The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories: Terrifying Tales Set on the Scariest Night of the Year!

by Stephen Jones

  Dominic waited in the alley. He’d seen her go in and hoped she’d invite him for lunch. Hen bought him a bacon bap and a pumpkin-spiced latte, and another bap and sweet tea for herself. Her belly rumbled. On the radio, “Monster Mash” boomed. The chef danced along to it. Halloween would be a riot here, more fun than the theater at any rate.

  “Strange goings-on,” Dominic said.

  “What? Where?” Did he mean the theater? Theaters were always full of oddness and oddities, of prima donnas, of the desperate, the winning, the lost. “It’s just one show.”

  “Exactly. Who goes to all that trouble for one performance? And they never actually do anything. I mean they can’t. Maybe he’ll attach string to them, make them marionettes, but where are the puppeteers?”

  She hadn’t looked for answers, just a paycheck. What harm if an eccentric wanted to put on a show for his friends? Even if she would like to slap his horrid smirk. “Sometimes I imagine they’re alive.”

  “You too? I swear I recognize a few from the streets.”

  Ridiculous.

  “When I kissed her, the red-haired girl, I swear her lips moved beneath mine. They felt like skin. Too pursed to find a tongue though.”

  He kissed her. “You kissed her?”

  “I’ve hit a jealousy nerve. Sorry.”

  “No.” She wasn’t interested in him. Not because he was on the street, she’d spent a short time there herself.

  “Well that’s me told.” He laughed. “Ever think of sneaking in there when he’s out, steal the dolls?”

  “Drag them along the streets like corpses? That’d be fun. Not.”

  “We could set them up on street corners, a bit like ‘penny for the guy’ and get some extra cash. Maybe even enjoy a slap-up meal or get some tickets for this whacko show.”

  “I’m working the show, and for us this is a slap-up meal.”

  He swallowed the remainder of the bap. Stealing ruby-red, now there was an idea. He kissed her.

  “Dominic, who were you?”

  “Worked in an office, admittedly a dead-end job, made redundant, couldn’t find another job, landlord didn’t want benefit-scum, his words, living in his flats, so I was out and couldn’t get on the housing list. I hope to trip over the turd’s corpse one day. An aid-worker from a homeless shelter came into the office once to give a talk and persuade the company to sponsor the charity. She said that we were all two or three months from living on the streets, dependent on our savings. I joked I was half-a-minute from. Not so funny now.”

  The waitress cleaned the cups away. She wanted them gone.

  Dominic slept on the floor of the flat, a threadbare towel rolled up to provide a pillow, his coat providing a blanket. He couldn’t stay permanently, this was a one-off, although she’d said he could use the address for job application purposes. His snores filled the flat as Hen headed for the theater. October 30th. One day until the show, and only one face to make up. Ruby-red.

  Herr Smithton waited in the auditorium. This time he didn’t object to her company.

  “Rehearsal tonight. I want my shining beauty to eclipse them all. You can do it? Yes, yes. This one needs hardly any work at all. They will all want her. As, I suspect, do you.”

  Herr Smithton grabbed Hen’s chin. She balled her fists but didn’t strike him. Yet. Job would be over in two days and he was hardly the sort you’d offer up as a reference.

  “You tell me about yourself. I want to know what I employ. And your friend who sneaks around backstage. I want to know about him too. Oh, don’t look so shocked. I have eyes and ears and not just on the stage. Little birds tell me things. We all have hopes, dreams, desires. Even them. Perhaps them most of all.”

  “He’s not my friend. I mean he wasn’t my friend. I thought he worked here.”

  “No you didn’t, but I’ll ignore the lie. We are all allowed one lie.”

  Ruby-red’s skin proved softer, more pliable than the others. Careful not to smudge the makeup, she pressed her finger to the cheek of the man beside her. It, too, offered a softness. She pinched the man’s arm. Did he wince? Herr Smithton had unnerved her as he always did. One more day and then it was back on job seeker’s allowance until she found other employment. Unlike Dominic’s previous landlord, hers would take money from anyone for that rat hole; of which he had several such dives in the city center.

  Herr Smithton joined her on stage, moving among the dolls to adjust clothing and realign their arms so they were in a position that suggested dance. He couldn’t expect they would move tomorrow night. Halloween might allow the dead to walk, but not mannequins. Unless said dead needed bodies to inhabit. Now she was growing fanciful and idiotic. The dead were dead and if they weren’t, they would have come back long ago to help her. Still, ruby-red’s lips were pliable. She tried to poke a finger between them, to find the tongue. Lips shot open. Teeth. A tongue traced the tip of her finger. She drew back, trying not to catch Herr Smithton’s attention.

  “Are you done? Are you going now?”

  Without realizing, she’d moved a good few inches from ruby-red, almost to the edge of the stage and in danger of dropping into the cobwebbed orchestra pit. She shuffled the chair closer.

  “Almost done.”

  She couldn’t close the mouth. Would he notice? All the other dolls were tight-lipped. Did I wake you? You cannot wake that which is inanimate, but then neither can it lick your finger. She would come back later to save this one doll.

  “I’ve finished, Herr … Mr. Smithton.”

  “Let me see. Let me check my beauty.”

  This was the time for Hen to not only leave but to run.

  “What have you done? Her mouth, her teeth. Oh, it’s exquisite. It’s as if she is about to burst into chorus and she will prove to be such a little songbird. Oh yes, she will sing for us tomorrow night and the audience will want to carry her away.”

  That’s if Hen and Dominic didn’t carry her away first.

  “Before you go.” He grabbed her arm, fingers digging into skin, perhaps to check she wasn’t an escaping doll. “I have a new addition to the chorus line.”

  He pulled her through the crowd to the dark of the stage. Against a faded backdrop of a chandelier stooped a figure she’d left dreaming on her bedroom floor. Dominic.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She tried to pull away. Herr Smithton’s fingers dug harder, sharp fingernails drawing blood. The stage spun or she spun, projectile vomit would ruin her work. Any moment now Dominic would move and they’d laugh and it would prove a joke. Only Herr Smithton wasn’t the joking type, certainly not with the likes of her.

  “Paint.”

  Hen shook her head.

  “Paint or lie with the spiders in the pit.”

  She took out her kit. Sorry. Dominic’s blank-eyed stare didn’t note her. His skin pliable, as soft as ruby-red’s. These weren’t dolls. What madness had she descended into? There would be no rescue of ruby now, she’d only have enough strength to drag Dominic from the theater. If Herr Smithton allowed her to leave. He waited at her shoulder. He watched the work of her fingers, of the skill she’d developed over the past week. She’d thought ruby-red would be her masterpiece.

  “He likes pumpkin-spiced latte and bacon sandwiches. He had hope despite a sodden cardboard box for a home, and he was kind and funny and so much more than the streets claimed.”

  “I can’t allow you to leave.”

  “You can’t make me stay.”

  She needed an advantage. There had to be an advantage. He twirled her chair around, brought herself to face not him but a mirror. A sharp jab in the arm caught her unawares.

  “What?”

  The stage, Herr Smithton, her image in the mirror blurred. She was here and she was a thousand miles away. He began to apply her makeup, turning her into a circus freak. She would not shine. She was no ruby-red.

  Who would carry them out now?

  She must have passed out, for next she woke to music and chatter;
to a theater alive with an audience. The mirror remained in place. She sat at the edge of the stage, staring at her reflection, while behind her the others began to dance around ruby-red. Everyone waited for the star to awake. If only she could break the glass. Shatter this illusion, shatter that of the audience. We are not dolls. Hen jerked forward. She would fall from this seat, even if the orchestra pit proved her destination. She would show them she was flesh, blood, and stolen.

  Numbers were being shouted from the audience. Dancers dragged to the front of the stage. Bartered for. Who would want a doll that only danced on Halloween? This was kidnap, this was … Herr Smithton dragged her to the front of the stage, the chair clattered to the boards. The audience laughed. She did not dance, she did not sing. Tiny balled fists fought against the fugue. The prices shot up at that. They liked her spunk. This wasn’t spunk.

  She teetered at the edge of the stage. Ruby-red twirled forward. She was to be the star, not Hen. Never meant to be Hen. Did she even know who she was anymore? Teeth bared, ruby-red leaned forward to kiss Hen. The audience gasped and clapped and proclaimed for them both. Instead, she bit Hen’s lip and pushed her over the edge.

  Cymbals clashed. Drumskin didn’t so much break her fall as break her back. A few faces peered over into the pit from the audience side. Above, Herr Smithton tried to bring his show under control.

  “That doll is bleeding,” a woman said, her voice shrill. “Dolls do not … Henry. Henry dear, I think I may faint.” She wasn’t the only one. “Someone call an ambulance.”

  On stage, Herr Smithton attempted to regain his audience, “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is our Halloween extravaganza. These beauties were brought here for your delight, but you, I’m afraid, were brought here for them.”

  The great doors leading into the auditorium slammed, the drawing of bolts echoed across the expanse. The screams didn’t die for some time, perhaps a little after the end of Hen.

  NOT OUR BROTHER

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  Robert Silverberg has been a professional writer since 1955, the year before he graduated from Columbia University, and has published more than one hundred books and close to one thousand short stories.

  His books and stories have been translated into forty languages, and among his best-known novels are Lord Valentine’s Castle, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Nightwings, The World Inside, and Downward to the Earth. He has also edited dozens of science fiction and fantasy anthologies, including The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His collaboration with Isaac Asimov, The Positronic Man, was made into the movie Bicentennial Man starring Robin Williams.

  More recent titles include First-Person Singularities, a collection of stories entirely written in the first person; Rough Trade, a collection of crime fiction dating back to the 1950s; and Living in the Future, a collection of essays about science fiction from NESFA Press.

  Silverberg is a multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards. He was inducted into to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which he is a past president.

  “In the autumn of 1981 short stories were emanating from me with a swiftness that I had not experienced in several decades,” recalls the author. “‘Not Our Brother,’ grew out of my fascination with Mexico and Mexican dance masks, which I had begun to collect. It was not science fiction but horrific fantasy, and I thought Playboy might like it.

  “Fiction editor Alice K. Turner replied on November 25: ‘I hate to do this, but I’m turning it down. It is very similar in both structure and content to “Via Dolorosa,” and I think it had the same problems. I won’t go into detail unless you want it, for I know you will easily sell the story elsewhere, but what it comes down to is that I don’t love this the way I love “Gianni” and “Conglomeroid.” So I’m going to wait for the next one. The way you’re going, I expect to see it in a week or two.’

  “I thought that the resemblances between ‘Not Our Brother’ and ‘Via Dolorosa’ were fairly superficial ones. Perhaps they ran deeper than that, though, because when I sent it to T. E. D. Klein of the Twilight Zone Magazine, who had published ‘Via Dolorosa’ and ‘How They Pass the Time in Pelpel,’ he commented that it seemed ‘awfully similar to both of them in theme and other elements.’ Well, all three were stories about Americans experiencing strange events in Third World countries, I suppose.

  “Despite his qualms, T. E. D. accepted the story gladly, and Twilight Zone published it in the July 1982 issue.”

  HALPERIN CAME INTO San Simón Zuluaga in late October, a couple of days before the fiesta of the local patron saint, when the men of the town would dance in masks. He wanted to see that. This part of Mexico was famous for its masks, grotesque and terrifying ones portraying devils and monsters and fiends. Halperin had been collecting them for three years. But masks on a wall are one thing, and masks on dancers in the town plaza quite another.

  San Simón was a mountain town about halfway between Acapulco and Taxco. “Tourists don’t go there,” Guzmán López had told him. “The road is terrible and the only hotel is a Cucaracha Hilton—five rooms, straw mattresses.” Guzmán ran a gallery in Acapulco where Halperin had bought a great many masks. He was a suave, cosmopolitan man from Mexico City, with smooth dark skin and a bald head that gleamed as if it had been polished. “But they still do the Bat Dance there, the Lord of the Animals Dance. It is the only place left that performs it. This is from San Simón Zuluaga,” said Guzmán, and pointed to an intricate and astonishing mask in purple and yellow depicting a bat with outspread leathery wings that was at the same time somehow also a human skull and a jaguar. Halperin would have paid ten thousand pesos for it, but Guzmán was not interested in selling. “Go to San Simón,” he said. “You’ll see others like this.”

  “For sale?”

  Guzman laughed and crossed himself. “Don’t suggest it. In Rome, would you make an offer for the Pope’s robes? These masks are sacred.”

  “I want one. How did you get this one?”

  “Sometimes favors are done. But not for strangers. Perhaps I’ll be able to work something out for you.”

  “You’ll be there, then?”

  “I go every year for the Bat Dance,” said Guzmán. “It’s important to me. To touch the real Mexico, the old Mexico. I am too much a Spaniard, not enough an Aztec; so I go back and drink from the source. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Halperin said. “Yes.”

  “You want to see the true Mexico?”

  “Do they still slice out hearts with an obsidian dagger?”

  Guzmán said, chuckling, “If they do, they don’t tell me about it. But they know the old gods there. You should go. You would learn much. You might even experience interesting dangers.”

  “Danger doesn’t interest me a whole lot,” said Halperin.

  “Mexico interests you. If you wish to swallow Mexico, you must swallow some danger with it, like the salt with the tequila. If you want sunlight, you must have a little darkness. You should go to San Simón.” Guzmán’s eyes sparkled. “No one will harm you. They are very polite there. Stay away from demons and you will be fine. You should go.”

  Halperin arranged to keep his hotel room in Acapulco and rented a car with four-wheel drive. He invited Guzmán to ride with him, but the dealer was leaving for San Simón that afternoon, with stops en route to pick up artifacts at Chacalapa and Hueycantenango. Halperin could not go that soon. “I will reserve a room for you at the hotel,” Guzmán promised, and drew a precise road map for him.

  The road was rugged and winding and barely paved, and turned into a chaotic dirt-and-gravel track beyond Chichihualco. The last four kilometers were studded with boulders like the bed of a mountain stream. Halperin drove most of the way in first gear, gripping the wheel desperately, taking every jolt and jounce in his spine and kidneys. To come out of the pink-and-manicured Disneyland of plush Acapulco into this primitive wilderness was to make a journey five hundred ye
ars back in time. But the air up here was fresh and cool and clean, and the jungle was lush from recent rains, and now and then Halperin saw a mysterious little town half-buried in the heavy greenery: dogs barked, naked children ran out and waved, leathery old Nahua folk peered gravely at him and called incomprehensible greetings. Once he heard a tremendous thump against his undercarriage and was sure he had ripped out his oil pan on a rock, but when he peered below everything seemed to be intact. Two kilometers later, he veered into a giant rut and thought he had cracked an axle, but he had not. He hunched down over the wheel, aching, tense, and imagined that splendid bat mask, or its twin, spotlighted against a stark white wall in his study. Would Guzmán be able to get him one? Probably. His talk of the difficulties involved was just a way of hyping the price. But even if Halperin came back empty-handed from San Simón, it would be reward enough simply to have witnessed the dance, that bizarre, alien rite of a lost pagan civilization. There was more to collecting Mexican masks, he knew, than simply acquiring objects for the wall.

  In late afternoon he entered the town just as he was beginning to think he had misread Guzmán’s map. To his surprise it was quite imposing, the largest village he had seen since turning off the main highway—a great bare plaza ringed by stone benches, marketplace on one side, vast heavy-walled old church on the other, giant gnarled trees, chickens, dogs, children about everywhere, and houses of crumbling adobe spreading up the slope of a gray flat-faced mountain to the right and down into the dense darkness of a barranca thick with ferns and elephant-ears to the left. For the last hundred meters into town an impenetrable living palisade of cactus lined the road on both sides, unbranched spiny green columns that had been planted one flush against the next. Bougainvillea in many shades of red and purple and orange cascaded like gaudy draperies over walls and rooftops.