Zero Lives Remaining

by Adam Cesare

  No, George Allen’s home arcade wasn’t Funcave, but it was a start.

  Zero Lives Remaining is over, but read on for a special bonus story...

  STARTING EARLY

  The feeling peaked at age twelve and it’s been a case of diminishing returns every year since.

  I still chase the high, though.

  And I begin to chase it early in the season.

  The checkout girl is more dead-eyed than usual as she swipes the barcodes on my bags of candy corn and individually wrapped Reese’s.

  Supermarkets are one of the first places to start putting out their Halloween supplies, beginning with candy. Pharmacies are a close second, and they usually put out both decorations and candy at the same time.

  All that’s true unless you count party stores, a few of which keep a dedicated costume and decorations aisle year-round.

  There’s a Party City not far from where I live, but I haven’t owned a functioning car in years, and the bus lines going out there don’t seem worth the effort. So I settle for the supermarket, at least until the CVS up the block starts putting out their masks, window clings, and singing candy bowls.

  It’s the first week in September though, and supposed to go up to 93 degrees by tomorrow afternoon. Fall’s not here yet; I have time.

  “Do you have a discount card?” the girl asks.

  She sees me multiple times a week and asks me this same question every time I’m in her lane.

  It does wonders for my self-esteem to be remembered.

  “No, but can you run one for me?” I respond. This is what I always say, but none of the candy was marked as discount, so the total is the same.

  I pay. As the girl hands me back my change, I notice that she, too, is wearing chipped nail polish, a similar shade to mine.

  I wonder how old she is. High school?

  In a couple of decades, her own dead-eyed checkout girl won’t recognize her either.

  I leave the store, candy in hand. It’s all I’ve purchased on this trip, but it’s not like that’s all I eat. I did my shopping on Monday and have plenty of leftovers from a casserole I made last night.

  The walk home doesn’t take long but I do have to traverse a long stretch of road that has no sidewalk. Kids in a Jeep yell something at me as they pass and I flinch, not at the words but from how close the car comes.

  I’ve been called worse and today is a good day.

  Cecily waits for me on the second floor landing. She’s been loitering outside the door to my apartment, but she stares down at her phone, pretending to be busy.

  What does a ten-year-old need with an iPhone? And how can her parents afford it? I’ve asked these questions—internally—several times, but I’m never comfortable enough around the girl to ask.

  “Miss Maggie,” she says, not really yelling my name, but sounding happy to see me as I begin to ford the steps.

  She runs down to “help” me with my bag, but she knows I don’t need the help. And she wants to secure some of the candy for herself.

  “Are we unpacking the village today?” she asks.

  Yes. Yes we are. Somewhere she must have a calendar with these dates. Together we’ve decided on a schedule for preparing different elements of my Halloween display.

  I don’t live in a large apartment, but it has a spare room and I’ve utilized that space the best I can to store my collection without looking like an insane hoarder. In that room, floor-to-ceiling, I’ve stacked orange and black plastic Rubbermaid bins. Each one is a little over knee-high and can hold a surprising amount.

  “Yes, and you can help, but you have to be very careful,” I say, digging in my purse for the keys.

  “I got it,” Cecily says, pinching the spare key I’ve given her from her necklace. It’s supposed to only be for emergencies, but there’s been times where I’ve suspected Cecily has been in my apartment without me. At least, that’s what I would have done if I were her age.

  We enter, I prepare a bowl for the candy, slice both bags open and pour them in.

  Cecily uses her phone to bring up a playlist she’s prepared for the next two months. It starts with “The Monster Mash” and then moves to newer songs I’m not a huge fan of, but they stay within the seasonal theme and Cecily enjoys them.

  It will take us an hour or two, but once we get the village set up, the coffee table in the living room will be unusable for the rest of the season.

  Cecily munches candy corn and follows me underfoot as I go through the boxes in the spare room, looking for the one labeled “Spookyville”.

  That’s the name I’ve given to the collectable ceramic town I’ve accrued over the last decade. Christmas villages have been a staple among those collectors for ages, so it’s only fair that the Halloween industry caught up in recent years.

  “Maybe it’s in one of these,” Cecily says, pressing a finger against one of the three containers that don’t match the storage room’s black and orange color scheme.

  The blue bins are similar in shape but I’ve lined them up against the far wall. Then I’ve stacked heavier Halloween bins on top to prevent a curious Cecily from opening them.

  “No, those are just old clothes, honey.” She’s been told this several times.

  “Here it is,” I say, attempting to redirect my young charge’s attention. I begin to pick up the box, then pause and look to the little girl. “Wait. When do you have to be home? Maybe we shouldn’t start this project now.”

  “Missssss Maggie!” Cecily says, impatient and crossing her arms. Her huff is cute, but I think she knows that I’m kidding.

  If Cecily’s mother knows or cares where the girl spends most of her after-school time, I certainly haven’t heard about it. Perhaps she’s afraid that if she talks to me about it, I’ll try to negotiate a pay-rate for all the free babysitting I’m providing.

  We clear a space and begin unpacking the village. I’ve kept the houses in their original packaging where possible and wrapped all of the loose accessories in paper towels to keep the delicate pieces safe.

  The smell of the old paper towels is one of those unexpected nostalgia triggers. I unroll a tiny polyresin Frankenstein’s monster and the moment the slightly-mildewed wood-pulp reaches my nose I get a hit of the feeling.

  It’s the feeling I first remember having in the mid-seventies, watching Morticia Addams in re-runs and wanting my very own Lurch.

  It’s a feeling that I’d tried to foster at the dawn of the internet era by contributing to early message boards on the subject and connecting with fellow collectors. That was the first time I found out there were people just like me all around the country.

  That was a while ago, but I still put pictures of my displays up on my Facebook. The loss of anonymity on the internet has turned me off the community, though. I used to like knowing nothing about my friends beyond their screen name. The bloom is off the rose now that I can click on any friend’s profile and see that—during the other ten months of the year—their life is just as depressing as mine.

  “I like this one,” Cecily says, holding up the town’s florist, which has giant Venus fly traps painted behind its windows and thorns growing up its brick front.

  Cecily is careful, like I’ve requested, but she’s still only a child and my stomach drops every time it looks like she may let something slide through her fingers and onto the thin carpet of my living room.

  “I like it too,” I say, although it’s one of my least favorites. It’s a newer piece and the manufacturer has changed the scale of every building they’ve released since 2011. Which means the florist and the apothecary don’t look right when placed next to the haunted house and the mausoleum.

  “I wish you had a butcher shop.” Cecily says. “With severed arms in buckets and chainsaws. That would be scary. ”

  Cecily has been saying things like this for the past few weeks, in the build up to the season. I think she wants me to take her more seriously. Or she’s been browsing different websites and getting a w
ildly divergent definition of what the season’s about than I had when I was her age. It’s supposed to be fun, not grim.

  “That wouldn’t really fit,” I say, unrolling a witch seated side-saddle on her broom. “She doesn’t look like she would shop there to me.” I hold up the witch so Cecily can inspect her pointed hat and the purple trim of her cape.

  “Sure she would,” Cecily says, “witches eat children. She would buy candy from the candy store,” she points at the small sweets shop and continues, “to fatten the kids up and then she would bring them to the butcher to be slaughtered.”

  It’s so grotesque I have to laugh to cover up the shiver from the word slaughter. It doesn’t strike me as the kind of word a girl Cecily’s age should be using yet.

  I realize I’m both repulsed by her dark thoughts and don’t want her to grow up too fast.

  “No, that’s not what this witch does at all,” I say, not meaning to snap but doing it anyway. Cecily offers no rebuttal, only looks down at her hands.

  We don’t speak as we finish the rest of the unpacking; after a period of silence, Cecily hums along with her music.

  Once the mood has lightened, I let some candy corn dissolve in my mouth. It’s probably worse for my teeth, eating them this way, but they’re the first I’ve had all year and the sweetness is a time-release drip of that Halloween feeling. In a week they’ll lose their novelty, if I eat them every day, so I resolve to try not to do that.

  We finish putting the town together and I plug in all the lighted house pieces into a surge protector. Then we turn off the living room lights and watch the town glow for a minute before Cecily looks at her phone and says she has to be home for dinner.

  I spend the rest of the night staring in the windows of the town and fall asleep on the couch.

  When I wake, it’s already too late to take a shower before heading in to work.

  I work part-time. Not that I’m shifting toward retirement, but because I have very few needs. I have a little saved up for rent and don’t mind eating microwave noodles for two out of three of my daily meals.

  My only real expense is my collection, and even that I’ve cooled on in recent years. There’s not much that excites me anymore; I still buy, but I buy out of obligation and habit.

  The eight-twenty bus is pulling away as I walk up to the stop, so I end up punching in late.

  I’m an attendant at the Babylon train station. When I first took the position, I feared it would be too much customer interaction for me, but it turns out that I barely have to speak. There’s an inch and a half of Plexiglas between me and the commuters and most know what kind of ticket they need when they approach the counter. I only need to hold down the intercom button and press a few keys on my computer.

  Today I work six hours and arrive back home a little after three-thirty.

  Cecily is not on the landing when I return, which is surprising but maybe the awkwardness of me losing my temper with her last night has kept her away.

  I put my key in the lock, turn the knob, and am dismayed to see that I haven’t unlocked the door, but locked it.

  My mind immediately goes to a burglary and my heart flutters.

  Not that I have much to steal, but I’ve been robbed before and the thieves were not gentle with my collectables.

  Turning the key again, the door swings open and I peer into the hallway that opens onto my living room. It’s darker than it should be and I can’t even see the end of the hallway. Behind me the sun is bright and should be pushing through the blinds.

  “Hello?” I ask into the gloom. At first there’s no response, and then I hear it.

  The sound of a heartbeat.

  It’s not my own—I’m not that scared—but I do recognize it. The heartbeat’s from the beginning of a novelty sound effects CD I use to set the mood for my collection. But I don’t usually play it until the second week of October, when there’s a reason for those sounds to be pouring out my open windows. I usually put it on when I’ve taken the batteries out of the smoke detectors and turned on my fog machine for the first time.

  No thief would put “Creepy Sounds for your Haunted House Vol. 2” on before leaving the scene of a crime.

  “Cecily,” I say into the darkness, stepping over the threshold. I try not to let into my voice how upset I am to have my privacy invaded like this.

  I never should have made her that key.

  I close the door behind me and the hallway goes dark, just a faint glow from the living room. She hasn’t just closed the blinds, she’s pulled the blackout shades shut.

  There’s the sound of rattling chains and the moan of a ghost, signaling the CD is transitioning to a new soundscape.

  “Cecily, you’re not supposed to be in here without me, and certainly shouldn’t be touching my—”

  I stop when I reach the entryway to the living room, blocked off by a purple foil partition that reaches the floor. Holding the foil in place is a cardboard bat, cute and not creepy. I part the foil with two hands, like a curtain.

  Immediately I am hit by the smell of fog juice and something else I can’t quite place.

  On the coffee table, the lights of Spookyville are aglow, there’s a pillow of fog enshrouding the town. I’d always imagined the town as existing somewhere in the middle of the country, a less humid climate, but now it looks like a New England fishing town.

  As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I can see that there’s the outline of a body sitting on the couch. Its back is straight, small feet perched over the edge.

  “Cecily,” I say, nearly yelling her name now, looking for a response.

  “I’m sorry,” her voice comes from behind me, not from the couch. I turn to see that Cecily’s standing in the spare room’s doorway. “Don’t be mad, Miss Maggie. I wanted to surprise you. Set things up a little earlier this year.”

  My heart melts a little that she wants to do something for me.

  And then I remember the body on the couch and a chill washes over me.

  I used to have a posable latex skeleton. It was about the size of a small child, but I had to throw it out last year after Cecily twisted his arm a little too vigorously and forced part of his sharp wire armature out of his shoulder.

  The shape on the couch is too big to be the latex skeleton, anyway.

  I could flip on the overhead light and instantly reveal what Cecily’s set up on the couch, but I don’t have the strength. Instead I cross to the couch to get a better look, bumping my knee against the coffee table and sending Spookyville rattling.

  There are two of them seated there, not one.

  Brian is slouching, the flesh and musculature of his neck too moldered to sit up straight.

  Beside him, Jill is looking considerably better, if it weren’t for the blackened tips of her fingers she would just look hungry. Her eyes are sunken dried slits and her lips shriveled, but otherwise she looks alive.

  Cecily has opened the blue boxes, the coffins, even though she promised me that she wouldn’t snoop.

  I wonder how long she’s known that the containers didn’t hold something boring like old clothes.

  “They don’t scare me,” Cecily says. “They’re smelly but they don’t scare me. I think they’re neat.”

  Yesterday, I wondered if Cecily’s precociousness, the fact that she has a cell phone and is interested in more modern horror fare, was going to stop her from wanting to be around me. An old fuddy-duddy.

  Looking at the small bodies on the couch, their desiccated faces and putrid bellies, I get the feeling.

  And it’s the strongest the feeling has been in a long time. Maybe even since I was Cecily’s age.

  “What did you do with Heather?” I ask, looking around. She was the oldest of the three, she made it the farthest. Heather was thirteen and a half before I boxed her up.

  “She was too heavy. Can you help me?” Cecily has crept up behind me while my back was turned. Her fingers close around my hand and the human contact surprises me. We hold hand
s while on the CD a thunder crack echoes through a cemetery.

  “Yes, I can help you.” I say, glad that the season has started early and that I have someone to share it with.

  At least for a little longer.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Zero Lives Remaining was originally released as a limited edition hardcover. Although that’s not the version you currently hold in your hands, I feel that the editors, filmmakers, and artists who helped make that edition so special are still deserving of mention and thanks: Ken Wood, Sarah Wood, John Boden, Nick Gucker, Frank Walls, Yannick Bouchard, and Mike Lombardo of Reel Splatter Productions (who made an astonishing live-action trailer for the book, which you can watch online)

  And a special thanks to Tod Clark, Alexander “Cold Fire” Boden, David Brady, Erik Myrnes, Dylan S-C, and Kaleigh Brodbeck.

  “Starting Early” originally appeared in Dark Hallows, a collection of Halloween stories edited by Mark Parker. Big thanks to Mark for commissioning the story.

  ADAM CESARE is a New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia.

  His work has been featured in numerous magazines and anthologies. His nonfiction has appeared in Paracinema, The LA Review of Books and other venues. He also writes a (sometimes) monthly column about the intersection of horror fiction and film for Cemetery Dance Online and produces a weekly YouTube review show called Project: Black T-Shirt.

  His novels and novellas are available in ebook and paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all other fine retailers.

  Please visit adamcesare.com to learn more.

  Author photo by John Urbancik.

  Download a FREE exclusive ebook by visiting AdamCesare.com.

  The Blackest Eyes is a mini collection of two short stories. The title story is cautionary tale about keeping sharks in captivity. This ebook is free for everyone who signs up for Adam Cesare’s Mailing List of Terror.