine.”

  They went to the next house, which was split in half, two separate front doors sharing the same front steps. Both sides had visible windows, with lights on in each direction. They jostled to fit into the space, with their wingspans, and when they pushed the doorbell, they could hear the sound of bustle inside.

  “Trick or treat,” they called out when the door swung open.

  Standing there, looking puzzled, was a girl wearing an enormous t-shirt and no pants, her hair in curlers. She wasn't much older than Twyla.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  The girls stood there, equally confused.

  “Trick or treat,” Jessy repeated, in a plain, factual voice. The girl turned her head to face the room behind her.

  “Is it Halloween?” she asked. Someone out of sight laughed.

  “I think it is. I completely forgot.”

  The door opened wider, and another girl walked over to look at them. She had on a terry-cloth bathrobe, and makeup that was obvious in the bright light.

  “Do we have any candy in the house?” the first girl asked.

  “I don’t think so, but let me check.”

  Thery all stood there awkwardly, and Jessy looked around at the room. Posters of enormous flowers, in big, primary colors, hung over a floral sofa, cluttered with pillows and magazines. These girls went to the tech school, and rented this side of the house. They were probably getting ready to go out, maybe on dates. Jessy could hardly imagine a more exotic life.

  “Sorry,” the girl said. “We don’t have anything.”

  “Here.” The other one grabbed a giant purse and rooted around in it. She threw a dollar bill in each of their bags.

  “We’ll have to turn the lights out,” she said. “I don’t have anything else.”

  “Thanks,” they all chorused. They waited a minute, looking at each other, before they rang the other door. This was a well-known neighbor, and she oohed and aahed over their outfits, but was stingy with the candy.

  “Is that what happens when you grow up?” Karma asked on the sidewalk. “I mean, how do you forget that it's Halloween?”

  At the next house, a whole family of pumpkins clustered, burning orange on the front steps, and those neighbors threw candy into their bags. The morsels thumped on the bottom.

  They were heading in the direction of the Murder House.

  “Come on,” Jessy said. “It’s right there.”

  Karma and Corey stared at the house, its windows dark inside the nest of dark branches.

  “Maybe later,” Karma said.

  Before long they crossed paths with other groups of kids, and bumped into Allison, who was dressed as a scary witch, with green eye shadow all over her face. She was holding hands with a very shy-looking little princess, who tightly gripped the black strap of her pumpkin bucket. They all talked at each other at once, and finally went in different directions.

  “She always has such great costumes,” Jessy said, mildly jealous.

  “Her mom is a really good sewer,” Karma said. “And I bet she did her makeup.”

  They went all through the neighborhood, and noted when they hit their favorite houses. Jessy sometimes pretended she lived in a particular house with a zigzaggy walkway, winding through a set of stucco squares, like ground-level chimneys, with bushes sticking their heads out of them. When the door opened, they could only get a look at the entryway, which looked like every other entryway, but she suspected the rest of the house was really interesting.

  Karma liked to pretend that she lived at a cream-colored, cottage-like house around the corner, with a gate and an arched doorway. From the front you could se
e a whole garden curving around into the backyard, and a weeping willow tree. That house was on the same block as the dead Dracula guy's, but his didn’t have any lights on, and it looked like nobody was there.

  They knocked at the corner house that stood at a strange angle to the sidewalk, diagonal to the rest of the block, and at a small one-story house that looked like it was made of tin. Further up and down the block, they could see shadowy clumps of kids.

  Eventually they wandered down a residential street, far from their own. They didn’t know anyone who lived around there. Most of the porches were dark, and they didn't see any other trick-or-treaters. They stopped for a minute, and reached into their paper bags. Jessy’s mom always made them swear not to eat anything until it could be inspected by adults, so after each of them unwrapped a candy piece, they automatically stuffed the wrappers into their pockets.

  One of the houses had a light on, visible through the window, but there were no jack-o-lanterns or decorations or outside lights. They stood next to the door, trying to decide, when they heard a guy yelling at somebody inside. It sounded like an argument about who told who to clean this mess up. Karma made a face that they all agreed with, and they tip-toed back down from the steps.

  When they had trick or treated everywhere they could think of, Jessy and Karma and Corey stashed their candy in Corey’s garage, a bristling tangle of tools and looped hoses that stuck out in every direction. Then they went to the playground.

  Big, theatrical lights hung over the small outdoor basketball court. On the far side, they could see the boys on the swings, just sitting and swaying, with two girls from school they kind of made fun of, for being too stuck-up to wear their glasses. They wore them to school, so their parents wouldn’t know they took them off and stashed them in their desks as soon as they got there.

  They never even talked to Jessy, but she still knew the story about how their parents wouldn’t let them get contact lenses until at least junior high, and how it was really unfair. But contact lenses were really expensive.

  Scott had a vampire cape, and Troy was wearing white pants and a white turtleneck. One of the girls had a big coat on, and a cowboy hat on her head. The other was wearing a long skirt, a mask dangling in her hand.

  “What’s up?” Jessy asked.

  “We bumped into Tracy and Michelle,” Troy said.

  “Hi,” Tracy said. Michelle just looked at the ground.

  “They don’t think we dare go into the cemetery at night, not on Halloween,” Scott said.

  Show-off, Jessy thought, but she didn’t say it out loud.

  “What are you?” Corey asked Troy.

  “I'm a ghost.”

  “That's not what a ghost looks like,” she said.

  “Have you seen one before?” he asked.

  Michelle didn’t want to go to the cemetery, so Troy said he’d stay with her.

  “You still wanna come, right?” Jessy asked Corey.

  “Yes,” Corey said, definite.

  “Good.” Jessy grinned at her, and Corey smiled back. It was obvious that Corey felt braver because someone else was scared.

  The gates at the cemetery’s main entrance were closed, but they weren't sealed off all the way. They were just long metal barriers, so nobody could drive a car in after hours, but a person could walk right around them.

  It all looked different at night. Dry branches scuttled overhead. As they walked deeper and deeper into the cemetery, Jessy wasn’t really sure what they were looking for, or how they would know they were done.

  She and Karma came here all the time, but suddenly, the people in the graves seemed a lot deader. They seemed to be present, like each stone was really a person. Each one of them had been, to themselves, exactly what Jessy was to herself. They all saw the world as it was to who they were. And now they were under the ground, and mostly forgotten.

  Suddenly Karma gasped.

  “Look,” she whispered intently. “It’s Scott Visner’s grave!”

  The moonlight seemed to strike the stone special, so it sparkled in the light, the surface broken into tiny, shiny particles. The name was engraved in deep, straight letters. Twyla had known Scott, and so had Karma; he was a lot older, but they were neighbors. Scott had been killed in a car accident last summer, riding in the back of a pickup truck with some other kids, when it hit another car. He’d been really popular, on the football team, and a lot of people had been really shaken up when it happened.

  Scott just stared at the marker, frozen by the sight of his own first name on the tombstone.

  “Do you think he’s … really there?” Karma asked quietly.

  Suddenly his presence seemed malevolent. Like he was in the earth, angry with them for being alive, for coming to the cemetery so frivolously. Nobody said anything about why, but they were all unexpectedly afraid of him.

  “Maybe he’s gone on to a better place,” Tracy said, hesitant. “You know, this isn’t really him. Not really.”

  “That’s true,” Jessy agreed. Wherever he was, he wasn’t watching them. He didn’t know. Probably.

  “But we don’t really know for sure, do we?” Tracy went on.

  “Like, where his spirit really is,” Jessy said.

  “No,” Scott said, his voice sounding strange. “We don’t know where he is.”

  Stillness settled over them, tense, as if they were just waiting for something to jump out and scare them, to break the tension. But nothing was going to, so they were just getting more scared.

  “We should go,” Karma said. “Seriously.”

  They hadn't actually seen a ghost, or any mysterious lights, but they didn't really need to anymore. Everyone started walking just a little bit faster.

  “Wait up,” Jessy said. “There’s something I have to do.”

  “I want to get out of here,” Tracy said.

  “It’s something I have to do in private.”

  Everyone but Karma looked puzzled.

  “Do you have to go to the bathroom or something?” Scott asked, but innocently, not like he was giving her a hard time.

  “I need to commune with the spirits,” she said, sort of dramatically.

  Clearly, the other kids had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Like with a Ouija board,” Karma explained.

  “We’ll go on ahead,” Corey said.

  “But wait for us by the gate.”

  Once they were gone, Jessy wasn't nervous anymore. She and Karma stood for a minute, not moving, just basking in the darkness. Then they looked for a spot to bury their talisman bags.

  Karma poked at a spot on the dark earth. “The ground is hard,” she whispered. Jessy crouched down next to her, and tried to pry it with her fingers.

  “We didn't bring anything to dig with,” she said.

  “Here,” Karma said. They tucked the bags deep in the lower branches of a heavily overgrown evergreen bush. They were practically buried.

  “Now I guess we'll see what happens.”

  They started down the path, toward the entrance.

  “What if Johnny the Hangman were real?” Karma said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, what if his spirit was actually here, in the cemetery? What if we pretended to call upon him, and we really did?”

  “He couldn’t hurt us,” Jessy said. “He’s already dead.”

  “We don’t know what spirits can do. They’re supernatural, remember? Preternatural.”

  “But Twyla just made the whole thing up,” Jessy said. “Right?”

  As the paved path curved and started to stare directly at the front gate, they realized they couldn’t see the other kids.

  “Jessy!” a big stage whisper came out of nowhere. “Karma!”

  Scott and Tracy started toward them. They had ducked down the alley.

  “A cop car came by,” Scott said.

  They walked back to the playground, Tracy and Karma a little ahead of the others, and Scott looking up at t
he overcast sky.

  “We should meet for UFO watching again,” he said. “Now that it gets darker so much earlier, they'd be easier to see. Wait -- now I don’t see Troy anywhere.”

  “I hope she didn’t get too scared,” Tracy worried.

  Their feet crunched loudly when they hit the sandy-surfaced part of the playground. Somebody jumped in the shadows cast by the tangle of lilac bush, and then their figures emerged.

  “Hey, there you are,” Tracy said. Jessy thought Troy looked sheepish. Had he and Michelle been kissing? Twyla had lots of stories about friends of hers who got caught kissing people they shouldn’t, getting in trouble with their boyfriends or girlfriends.

  “Did you see anything?” Troy asked.

  They all looked at each other.

  “No,” Jessy said. “Nothing happened.”

  She and Karma went back to Corey's to collect their bags.

  “It's getting pretty late,” Corey said. “Maybe I should go in.”

  “You can walk with us a little longer,” Jessy told her.

  Karma added, “Let's see if there's any houses we missed.”

  Their route back in Jessy's direction took them by the Murder House again. None of the other trick-or-treaters were in sight. It had gotten a lot darker; the moon was completely smothered in dark clouds. Every house on the street seemed like it had a ghost in every window.

  “We have to do it,” Karma said, as they neared the Murder House. They all looked solemn. “Agreed?”

  They nodded. The walkway up to the front door seemed very long, but they walked down it. They knew the house was white, but the walls looked like a faded grey. Next to the front door, a flat orange glow burned inside the plastic strip of doorbell, a will-o-the-wisp of electricity.

  They looked at each other, and finally, Jessy pushed it.

  It was so quiet, they could hear the faint trill of the bell as it rang inside the empty house. Jessy realized she was holding her breath. She felt stupid for feeling scared, but at least she could say she'd done it.

  There was a flare of muffled light in one of the darkened windows. Jessy was sure it was a reflection, a car down the street, but she stared intently at the glass. She couldn’t see a thing.

  “There's nobody home,” she whispered.

  “Well, we knew that,” Karma whispered back.

  Behind them, there was a rustling noise. It seemed to rustle more, and louder. They all turned to look, and saw the heavy evergreen branches in the bank of pines swaying, dancing back and forth. Suddenly a group of figures, Jessy couldn't tell how many, seemed to emerge from out of the darkness, like they'd always been there, but she hadn't seen them before. They were wearing hoods, and some kind of robes, and they each held something silvery in their hands, the shape of a crescent moon.

  One of the girls screamed, and someone grabbed Jessy's hand, and they all ran, straight across the lawn to the sidewalk, around the corner, down the block. Karma stopped abruptly, and they all came to a confused stop. She turned back to look, and the other girls looked with her. All along the dusky-lit sidewalk, the street, it was empty.

  “There's nobody there,” Jessy half laughed, half out of breath.

  “Geez,” Corey said. “I almost had a heart attack.”

  “Come on,” Karma said. “We'll walk you home.”

  They dropped her off, still giggling with fear, calling “See you Monday!”

  Walking back, Jessy stared up at the dark sky behind the silent Murder House, the black trees shivering against it like shadow puppets. She inhaled deeply, as if she could breathe in the night.

  “Is that?” Karma asked. She was holding out her arm, stretching her palm. “It’s starting to snow.”

  They huddled their bags under their coats, and walked faster. It was only a few blocks, but the snow began to blur against the yellow and brown leaves, and dampen the figure hanging in Jessy's yard, its grey cloak flaring at them as they passed it.

  The jack-o-lanterns still sat flickering in front of her house, bright orange eyes staring at her, like they knew everything.

  Inside, the house was warm, and smelled of pumpkin and wax.

  “You girls are awfully late,” her mom said, while they detangled from their wings and their coats, but she didn’t sound mad.

  “Spooky out there tonight, huh?” her dad asked, looking at their faces. Then he glanced at their bags. “Good haul?”

  “Yeah,” Jessy said.

  “Where’s your sister?” her mom asked.

  “We kind of got lost,” Jessy said. “She’s probably still looking for us.”

  At her mom’s expression, she began elaborating. “It was our fault. We ran into a friend of hers, who was taking her little brother. A really little kid. They were talking, and his costume was coming apart, so we said we’d go on ahead. We went along a little too far, and we lost her.”

  Her mom’s face looked tight, but her dad said, “Well, she’ll turn up.”

  “You’re getting to be big girls,” her mom said, like she was making a big announcement. “So I’m not going to go through your candy this year.” She sounded pretty uncertain about that, but kept going. “Before you eat anything, make sure to check all the wrappers. If it looks like it’s been unwrapped and re-wrapped, don’t eat it. Look for holes, even tiny holes. Even a pinprick.”

  “We’ll look really carefully,” Jessy promised.

  “Okay, good.”

  Up in Jessy's room, they rolled out their sleeping bags on the floor, and plumped up their pillows to lean on. Then they poured the candy from their bags into the space between, careful to keep the contents separated from each other. They snatched out their dollar bills, and began to scrutinize.

  There were legends about kids whose parents confiscated their bags, only letting them eat so much on Halloween night. They'd tuck the rest away into some kind of candy vault, and ration out the pieces. That would be horrible!

  They had fat popcorn balls, in tight cellophane wrappers. Packets of the enormous SweeTart candies, a pair of them tucked inside a paper rectangle. Handfuls of taffy-like candies, twisted into orange and black waxed paper, the orange ones melty and tasting of peanut butter, the black ones soft licorice. Rolls of Smartees, which they judged according to the variety of pastel colors. Nobody liked too many of the same color in a row.

  Because the word “smart” was in the name, everyone said they were candy pills, supposed to make you smarter.

  “I’m going to save some for the next math test,” Karma joked.

  They'd gotten all sorts of bite-sized candy bars, too, and little orange suckers, with white loops of twisted paper for handles. Those had white jack-o-lanterns drawn on them; that licked right off when you sucked on them. Plus tons of Jolly Ranchers, pixie sticks, miniature Tootsie Rolls, and full-sized Tootsie Pops. That was a good candy, based on size, but the smaller suckers you could only get on Halloween, so it was a toss-up which was the superior treat.

  Sugar Daddies; Bit-O-Honeys; little boxes of Milk Duds, which were fun to pick up and shake. Some kind of no-brand bubblegum, narrow pink wedges with flat ends, and the sphere-shaped lollipops that turned into a kind of powder on your tongue. How could you decide what to eat first?

  Karma unwrapped one of the orange suckers, and popped the round face into her mouth. Jessy started with the Tootsie Rolls.

  “We didn’t imagine it, did we?” Karma asked.

  “All three of us couldn't imagine it,” Jessy said.

  The sleet was turning more solid outside the window.

  “I was just thinking about your story,” Karma said. “It's weird to think of running from vampires in the snow.” Then she added, “You’d know if you were dead, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course you would.”

  “I saw this movie once, where there was a ghost, and they didn’t know they were dead. They kept reliving what they were doing, the night they died.”

  “Everybody's heard a story about that,” Jessy
said.

  “Yeah. It's weird that so many people think that can happen.”

  “Maybe we’re dead right now,” Jessy joked.

  “Don’t say that,” Karma said. “It’s bad luck.”

  Before they went to sleep, they gathered their candy together again. Karma shoved her bag between the sleeping bag and the wall, and Jessy set hers on the desk, in a nest of paper.

  In the middle of the night, Jessy half woke up, as if she'd heard something. Her door was open a crack, when she was sure she'd left if as closed as it would go. It looked like a shadow in the doorway, and in the darkness, she thought it was Twyla, looking in. Jessy started to sit up to say something, but there was no one there.

  She must have just come in from the party, she thought. But then she was startled by a thought. Karma said it happened all the time, that ghosts visited people, right when they died. What if something had happened to Twyla, right that second, like the ghost in the story? She looked over at Karma, who was obviously sound asleep, and then she put her head back on the pillow, turned toward the door, closing her eyes almost all the way.

  She waited. There was another faint sound, a creak. The door opened slightly wider. A figure stepped, silent, into the room. Jessy tried not to make a sound. It really was Twyla. She stepped toward the desk, and then she reached carefully into the bag and grabbed a piece of candy.

  ****