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

by Stephen Jones

I’m not sure how this works so I just hit ENTER.

  And now I wait.

  IN THE YEAR OF OMENS

  HELEN MARSHALL

  Helen Marshall is a senior lecturer of Creative Writing and Publishing at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her first collection of short fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, won the British Fantasy Society’s Sydney J. Bounds Best Newcomer Award in 2013, and Gifts for the One Who Comes After, her second collection, won both the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award in 2015.

  She edited the 2017 volume of The Year’s Best Weird Fiction, and her debut novel The Migration is forthcoming from Random House Canada.

  “I love the smell of woodsmoke and dying leaves,” admits the author, “the crispness in the air and those clear bright skies fading into early dusk. As a teacher I still feel as if autumn offers the real beginning of the year, when the easy days of summer give way to the coming cold.

  “This story was an attempt to capture the strangeness of October when I was a child, and everything felt possible yet completely baffling, as if I was on the edge of comprehending something vast and mysterious about myself.

  “But I suppose that’s what growing up is—a series of revelations that bring you into a more complex world, a world sometimes beautiful and sometimes frightening.”

  THAT WAS THE year of omens—the year the coroner cut open the body of the girl who had thrown herself from the bridge, and discovered a bullfrog living in her right lung. The doctor, it was said by the people who told those sorts of stories (and there were many of them), let the girl’s mother take the thing home in her purse—its skin wet and gleaming, its eyes like glittering gallstones—and when she set it in her daughter’s bedroom it croaked out the saddest, sweetest song you ever heard in the voice of the dead girl.

  Leah loved to listen to these stories. She was fourteen and almost pretty. She liked swimming and horses, sentimental poetry, certain shades of pink lipstick, and Hector Alvarez, which was no surprise at all, because everyone liked Hector Alvarez.

  “Tell me what happened to the girl,” Leah would say to her mum as she sliced potatoes at the kitchen counter, careful, always to jam the knifepoint in first so that they would break open as easily as apples. Her dad had taught her that before he had died. Everything he did was sacred now.

  “No,” her mum would say.

  “But you know what happened to her?”

  “I know what happened, Leah.”

  “Then why won’t you tell me?”

  And Leah would feel the thin weight of her mother’s frame like a ghost behind her. Sometimes her mum would touch the back of her neck, just rest a hand there, or on her shoulder. Sometimes, she would check the potatoes. Leah had a white scar on her thumb where she’d sliced badly once.

  “You shouldn’t have to hear those things. Those things aren’t for you, okay?”

  “But mum—”

  “Mum,” Milo would mumble from his highchair. “Mum mum mum mum.”

  “Here, lovely girl, fetch me the rosemary and thyme. Oh, and the salt. Enough about that other thing, okay? Enough about it. Your brother is getting hungry.”

  And Leah would put down the knife, and would turn from the thin, round slices of potatoes. She would kiss her brother on the scalp where his hair stuck up in fine, whitish strands. Smell the sweet baby scent of him. “Shh, monkey-face, just a little bit longer. Mum’s coming soon.” Then Milo would let out a sharp, breathy giggle, and maybe Leah would giggle too, or maybe she wouldn’t.

  Her mum wouldn’t speak of the things that were happening, but Leah knew—of course Leah knew.

  First it was the girl. That’s how they always spoke of her.

  “Did you hear about the girl?”

  “Which girl?”

  “The girl. The one who jumped.”

  And then it wasn’t just the girl anymore. It was Joanna Sinclair who always made red velvet cupcakes for the school bake sale. It was Oscar Nunez from the end of the block whose tongue shriveled up in his mouth. It was Yasmine with the black eyeliner. She used to babysit Leah when she was younger.

  “Maybe it’ll be, I dunno, just this one perfect note. Like a piano,” Yasmine had murmured before it happened, pupils big enough to swallow the violet-circled iris of her eyes. “Or a harp. Or a, what’s it, a zither. I heard one of those once. It was gorgeous.”

  “You think so?” Leah asked. She watched the smoke curl around the white edge of her nostrils like incense. There were only four years between them, but those four years seemed a magnificent chasm. Across it lay wisdom and secret truths. Across it lay the Hectors of the world, unattainable if you were only fourteen years old. Everything worthwhile lay across that chasm.

  “Maybe. Maybe that’s what it will be for me. Maybe I’ll just hear that one note forever, going on and on and on, calling me to Paradise.”

  It hadn’t been that.

  When Hector found her—they were dating; of course Hector would only date someone as pretty and wise as Yasmine, Leah thought—the skin had split at her elbows and chin, peeled back like fragile paper to reveal something as bony and iridescent as the inside of an oyster shell.

  Leah hadn’t been allowed to go to the funeral.

  Her mum had told her Yasmine had gone to college, she couldn’t babysit anymore, Leah would have to take care of Milo herself. But Leah was friends with Hector’s sister, Inez, and she knew better.

  “It was like there was something inside her,” Inez whispered as they both gripped the tiled edge of the pool during the Thursday swim practice, Inez’s feet kicking lazily in hazy, blue-gray arcs. Inez had the same look as her brother, the same widely spaced eyes, skin the same dusty copper as a penny. Her hair clung thick, black, and slickly to her forehead where it spilled out of the swimming cap.

  “What kind of thing was it?” The water was cold. Leah hated swimming, but her mum made her do it anyway.

  “God, I mean, I dunno. Hector won’t tell me. Just that … he didn’t think it would be like that. He thought she’d be beautiful on the inside, you know? He thought it would be something else.”

  Leah had liked Yasmine—even though she had always liked Hector more, liked it when Yasmine brought him over and the two of them huddled on the deck while Leah pretended not to watch, the flame of the lighter a third eye between them. Leah had wanted it to be a zither for her. Something sweet and strange and wondrous.

  “I thought so too,” Leah whispered, but Inez had already taken off in a perfect backstroke toward the deep end.

  It was why her mum never talked about it. The omens weren’t always beautiful things.

  There had always been signs in the world. Every action left its trace somewhere. There were clues. There were giveaways. The future whispered to you before you even got there, and the past, well, the past was a chatterbox, it would tell you everything if you let it go on.

  The signs Leah knew best were the signs of brokenness. The sling her mum had worn after the accident that made it impossible for her to carry Milo. The twinging muscle in her jaw that popped and flexed when she moved the wrong way. It had made things difficult for a while. The pain made her mum sharp and prickly. The medication made her dozy. Sometimes she’d nod off at the table, and Leah would have to clear up the dishes herself, and then tend to Milo if he was making a fuss.

  And there was the dream.

  There had always been signs in the world.

  But, now. Now it was different, and the differences both scared and thrilled Leah.

  “Mum,” she would whisper. “Please tell me, mum.”

  “I can’t, sweetie,” her mum would whisper in a strained, half-conscious voice. Leah could see the signs of pain now. The way her mum’s lids fluttered. The lilt in her voice from the medication. “I just don’t know. Oh, darling, why? Why? I’m scared.”

  But Leah wasn’t scared.

  A month later Leah found something in the trash: one of her mother’s sheer black stockings. Inside it was th
e runt-body of a newborn kitten wrapped in a wrinkled dryer sheet.

  “Oh, pretty baby,” she cooed.

  Leah turned the lifeless little lump over. She moved it gently, carefully from palm to palm. It had the kind of boneless weight that Milo had when he slept. She could do anything to him then, anything at all, and he wouldn’t wake up.

  One wilted paw flopped between her pinkie and ring finger. The head lolled. And there—on the belly, there it was—the silver scales of a fish. They flaked away against the calluses on her palm, decorated the thin white line of her scar.

  Leah felt a strange, liquid warmth shiver its way across her belly as she held the kitten. It was not hers, she knew it was not hers. Was it her mum who had found thing? Her mum. Of course it was her mum.

  “Oh,” she said. “My little thing. I’m sorry for what’s been done to you.”

  She knew she ought to be afraid then, but she wasn’t. She loved the little kitten. It was gorgeous—just exactly the sort of omen that Yasmine ought to have had.

  If only it had been alive… .

  Leah didn’t know what her own omen would be. She hoped like Yasmine had that it would be something beautiful. She hoped when she saw it she would know it most certainly as her own special thing. And she knew she would not discard it like the poor drowned kitten—fur fine and whitish around the thick membrane of the eyelids. Not for all the world.

  She placed the kitten in an old music box her dad had brought back from Montreal. There was a crystal ballerina, but it was broken and didn’t spin properly. Still, when she opened the lid, the tinny notes of ‘La Vie en Rose’ chimed out slow and stately. The body of the kitten fit nicely against the faded velvet inside of it.

  The box felt so light it might have been empty.

  Now it was October—just after the last of the September heat had begun to fade off like a cooling cooking pan. Inez and Leah were carving pumpkins together. This was the last year they were allowed to go trick-or-treating and, even so, they were only allowed to go as long as they took Milo with them. (Milo was going to dress as a little white rabbit. Her mum had already bought the costume.)

  They were out on the porch, sucking in the last of the sunlight, their pumpkins squat on old newspapers empty of the stories that Leah really wanted to read.

  Carving pumpkins was trickier than cutting potatoes. You had to do it with a very sharp, very small knife. It wasn’t about pressure so much. It was about persistence—taking things slow, feeling your way through it so you didn’t screw up. Inez was better at that. It wasn’t the cutting that Leah liked anyway. She liked the way it felt to shove her hands inside the pumpkin and bring out its long, stringy guts. Pumpkins had a smell: rich and earthy, but sweet too, like underwear if you didn’t change it every day.

  “It’s happening to me,” Inez whispered to her. She wasn’t looking at Leah, she was staring intensely at the jagged crook of eye she was trying to get right. Taking it slow. Inez liked to get everything just right.

  “What’s happening?” Leah said.

  Inez wasn’t looking at her, she was looking at the eye of the jack-o’-lantern-to-be, her brow scrunched as she concentrated. But her hand was trembling.

  “What’s happening?”

  Cutting line met cutting line. The piece popped through with a faint sucking sound.

  “It’s happening to me. You know, Lin. What’s been happening to … to everyone. What happened to Yasmine.” Her voice quavered. Inez was still staring at the pumpkin. She started to cut again.

  “Tell me,” Leah said. And then, more quietly, she said, “Please.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  Plop went another eye. The pumpkin looked angry. Or scared. The expressions sometimes looked the same on pumpkins.

  “Then why did you even bring it up?” Leah could feel something quivering inside her as she watched Inez saw into the flesh of the thing.

  “I just wanted to—I don’t even know. But don’t tell Hector, okay? He’d be worried about me.”

  Leah sneaked a look at Hector, who was raking leaves in the yard. She liked watching Hector work. She liked to think that maybe if the sun was warm enough (as it was today—more of a September sun than an October sun, really), then maybe, just maybe, he would take his shirt off.

  “It’s okay to tell me, Inez. Promise. I won’t tell anyone. Just tell me so someone out there knows.”

  Inez was quiet. And then she said in a small, tight voice, “Okay.”

  She put down the knife. The mouth was only half-done. Just the teeth. But they were the trickiest part to do properly. Then, carefully, gently, Inez undid the top three buttons of her blouse. She swept away the long, black curls that hid her neck and collarbone.

  “It’s here. Do you see?”

  Leah looked. At first she thought it was a mild discoloration, the sort of blemish you got if you sat on your hands for too long and the folds of your clothes imprinted themselves into the skin. But it wasn’t that at all. There was a pattern to it, like the jack-o’-lantern, the shapes weren’t meaningless. They were a face. They were the shadow of a face—eyes wide open. Staring.

  “Did you tell Hector?”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “God, Inez—”

  But Inez turned white and shushed her. “Don’t say that!” Inez squealed. “Don’t say His name like that. We don’t know! Maybe it is, I mean, do you think, maybe He … I mean, oh, Jesus, I don’t know, Lin!” Her mouth froze in a little “oh” of horror. There were tears running down her cheeks, forming little eddies around a single, pasty splatter of pumpkin guts.

  “It’s okay, Inez. It’s okay.” And Leah put her arm around Inez. “You’ll be okay,” she whispered. “You’ll be okay.”

  And they rocked together. So close. Close enough that Leah could feel her cheek pressing against Inez’s neck. Just above the mark. So close she could imagine it whispering to her. There was something beautiful about it all. Something beautiful about the mark pressed against her, the wind making a rustling sound of the newspapers, Hector in the yard, and the long strings of pumpkin guts lined up like glyphs drying in the last of the summer light.

  “It’s okay,” Leah told her, but even as their bodies were so close Leah could feel the hot, hardpan length of her girlish muscles tense and relax in turns, she knew there was a chasm splitting between them, a great divide.

  “Shush,” she said. “Pretty baby,” she said because sometimes that quieted Milo down. Inez wasn’t listening. She was holding on. So hard it hurt.

  Inez was dead the next day.

  Leah was allowed to attend the funeral. It was the first funeral she’d been allowed to go to since her dad’s.

  The funeral had a closed casket (of course, it had to) but Leah wanted to see anyway. She pressed her fingers against the dark, glossy wood of the coffin, leaving a trail of smudged fingerprints that stood out like boot-marks in fresh snow. She wanted to see what had happened to that face with the gaping eyes. She wanted to know who that face had belonged to. No one would tell her. From her mum, it was still nothing but, “Shush up, Lin.”

  And Hector was there.

  Hector was wearing a suit. Leah wondered if it was the same suit that he had worn to Yasmine’s funeral, and if he’d looked just as good wearing it then as he did now. A suit did something to a man. Leah was wearing a black dress. Not a little black dress. She didn’t have a little black dress—she and Inez had decided they would wait until their breasts came in before they got little black dresses. But Inez had never gotten her breasts.

  The funeral was nice. There were lots of gorgeous white flowers, roses and lilies and stuff, which looked strange because everyone was wearing black. And everyone said nice things about Inez—how she’d been on the swim team, how she’d always got good grades. But there was something tired about all the nice things they said, as if they’d worn out those expressions already.

  “She was my best friend,” Leah said into the microphone. She had been ne
rvous about speaking in front of a crowd, but by the time her turn actually came she was mostly just tired too. She tried to find Hector in the audience. His seat was empty. “We grew up together. I always thought she was like my sister.”

  She found him outside, afterward. He was sitting on the stairs of the back entrance to the church, a plastic cup in one hand. The suit looked a little crumpled, but it still looked good. At nineteen he was about a foot taller than most of the boys she knew. They were like little mole rats compared to him.

  Her mother was still inside making small talk with the reverend. All the talk anyone made was small these days.

  “Hey,” she said.

  He looked up. “Hey.”

  It was strange, at that moment, to see Inez’s eyes looking out from her brother’s face now that she was dead. It didn’t look like the same face. Leah didn’t know if she should go or not.

  Her black dress rustled around her as she folded herself onto the stair beside him.

  “Shouldn’t you be back in there?”

  Hector put the plastic cup to his lips and took a swig of whatever was inside. She could almost imagine it passing through him. She was fascinated by the way his throat muscles moved as he swallowed, the tiny triangle he had missed with his razor. Wordlessly, he handed the cup to her. Leah took a tentative sniff. Whatever it was, it was strong. It burned the inside of her nostrils.

  “I don’t know,” Hector said. “Probably. Probably you should too.”

  “What are you doing out here?”

  Hector didn’t say anything to that. He simply stared at the shiny dark surface of his dress shoes—like the coffin—scuffing the right with the left. The sun made bright hotplates of the parking lot puddles. Leah took a drink. The alcohol felt good inside her stomach. It felt warm and melting inside her. She liked being here next to Hector. The edge of her dress was almost touching his leg, spilling off her knees like a black cloud, but he didn’t move. They stayed just like that. It was like being in a dream. Not the dream. A nice dream.