Blue World

by Robert R. McCammon

  “Somebody’ll be a clown by the time you get back,” Karen said, glancing slyly at Jaime.

  “Me! Me’ll be a clown, Daddy!”

  Dan grinned at her and, his heart full, went back to take his shower.

  2

  DARKNESS WAS FALLING FAST as Dan drove his white pickup truck along the winding country road that led to Hathaway’s place. His headlights picked out a deer as it bolted in front of the truck. Beyond the ridge of hills to the west, the setting sun tinted the sky a vivid orange.

  Meeting, Dan thought uneasily. What was it that couldn’t wait? He wondered if it might have something to do with the last rent check. No, no; his days of rubber checks and irate landlords were over. There was plenty of money in the bank. In August, Dan had received a letter that said they’d won five thousand dollars in a contest at the Food Giant store in Barrimore Crossing. Karen didn’t even recall filling out an entry slip. Dan had been able to pay off the new truck and buy Karen a color television she’d been wanting. He was making more money than ever before, since his promotion in April from gravel-shoveler to unit supervisor at the cement plant. So money wasn’t the problem. What was, then?

  He loved the Essex community. It was fresh air and bird songs and a low-lying morning mist that clung like lace in the autumn trees. After the smog and harshness of Birmingham, after the trauma of losing his job and being on unemployment, Essex was a gentle, soul-soothing blessing.

  Dan believed in luck. In hindsight, it was even good luck that he’d lost that job at the mill, because if he hadn’t he never would have found Essex. One day in May he’d walked into the hardware and sporting-goods store in Barrimore Crossing and admired a double-barreled Remington shotgun in a display case. The manager had come over, and they’d talked about guns and hunting for the better part of an hour. As Dan had started to leave, the manager unlocked that display case and said: Dan, I want you to try this baby out. Go ahead, take it! It’s a new model, and the Remington people want to know how folks like it. You take it home with you. Bring me back a wild turkey or two, and if you like that gun, tell other folks where they can buy one, hear?

  It was amazing, Dan thought. He and Karen were living some kind of fantastic dream. The promotion at the plant had come right out of the blue. People respected him. Karen and Jaime were happier than he’d ever seen them. Just last month, a woman Karen had met at the Baptist church gave them a rich harvest of garden vegetables that would last them through the autumn. The only remotely bad thing that had happened since they’d moved to Essex, Dan recalled, was when he’d made a fool of himself in Roy Hathaway’s office. He’d sliced his finger on a sliver of plastic in the pen he was using to sign the lease and had bled all over the paper. It was a stupid thing to remember, he knew, but it had stuck in his mind because he’d hoped it wasn’t a bad omen. Now he knew nothing could be further from the truth.

  He rounded a corner and saw Roy’s house ahead. The front-porch lights were on, and lights showed through most of the windows. The driveway was packed with cars, most of which Dan recognized as belonging to other Essex residents. What’s going on? he wondered. A community meeting? On Halloween?

  He parked his truck next to Tom Paulsen’s new Cadillac and walked up the front-porch steps to the door. As he knocked, a long keening animal cry came from the woods behind Hathaway’s house. Bobcat, he thought. The woods are full of ’em.

  Laura Hathaway, an attractive gray-haired woman in her mid-fifties, answered the door with a cheerful, “Happy Halloween, Dan!”

  “Hi! Happy Halloween.” He stepped into the house, and could smell the aromatic cherry pipe tobacco Roy favored. The Hathaways had some nice oil paintings on their walls, and all their furniture looked new. “What’s going on?”

  “The men are down in the rumpus room,” she explained. “They’re having their little yearly get-together.” She started to lead him to another door that would take him downstairs. She limped a bit when she walked. Several years ago, Dan understood, a lawn mower had sliced off a few of the toes on her right foot.

  “Looks like everybody in Essex is here, with all those cars outside.”

  She smiled, her kindly face crinkling. “Everybody is here, now. Go on down and make yourself at home.”

  He descended the stairs. He heard Roy’s husky voice down there: “…Jenny’s gold earrings, the ones with the little pearls. Carl, this year it’s one of Tiger’s new kittens—the one with the black markings on its legs, and that ax you got at the hardware store last week. Phil, he wants one of your piglets and the pickled okra Marcy put in the cupboard…”

  When Dan reached the bottom of the stairs, Roy stopped talking. The rumpus room, carpeted in bright red because Roy was a Crimson Tide fan, was filled with men from the Essex community. Roy, a hefty man with white hair and friendly, deep-set blue eyes, was sitting in a chair in the midst of them, reading from some kind of list. The others sat around him, listening intently. Roy looked up at Dan, as did the other men, and puffed thoughtfully on his pipe. “Howdy, Dan. Grab yourself a cup of coffee and sit a spell.”

  “I got your message. What kind of meeting is this?” He glanced around, saw faces he knew: Steve Mallory, Phil Kane, Carl Lansing, Andy McCutcheon, and more. A pot of coffee, cups, and a platter of sandwiches were placed on a table on one side of the room.

  “Be with you in a minute,” Roy said. While Dan, puzzled at what was so important on Halloween, poured himself a cup of coffee, he listened to Roy reading from the list he held. “Okay, where were we? Phil, that’s it for you, I reckon. Next is Tom. This year it’s that ship model you put together, a pair of Ann’s shoes—the gray ones she bought in Birmingham—and Tom Junior’s G.I. Joe doll. Andy, he wants…”

  Huh? Dan thought as he sipped at the hot black coffee. He looked at Tom, who seemed to have released a breath he’d been holding for a long time. Tom’s model of Old Ironsides had taken him months to put together, Dan knew. Dan’s gaze snagged other eyes that quickly looked away. He noted that Mitch Brantley, whose wife had just had their first child in July, looked ill; Mitch’s face was the color of wet cotton. A haze of smoke hung in the air from Roy’s pipe and several other smokers’ cigarettes. Cups rattled against saucers. Dan looked at Aaron Greene, who stared back at him through strange, glassy eyes. Aaron’s wife, Dan had heard, had died of a heart attack last year about this time. Aaron had shown him pictures of her, a robust-looking brunette in her late thirties.

  “…your golf clubs, your silver cufflinks, and Tweety-bird,” Roy continued.

  Andy McCutcheon laughed nervously. In his pallid, fleshy face his eyes were dark and troubled. “Roy, my little girl loves that canary. I mean…she’s real attached to it.”

  Roy smiled. It was a tight, false smile, and something about it started a knot of tension growing in Dan’s stomach. “You can buy her another one, Andy,” he said. “Can’t you?”

  “Sure, but she loves—”

  “One canary’s just like another.” He drew at his pipe, and when he lifted a hand to hold the bowl, the overhead light glinted off the large diamond ring he wore.

  “Excuse me, gents.” Dan stepped forward. “I sure would like for somebody to tell me what this is all about. My wife and little girl are getting ready for Halloween.”

  “So are we,” Roy replied, and blew out a plume of smoke. “So are we.” He traced his finger down the list. Dan saw that the paper was mottled and dirty; it looked as if it had been used to wipe out the inside of a garbage can. The writing on it was scrawled and spiky. “Dan,” Roy said, and tapped the paper. “This year he wants two things from you. First is a set of fingernail clippings. Your own fingernails. The second is—”

  “Hold on.” Dan tried to smile, but couldn’t find one. “I don’t get this. How about starting from the beginning.”

  Roy stared at him for a long, silent moment. Dan felt other eyes on him, watching him carefully. On the opposite side of the room, Walter Ferguson suddenly began quietly sobbing. “Oh,” Roy s
aid. “Sure. It’s your first Halloween in Essex, isn’t it?”

  “Right. And?”

  “Sit down, Dan.” Roy motioned toward an empty chair near him. “Come on, sit down and I’ll tell you.”

  Dan didn’t like the feeling in this room; there was too much tension and fear in here. Walter’s sobbing was louder. “Tom,” Roy said, “take Walter out for a breath of air, won’t you?” Tom muttered an assent and helped the crying man out of his chair. When they had left the rumpus room, Roy struck a kitchen match to relight his pipe and looked calmly at Dan Burgess.

  “So tell me,” Dan urged as he sat down. He did smile this time, but the smile would not stick.

  “It’s Halloween,” Roy explained, as if speaking to a retarded child. “We’re going over the Halloween list.”

  Dan laughed involuntarily. “Is this a joke, gents? What kind of Halloween list?”

  Roy’s thick white brows came together as he gathered his thoughts. Dan realized the other man was wearing the same dark red sweater he’d worn the day Dan had signed that lease and cut his finger. “Call it…a trick-or-treat list, Dan. You know, we all like you. You’re a good man. We can’t think of a better neighbor to have in Essex.” He glanced around as some of the others nodded. “Essex is a very special place to live, Dan. You must know that by now.”

  “Sure. It’s great. Karen and I love it here.”

  “We all do. Some of us have lived here for a long time. We appreciate the good life we have here. And in Essex, Dan, Halloween is a very special night of the year.”

  Dan frowned. “I’m not following you.”

  Roy produced a gold pocket watch, popped it open to look at the time, then closed it again. When he lifted his gaze, his eyes seemed darker and more powerful than Dan had ever seen them. They made him shiver to his soul. “Do you believe in the Devil?” Roy asked.

  Again Dan laughed. “What are we doing, telling spooky stories?” He looked around the room. No one else was laughing.

  “When you came to Essex,” Roy said softly, “you were a loser. Down on your luck. No job. Your money was almost gone. Your credit rating was zero. You had an old car that was ready for the junkyard. Now I want you to think back on all the good things that have happened to you—all the things you might have taken as a run of good luck—since you’ve been part of our community. You’ve gotten everything you’ve wanted, haven’t you? Money’s come to you like never before. You got yourself a brand-new truck. A promotion at the plant. And there’ll be more good things to come in the years ahead—if you cooperate.”

  “Cooperate?” He didn’t like the sound of that word. “Cooperate how?”

  “With the list. Like we all do, every Halloween. Every October thirty-first I find a list just like this one under the welcome mat at the front door. Why I’ve been chosen to handle it, I don’t know. Maybe because I help bring new people in. These items on this list are to be left in front of your door on Halloween. In the morning, they’re gone. He comes during the night, Dan, and he takes them away with him.”

  “This is a Halloween joke, isn’t it!” Dan grinned. “Jesus Christ, you gents had me going! That’s a hell of an act to put on just to scare the crap out of me!”

  But Roy’s face remained impassive. Smoke seeped from a corner of his wrinkled mouth. “The list,” Roy continued evenly, “has to be collected and left out before midnight, Dan. If you don’t collect the items and leave them for him, he’ll come knocking at your door. And you don’t want that, Dan. You really don’t.”

  A chunk of ice seemed to have jammed itself in Dan’s throat, while the rest of his body felt feverish. The Devil in Essex? Collecting things like golf clubs and cufflinks, ship models and pet canaries? “You’re crazy!” he managed to say. “If this isn’t a damned joke, you’ve dropped both your oars into the water!”

  “It’s no joke, and he ain’t crazy,” Phil Kane said, sitting behind Roy. Phil was a large, humorless man who raised pigs on a farm about a mile away. “It’s just once a year. Just on Halloween. Hell, last year alone I won one of them magazine sweepstakes. It was fifteen thousand dollars at one whack! The year before that, an uncle I didn’t even know I had died and left me a hundred acres of land in California. We get free stuff in the mail all the time. It’s just once a year we have to give him what he wants.”

  “Laura and I go to art auctions in Birmingham,” Roy said. “We always get what we want for the lowest bid. And the paintings are always worth five or ten times what we pay. Last Halloween he asked for a lock of Laura’s hair and one of my old shirts with blood on it where I cut myself shaving. You remember that trip to Bermuda the real-estate company gave us last summer? I’ve been given a huge expense account, and no matter what I charge, nobody asks any questions. He gives us everything we want.”

  Trick-or-treat! Dan thought crazily. He envisioned some hulking, monstrous form lugging off a set of golf clubs, one of Phil’s piglets, and Tom’s Old Ironsides. God, it was insane! Did these men really believe they were making sacrifices to a satanic trick-or-treater?

  Roy lifted his eyebrows. “You didn’t return the shotgun, did you? Or the money. You didn’t refuse the promotion.”

  “I earned that promotion!” Dan insisted, but his voice was strained and weak, and it shamed him.

  “You signed the agreement in blood,” Roy said, and Dan remembered the drops of blood falling from his cut finger onto the white paper of the lease, right underneath his name. “Whether you knew it or not, you agreed to something that’s been going on in Essex for over a hundred years. You can have anything and everything you want, Dan, if you give him what he wants on one special night of the year.”

  “My God,” Dan whispered. He felt dizzy and sick. If it was true…what had he stumbled into? “You said…he wants two things from me. The fingernail clippings and what else?”

  Roy looked at the list and cleared his throat. “He wants the clippings, and…he wants the first joint of the little finger of your child’s left hand.”

  Dan sat motionlessly. He stared straight ahead, and feared for an awful moment that he would start laughing and giggle himself all the way to an asylum.

  “It’s really not much,” Roy said. “There won’t be a lot of blood, will there, Carl?”

  Carl Lansing, who worked as a butcher at the Food Giant in Barrimore Crossing, raised his left hand to show Dan Burgess. “Not much pain if you do it quick, with a cleaver. One sharp blow’ll snap the bone. She won’t feel a whole lot of pain if you do it fast.”

  Dan swallowed. Carl’s slicked-back black hair gleamed with Vitalis under the light. Dan had always wondered exactly how Carl had lost the thumb of his left hand.

  “If you don’t put what he wants in front of your door,” Andy McCutcheon said, “he’ll come in after them. And then he’ll take more than he asked for in the first place, Dan. God help you if he has to knock at your door.”

  Dan’s eyes felt like frozen stones in his rigid face; he stared across the room at Mitch Brantley, who appeared to be either about to faint or throw up. Dan thought of Mitch’s new son, and he did not want to think about what might be on the list beside either Mitch’s or Walter Ferguson’s name. He rose unsteadily from his chair. It was not that he believed the Devil was coming to his house tonight for a bizarre trick-or-treat that frightened him so deeply; it was that he knew they believed, and he didn’t know how to deal with it.

  “Dan,” Roy Hathaway said gently, “we’re all in this together. It’s not so bad. Really it isn’t. Usually all he wants are little things. Things that don’t matter very much.” Mitch made a soft, strangled groaning sound. Dan flinched, but Roy paid no attention. Dan had the sudden urge to leap at Roy and grab him by the front of that blood-red sweater and shake him until he split open. “Once in a while he…takes something of value,” Roy said, “but not very often. And he always gives us back so much more than he takes.”

  “You’re crazy. All of you…are crazy.”

  “Give him wh
at he wants.” Steve Mallory spoke in the strong bass voice that was so distinctive in the Baptist church choir on Sunday mornings. “Do it, Dan. Don’t make him knock at your door.”

  “Do it,” Roy told him. “For your own sake, and for your family’s.”

  Dan backed away from them. Then he turned and ran up the stairs, ran out of the house as Laura Hathaway was coming out of the kitchen with a big bowl of pretzels, ran down the front steps and across the lawn to his pickup. Near Steve Mallory’s new silver Chevy, Walter and Tom were standing together. Dan heard Walter sob “…not her ear, Tom! Dear God, not her whole ear!”

  Dan got into his truck and left twin streaks of rubber on the pavement as he drove away.

  3

  DEAD LEAVES WHIRLED THROUGH THE turbulent, chilly air as Dan pulled up into his driveway, got out and ran up the front-porch steps. Karen had taped a cardboard skeleton to the door. His heart was pounding, and he’d decided to take no chances; if this was an elaborate joke, they could laugh their asses off at him, but he was getting Karen and Jaime out of here.

  Halfway home, a thought had occurred to him that had almost made him pull off the road to puke: if the list had demanded a lock of Jaime’s hair, would he have given it without question? How about her fingernail clippings? A whole fingernail? An earlobe? And if he had given any of those things, what would be on the trick-or-treat list next year and the year after that?

  Not much blood, if you do it quick.

  “Karen!” he shouted as he unlocked the door and went in. The house was too quiet. “Karen!”

  “Lord, Dan! What are you yelling about?” She came into the front room from the hallway, followed by Jaime in clown makeup, an oversize red blouse, patched little blue jeans, and sneakers covered with round yellow happy-face stickers. Dan knew he must look like walking death, because Karen stopped as if she’d run into a wall when she saw him. “What’s happened?” she asked fearfully.