Halloween Carnival Volume 2

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  Halloween Carnival: Volume Two is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Hydra Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by Brian James Freeman

  “Mr. Dark’s Carnival” by Glen Hirshberg, copyright © 2000 by Glen Hirshberg

  “The Facts in the Case of My Sister” by Lee Thomas, copyright © 2017 by Lee Thomas

  “Mischief Night” by Holly Newstein, copyright © 2017 by Holly Newstein

  “The Ghost Maker” by Del James, copyright © 2017 by Del James

  “The Pumpkin Boy” by Al Sarrantonio, copyright © 2005 by Al Sarrantonio

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Mr. Dark’s Carnival” by Glen Hirshberg was originally published in Shadows and Silence, edited by Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden (Ashcroft, BC, Canada: Ash Tree Press, 2000).

  “The Pumpkin Boy” by Al Sarrantonio was originally published by Endeavor Press in 2005.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399182044

  Cover design: Elderlemon Design

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Mr. Dark’s Carnival

  The Facts in the Case of My Sister

  Mischief Night

  The Ghost Maker

  The Pumpkin Boy

  Dedication

  About the Editor

  Mr. Dark’s Carnival

  Glen Hirshberg

  “The Montanan is both humbled and exalted by this blazing glory filling his world, yet so quickly dead.”

  —Joseph Kinsey Howard

  “So the first question, really,” I said, leaning on my lectern and looking over the heads of my students at the twilight creeping off the plains into campus, “is, does anyone know anyone who has actually been there?”

  Hands went up instantly, as they always do. For a few moments, I let the hands hang in the air, start to wilt under the fluorescent light, while I watched the seniors on the roof of Powell House dorm across the quad drape the traditional black bunting down the side of the building, covering all the windows. By the time I got outside, I knew there would be straw corpses strewn all over campus and papier-mâché skeletons swinging in the trees. Few, if any, of the students who hung them there would have any cognizance of the decidedly sinister historical resonance of their actions.

  “Right,” I said, and returned my attention to my freshman seminar on eastern Montana history. It was the one undergraduate class I still taught each year. It was the one class I would never give up. “Primary source accounts only, please.”

  “Meaning stuff written at the time?” said the perpetually confused Robert Hayright from the front row.

  “That is indeed one correct definition of a primary source, Mr. Hayright. But in this case, I mean only interviews you have conducted or overheard yourself. No stories about third parties.”

  Two-thirds of the hands drooped to their respective desktops.

  “Right. Let’s eliminate parents and grandparents, now, who, over the centuries, have summoned and employed all sorts of bogeymen to keep their children careful as they exit the safeties of home.”

  Most of the rest of the hands went down.

  “High school chums, of course, because the whole game in high school, especially Eastern Montana High School, is to have been somewhere your classmates haven’t, isn’t it? To have seen and known the world?”

  “I have a question, Professor R.,” said Tricia Corwyn from the front row, crossing her stockinged legs under her silky skirt and pursing her too-red mouth. Around her, helpless freshmen boys squirmed in their seats. The note of flirtation in her tone wasn’t for me, I knew. It was a habit, quite possibly permanent, and it made me sad. It has taken most of a century to excise most of the rote machismo from Montana’s sons. Maybe next century, we can go to work on the scars that machismo has left on its daughters.

  “If we eliminate secondhand accounts, parents, and high school friends, who’s left who could tell us about it?”

  “My dear,” I said, “you have the makings of a historian. That’s a terrific question.”

  I watched Tricia trot out that string of studiously whitened teeth like a row of groomed show horses, and abruptly I stood up straight, allowing myself a single internal head shake. My dear. The most paternalistic and subtle weapon of diminishment in the Montana teacher’s arsenal.

  Pushing off the lectern and standing up straight, I said, “In fact, that’s so good a question that I’m going to dodge it for the time being.” A few members of the class were still alert or polite enough to smile. I saw the astonishing white hair of Robin Mills, the Humanities Department secretary, form in the doorway of my classroom like a cumulus cloud, but I ignored her for the time being. “Let me ask this. How many of you know anyone—once again, primary sources only, please—who claims to have worked there?”

  This time, a single hand went up. That’s one more than I’d ever had go up before.

  “Mr. Hayright?” I said.

  “My dog,” he said, and the class exploded into laughter. But Robert Hayright continued. “It’s true.”

  “Your dog told you this?”

  “My dog Droopy disappeared on Halloween night three years ago. The next morning, a neighbor brought him home and told my dad a man in a clown suit had brought her to their door at six in the morning and said, ‘Thank you for the dog, he’s been at Mr. Dark’s.’ ”

  Mr. Hayright’s classmates erupted again, but I didn’t join them. The clown suit was interesting, I thought. A completely new addition to the myth.

  “So, let’s see,” I said gently. “Counting your father, your neighbor, and the clown”—this brought on more laughter, though I was not mocking—“your story is, at best, thirdhand.”

  “Not counting the dog,” said Robert Hayright, and he grinned, too. At least this time, I noted, everyone seemed to be laughing with him.

  In the doorway, Robin Mills cleared her throat, and her mass of white hair rippled. “Professor Roemer?”

  “Surely this can wait, Ms. Mills,” I said.

  “Professor, it’s Brian Tidrow.”

  I scowled. I couldn’t help it. “Whatever he’s got can definitely wait.”

  Instead of speaking, Robin Mills mouthed the rest. She did it three times, although I understood her the second time.

  “That fucker,” I muttered, but not quietly enough, and my students stopped laughing and stared. I ignored them. “Does Kate know?” I asked Robin.

  “No one’s seen her yet.”

  “Find her. Find her now. Tell her I’ll be there soon.”

  For a second, Robin lingered in the doorway. I don’t know if she expected comfort or company or just more reaction, but I wasn’t planning on giving her any. Brian Tidrow was a descendent of a Crow who’d married a white woman, scouted for Custer, and eventually died with him. He was also a third-generation alcoholic, arguably the brightest graduate student I’d ever taught, and almost certainly the one I had enjoyed least. Now he had finally committed the supreme act of havoc-wreaking he’d been threatening for years. He would get no more reaction from me, ever. I glared at Robin until she ducked her head and turned from the door.

  “What was that about, Professor R.?” Trici
a asked.

  I avoided thinking about Kate. About Kate and Brian. What was there to think about? It had been years ago. By the time Robin located her for me, class would be over, and I’d be on my way. “You will notice, my young scholars, that I didn’t even ask if any of you have been there. I have lived in Clarkston all my life, except for my eight years of university and graduate work. My parents lived here all their lives. My grandparents came from Germany right before the First World War”—‘at least several hundred years after my father, and half a century after my mother,’ as Brian Tidrow loved to remind me—“and never left until their deaths. In all that time, not a single member of my family has ever encountered anyone who has actually, personally, been. Ever. And that leads us to the most alarming, the most discomfiting, question of all. Is it possible that Mr. Dark’s Carnival—the inspiration for all our Halloween festivities, the most celebrated attraction or event in the history of Clarkston, Montana—never really existed?”

  As always, that question took just a moment to land. It floated through the room for a few seconds like an Alka-Seltzer tablet dropped into a glass. And then it began to fizz.

  “Wait,” said one of the boys near Tricia.

  “Oh my God, no way,” said Tricia, her blue eyes bright as they blazed through boy after boy.

  Robert Hayright shook his head. “That’s wrong. You’re wrong, Professor. I know it.”

  I put my hand up, but the fizzing continued awhile longer. When it quieted at last, I started to smile, thought of Brian Tidrow with his great-grandfather’s Winchester rifle gripped in his teeth, and shuddered. Goddamn him, I thought. I refused to offer him any additional respect, simply because he’d finally had the stupidity—he’d probably have called it guts—to go and do it.

  “What do you know, Mr. Hayright?”

  “I know there was a carnival in 1926. It was out in the fallow fields by where the Gulf station at the edge of town is now.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We studied it in high school. There were newspaper reports. Primary sources.” He glanced up at me to see if I’d stop him, then went on. “Livestock that vanished. Some guy in a black robe seen drifting around on the prairie and lurking in the bushes. Three people died of fright, including a policeman sent to investigate all the screaming.”

  “There was another in 1943,” I said quietly to the suddenly silent room as the icy twilight permeated the windows and seeped into the corners like floodwater. “That one was in particularly poor taste. Reportedly, it was haunted by dozens of people outfitted as dead soldiers. Upset a lot of parents whose sons were currently overseas.

  “In 1978, there were no less than three so-called Mr. Dark’s Carnivals rumored around town, though two of them were meant for small children and the third turned out to be a dance. I’m not saying no one has ever called their haunted house ‘Mr. Dark’s Carnival.’ But as to the existence of the legendary, mystery-shrouded carnival-to-end-all-carnivals…” I waved my hand, started to smile, sighed instead. “The fact is that every year we build our haunted houses and collect our children and head out to cover as much of our fair miniature city as we can, hoping for that supreme horrifying experience. That haunted house that will detonate our bowels, grind our chattering teeth to rubble, and blast us out the other side, shaken and giggling and alive. That Mr. Dark’s Carnival that we’ve been told all our lives might just be out there, on some unnamed street, in some unexpected and unexplored corner.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, students hurled questions about the most persistent and ubiquitous elements of the myth: the tickets that had to be given to you or found somewhere; the ever-changing locations; the reputed deaths by terror. Most years, I let this part of the discussion go as long as it would, because I enjoyed hearing the variations on the legend, and the students enjoyed having the legend exploded. But this year, feeling increasingly disturbed that Robin had not floated back to the door to say she’d found Kate, and unable to shake the picture I’d formed of Brian Tidrow’s last moments on Earth, I ticked off my myth-destroying points in mere minutes.

  How many unexplored corners were there, exactly, in a town barely eleven miles square and one hundred forty-five years old? How many new locations could there be? If tickets had to be found or given, who did the hiding and giving? Given the elaborate nature of the illusions attributed to Mr. Dark’s, where were all the workers necessary to perpetuate them?

  Finally, Tricia once again asked the most significant remaining question. “Was there even a Mr. Dark?” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” I answered, even more quietly, and the class hushed once more. “Although as to why this story has attached himself to him, well…”

  It was at that moment, of course, that Robin Mills finally returned. How not surprising, I thought, indulging just a little selfish fury, that Brian Tidrow’s farewell gesture should destroy my favorite moment of the teaching year. The only thing that even came close was the day I marched into my graduate seminar, laid a map detailing the progress of cattle introduction onto the Open Range over another showing the path of buffalo depletion, and proved, or at least suggested, that despite all our best efforts and a hundred years of imprecise historical accounting, it was anthrax, not white men—not directly, anyway—that killed the buffalo.

  Outside, gray lines of snow began to drag themselves over the ground like the fringe on a giant, smothering carpet. The clouds hung heavy and low, and the first unmistakable winter wind gnawed and whined at the windows. I thought of Kate and forgot about anger, forgot about my teaching and my love for Halloween. I started to ache.

  “Scholars, I apologize,” I said. “There has been a personal crisis in the Humanities Department, and I need to tend to it immediately. So we will have to continue this discussion on Monday.”

  “What about Mr. Dark?” Robert Hayright whined, sounding almost angry. I didn’t blame him. My class had been the most popular freshman elective for most of a decade, primarily because of the lecture I gave each year on this date.

  I began to slide the notes I never used into my backpack, watched Robert Hayright slouch in his seat while Tricia rose in front of him. “Who knows?” I said, catching Robin Mills’s agitated tapping against the door frame of my room with a pen. “Perhaps one of you will find a strip of paper tacked to a tree trunk tonight and stare at it in disbelief. And you’ll find the real Mr. Dark. And on Monday, you’ll be able to tell me just how wrong I’ve been all these years. All right, I see you, Ms. Mills.”

  “Sorry, Professor,” I heard her say. “Didn’t even know what I was doing.”

  “Have a recommendation?” Tricia asked as the class began to file out. She was leaning forward over my desk, too close to me. Habit, again.

  “About what, Ms. Corwyn?” I continued putting away papers but avoided brushing her sweater with my arm.

  “Haunted houses we shouldn’t miss? Particularly good streets? I hear they’re going to have monsters in the river.”

  Startled, I looked up and found myself submerged in those too-blue eyes. “No one’s done that for years,” I said, and the last of my anger sank into sadness, though none of it was for Brian Tidrow. Other people have Christmases or high holidays, and families to share them with. I have Halloween and these kids. This year I would have neither. “You’ll have to tell me about it.”

  “I will,” she said. “Thanks for the great class.”

  Seconds later, they were gone, and all the energy in the room went with them, and I was just another academia ghost, my skin sporting that translucent, sickly fluorescent tan, my hair succumbing to the color-leaching chalk dust and dead air. I wanted to see Kate. I wanted to help her fight through this. For the first time in my life, I wanted Halloween to be over.

  “Where is she?” I asked Robin Mills.

  “Your place,” she said, with no trace of the contempt she might otherwise have attached to that statement. “She called from there. She was apparently the one who found him, Professor
.”

  “Goddamn Brian,” I said, starting past Robin. “Goddamn him to hell.” I saw her start to register shock, because that’s the emotion recommended, I guess, in the Judgmental and Officious Department Secretary Handbook for such comments and situations.

  But then she said, “Tell Kate we’re all thinking of her. Tell her to come see me Monday, or whenever she wants.”

  I turned, smiled, and realized that I’d worked near, if not exactly with, this person for fourteen years, and that it was time I got over myself. “I will,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Seconds later, I was strolling through the deepening dark across campus. In the trees, paper men danced and spun on the frigid wind. I heard whooping sounds from the row of fraternity houses at the campus’ south end and scurrying feet as students raced excitedly for their assigned posts in haunted houses or collected dates for the evening tour through town. Underneath it all, I heard the ceaseless, sucking emptiness of the prairie, slowly pulling this town piece by piece and person by person back into the sea of cheatgrass and oblivion.

  By the time I turned onto Winslow Street and left campus, the cold had crawled inside my insufficient fall windbreaker, and I could feel it creeping down my bones toward the dead center of me. The little kids were out already, racing down sidewalks lined with lit pumpkins in paper bags that glowed a glorious, leering orange. I saw a green-skinned zombie shiver up from a pile of dead leaves in the corner of a lawn and grab for two bewinged little girls, who giggled and fled. The zombie watched them and smiled and shivered backward and drew the leaves over himself again. He would be there all evening, I knew. He would keep his smile to himself for longer when the older kids came, grab a little more forcefully. He’d be frozen half through when he got home, and full of civic pride. In some towns, the neighbors force you to keep your yard tidy. In others, you’re expected to show up in church or help out at the foodbank or on Clean the River Beaches Day. In Clarkston, you participate in Halloween.