The Halloween Girl

by O'Brien, Jeff

  I had some sort of sixth sense that one of those mysterious things I always imagined creeping in the dark corners of the unseen world was about to show itself. It was then that I saw something that I wasn’t supposed to have seen.

  From under a large oak tree across the street, a strange, black shape began taking the form of a person. At first I thought it was merely a Halloween decoration, perhaps a dummy corpse that someone had hung from the tree. I had almost convinced myself that that was all it was, when bright red eyes suddenly glowed from its shadowed face and pointed toward me like two lasers.

  I wanted to run for my life, but fear had nailed my feet to the ground. I tried as hard as I could, but was also unable to pry my eyes away from the dark shadow-being that was growing clearer in my vision.

  I could now see that this man, if that’s what he was, was wearing a black coat that hung low below his knees and a black fedora with a wide brim that cast a shadow over his face. Slowly, he lifted his finger to where his lips must have been hidden in the shadow. “Shhhhh,” he whispered. There was something off about his whisper. It felt as if it weren’t actually coming from his mouth, but was instead coming from inside my head.

  In the house behind this strange shape, the front door was open and the lights were on. Though my face was stuck on this dark man, I could tell by the darkness surrounding the house that the lights coming from inside were the only lights shining on the whole street. My mind couldn’t make sense of that in its fear ridden state, but something beyond the realm of normal was happening here. I at least had the wits about me to gather that much.

  The bitter, cold air stopped biting at my face and the leaves resumed their gentle bouncing around in the soft night wind. I didn’t realize I had been holding my breath until I let out a massive exhale of oxygen and grew dizzy with relief.

  I didn’t see the man disappear or run away, but he was just gone. Though I was still horribly frightened, my feet finally separated themselves from the sidewalk and carried me home as fast as they possibly could. The whole way home I perspired icy bullets and huffed and puffed, not looking back once.

  Now it seemed that the streets were populated once again. Where before I had only seen pure darkness, houses were lit up with orange lights and kids in bright costumes were playfully walking and skipping along the streets as their parents walked slowly behind them. A few concerned parents even yelled out to me as I chugged along, asking if I was all right. I blocked them all out and focused straight ahead, hell-bent on getting home to the sanctuary of my bedroom where movies would be my loving companions for the rest of this Allhallows Eve.

  After a moment’s thought, I decided that the vivid imagery of a scary movie might not be the best choice for tonight’s activities after what I had just seen. So now I just couldn’t wait to drown out this fear that was flooding my thoughts by getting lost in a book with some good heavy metal blasting from my tape deck to chase the real monsters out of my head with some stories about fake ones. To witness slashing and killings on a visual medium just might be too much. A spooky book seemed just more comforting than watching Michael Myers choke Linda to death with a phone cord.

  After I finally saw my street sign and bolted a sharp left onto my street, I slowed down and allowed myself to catch my breath a little. The good feeling of hitting the homestretch.

  What was supposed to be a peaceful, deep breath turned into just another icy gasp of fear as I saw red and blue lights flashing down the street. I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that those were police cars parked right out in front of Cassie’s apartment. Something awful had happened, I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that it was what I knew it was.

  Slowly I walked the rest of the way, as my lungs couldn’t handle anymore running. It wasn’t that I was out of shape. An Olympic athlete would have been held down under the amount of fear that was pounding through my veins at that moment. My mind hadn’t even yet had time to make sense of what I had just seen back in the silent darkness, but it had clearly recognized that I needed to be scared shitless.

  Now, seeing this on my street was just like dropping an anvil on a sinking row boat.

  Trying to focus on one thing at a time, I continued on down the street. My instinct had proven correct as I neared the police cars to find that they were indeed in front of Cassie’s apartment. The cruisers formed a semi-circle in front of the house, which I had to walk around to get past in order to get to my house.

  I couldn’t see any of what was going on, other than that Cassie’s front door had been broken down just like it had on that night I almost liked my father.

  My mother stood on our front porch, watching solemnly, waiting for someone or something to come out of Cassie’s front door. She noticed me approaching the house and called for me even though I was at a close enough distance to make her beckoning seem absurd. Sure enough, my mother was drunk.

  “Get in the house now, Tommy,” she urged me, as if I had plans to do otherwise. “That bad man is back.”

  My fear gave way to anger as she broke the news to me, and I remember clenching my fists tightly to the point that my fingernails dug into my palms.

  Everything had been so good for so long. I couldn’t even remember the last time I saw a marking of any sort other than excessive eye shadow on Cassie’s perfectly beautiful face. Her big blue eyes had not seen bruising in such a long time. I was heartbroken. And furious.

  “Get in the house and go to bed, Tommy,” my mother urged me again. “We never should have let you roam the streets alone tonight. It’s madness out there. These monsters just come and go as they please and do whatever they want. Justice is a myth!”

  Her drunken and arbitrary diatribe went on long after that, but I decided I’d rather run upstairs and watch the scene unfold from my bedroom window than listen to another of her nonsensical tirades. Sometimes she could be on par with my father, and tonight was sure to be one of those nights.

  As I entered the house and walked by the living room, I was halted by my father’s drunken mutterings. It couldn’t have been any later than 8:30 and he was already slurring his words incoherently. The bottle of whiskey that he was just starting in on when I left the house was now more than two-thirds empty.

  “Get in the bathroom and wash that shit off your face!” he bellowed as spittle flew in every direction. His usually sharp and gritty voice had lowered to a guttural mumble, barely understandable. From the smell coming from him, I guessed he had pissed himself more than once.

  “Not gonna have my kid prancing around like some fuckin’ fairy in makeup,” he continued. “Fuckin’ AIDS’ll get ya’. I tried with you, Tommy. I fuckin’ tried. Faggot failed me, you did.”

  “It’s Halloween, Dad,” I replied, doing everything in my power to hold back the tears that were fighting to flow forward. Something about the way his words were out of place and not making any sense further unnerved me.

  “I’m not a faggot. It’s my costume,” I pleaded with labored words.

  Then he exploded.

  “Get in the bathoom and wash that shit off!”

  His scream almost knocked me off of my feet, and he nearly fell off of his wheelchair. He put his entire body into the force of his command, and seemed to feel the effects of it as he struggled to catch his breath and began coughing wildly. The emphasis he put on those last three words made every vein and cord in his face and neck bulge out, nearly popping through his purple skin. At that moment I thought his anger was going to kill him, which in a way it eventually did, of course. Just not that night.

  The impact of his last shout nullified anything I had done to keep the tears at bay. A moment later they cascaded down my face and I was sobbing uncontrollably, which only angered my father further.

  “Aww. Little girl is crying,” he mocked. “Fuckin’ pathetic little cunt is all you are, Tommy.”

  I ran as fast as I could to the bathroom while he continued berating me at the top of his lungs, straining his voice. I could only hope
that he’d eventually lose his voice and not be able to speak for a day or two.

  Luckily, my mother came back in and he turned his attention to her, demanding to know what was going on outside.

  That’s when I heard her say that Brent was released from prison three days ago, and had broken in and beaten Cassie pretty badly. She was going to be fine, but was being taken to the hospital in an ambulance that had just arrived.

  Perhaps subconsciously I just needed to escape this miserable house and be closer to Cassie. Or perhaps I was just a really fucked up and pissed off kid.

  So, I did what just seemed to feel so goddamn right at the time. Instead of finishing washing the Gene Simmons makeup from my face, I punched that fucking medicine cabinet mirror as hard as I possibly could. Maybe I was numb from fury, but it didn’t hurt even the slightest bit. In fact, it felt wonderful.

  As I saw blood splatter and cascade from many deep cuts between the knuckles of my right hand, I remember laughing delightedly.

  My mother ran into the bathroom screaming at me.

  I was growing a little too woozy to know if she was mad at me for destroying the medicine cabinet or if she was concerned for my well being. Probably the former, I figured.

  It didn’t really matter either way, because I was distracted by something right before my wooziness gave way to the mercy of unconsciousness.

  I looked down on the bathroom floor that I was now sitting on, focusing on the many shards of broken mirror that were strewn about. I saw my reflection in all of them, distorted like funhouse mirrors. But despite whatever misshaping each individual shard of glass gave me, it was still me looking back at myself in all of them. All except one.

  Maybe it was a hallucination from heavy blood loss, but in one silver mirror shard the reflection was not me. It was a familiar, dark face, hidden in shadow.

  Two piercing, red eyes stared back at me, entrancing me. I remembered the dark street and the dark man standing in front of that house.

  That’s the last thing I remember before blacking out.

  ***

  My stay at the mental hospital really wasn’t all that bad. In fact, when I had to leave, I really wanted to find a way to stay there.

  After I woke up in bed at the emergency room and gave the doctors my long list of reasons for punching the mirror, they began to deliberate on whether or not I was psych ward material. Some even urged the others to have me taken from my parents’ custody. I liked those people.

  When I told them that I saw a dark, shadowy, red-eyed figure looking back at me from one of the broken mirror shards, the jury had instantly reached a verdict and I was to be sent off to the nut farm. But not before some further questioning. I told them that earlier in the evening I had seen the same specter staring at me while I was walking home. One of the doctors, or whatever they were, asked me where this had happened. When I told them, they got all quiet and went off to talk for a bit. Turns out that a dead body had been found at the very house where I had seen the dark man with the red eyes. The wife of the victim, who was little more than a madwoman, had spoken of the same specter.

  I was dying to know more, but was given no further information. It seemed that they wanted to talk more about it, but were too closed minded to accept that I might have seen something beyond the realm of explanation. I knew right then and there that adults are no better than children. They’ll lie to themselves and call anything a coincidence that they don’t want to accept as truth. A child will tell his or herself that a creaky closet door is just a creaky closet door and not a monster. But adults will just pretend that real monsters don’t exist so they can sleep at night. I was never very good at being an adult.

  I thought a lot about these things while I was in the psych ward.

  The place was almost like paradise. Nothing much was expected of me. I was served good food of my choosing every day, and could have whatever my little heart desired. Usually it was cheeseburgers. Sometimes even bacon cheeseburgers. I was one happy fat kid.

  I also got to read books just about as much as I wanted to. I got better acquainted with Stephen King and Dean Koontz and all the other horror paperbacks that the hospital’s library had.

  I was pretty much free, except for when the social worker would come and bore me to death for an hour a day with her idiotic questions that made me feel like I was a toddler.

  I had to do all those ridiculous things I thought they only did in movies, like looking at a giant ink blot and telling her what I saw. She tried hypnosis on me a few times too, to no avail. Maybe I didn’t try all that hard, though.

  All that mattered was that I didn’t have to go to school and deal with any of the kids that I hated. And most importantly, I wasn’t home and didn’t have to see my father.

  My mother stopped in from time to time, though, acting as if it were a burden. She’d fidget and continually check the clock as she seemed to always have somewhere to be within an hour or less of her arrival. Usually she’d say she had to get to work, at her house cleaning job. Oddly, she seldom had her uniform on and smelled like my dad. Like booze. I didn’t bother calling her bluff. If she knew I caught her in the lie, then she might have stayed longer.

  I could say that it was a nice little vacation. I felt almost free, despite the fact that I was under constant supervision, and couldn’t even shit without a camera on me. Oh well. I hope they enjoyed the show.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t see Cassie in the hospital. I imagined that she’d be there for weeks. My only prior experience with hospitals was when my grandfather spent his final weeks in one, so I just assumed that all hospital stays were at least week-long events. Cassie, to my dismay, was discharged the same night she came in. So there was just one thing missing from my little vacation that had my mind thinking about home.

  When I was released, I had all but completely forgotten about that mystery man with the shining red eyes. I didn’t see him again for a while, and once again things went back to normal.

  My father had refrained from his volatile accusations of me being a homosexual. In fact, he had refrained from speaking to me at all. From the moment I first got back home, he would just look the other way and scowl or take a long swig of his bottle whenever he saw me. Usually he was staring vacantly out the window, not focusing on any one particular thing. Even at ten years old I was able to figure out what was really going on.

  The strong, fit man who was once clean shaven and well groomed every day, even to work construction, was now long haired and shaggy bearded. And he smelled just awful. Body odor, stale smoke, alcohol that came out of his pores, and what I’m guessing was occasional pants-shitting all conglomerated around him in a cloud, making him impossible to be near, not that anybody wanted to be near him anyways. The man had simply given up.

  My mother’s drinking had continued to grow far worse, as well. While she remained active and made it to her house cleaning job sober and on time every day, her time at home was spent drinking and smoking her cigarettes at the kitchen table all day, reading trashy newspapers about celebrities and their sex scandals. She and my father had stopped speaking or even acknowledging each other’s existence almost completely.

  My father had turned into what felt more like a dying grandfather or great-grandfather who had lived too long and was simply burdening his family by taking up space in the house.

  He was still able to speak to me when he was in desperate need of a booze refill, though. And like a good son I complied, mostly because I just felt like a cool older kid when I went into the liquor store. And, perhaps there was the subconscious notion that the booze was killing him, so I had better make sure he had a constant supply.

  Whenever I walked in the liquor store I’d always look around and imagine what I’d be buying here when I was old enough. So many options. But I always knew it wouldn’t be that stuff called Jim Beam.

  One day, coming back from the liquor store, I remember seeing Cassie sitting out on her front steps, smoking a cigarette. She ha
d been out there smoking a lot lately. And every time I saw her, it seemed more and more like something was wrong with her. I figured maybe she was afraid of Brent coming back again. But then why would she be outside in the open? Wouldn’t she be hiding inside? And why hadn’t she moved to another apartment that Brent didn’t know about?

  The thought of her moving scared me. My infatuation had only grown stronger since I punched the mirror in hopes of being with her at the hospital. I was now beginning to feel that she and I were bonded even more than before. I wondered if she felt it too. She had to.

  On that particular day that I remember seeing her, I’m guessing it was mid January, she was out on her front steps with no jacket on, smoking away and shivering something fierce. She didn’t seem to be bothered by the cold though, as I saw her take her cigarette out of her mouth and use it to light up another one. But she certainly seemed bothered by something else.

  I said my usual enthusiastic “hello” and smiled. She gave me her usual timid “hi” back, but did not smile. She looked as though she wanted to but was afraid to do so. I didn’t take it personally, because the look on her face told me that something must be on her mind. Something serious. Even at the young age I was, I could sense that she had some kind of tough decision to make.

  I went back into my house and handed my father his booze. He reeked worse than ever and looked it, too. His skin was yellow, as were his eyes where they weren’t bloodshot. He reached out and grabbed the bottle from me and said nothing. I retreated upstairs to my sanctuary and put him and everything else out of my mind.

  After a couple hours of playing Nintendo, I had gone downstairs to make myself a dinner of hot dogs and potato chips, since my mother was out drinking with her girlfriends from the cleaning company. My father sure as hell wasn’t going to make me dinner. I still remember hearing him snoring away in his wheelchair like a buzz saw on full power.

  After finishing making my dinner, I poured myself a large glass of Cherry Coke and grabbed a few feet of toilet paper, since we were the perfect white trash family and had no paper towels or napkins in the house. I put it all on a tray and carried it up to my room where I would pig out and continue trying to beat level 8-1 of Super Mario Brothers, which had become quite a frustrating challenge.