Ghost Town

by Jason Hawes

  “It’s the same every year,” Trevor said. “Even after hiring additional security, the police are spread too thin to watch everywhere.”

  They were driving through the residential section of town close to the main business district. The sidewalks there were full of people in costume—adults, teenagers, children, toddlers—all heading toward the parade route. On the other side of the barricade, people walked down the middle of the street, most of them moving quickly so they wouldn’t miss any of the fun. Trevor had the driver’s-side window cracked, and the sound of drums and trumpets drifted into the car.

  “That’s the high-school band,” Trevor said. “Sounds like they’re still warming up. That’s a good sign.”

  He slowed as they approached the barricade.

  “What are you doing?” Greg asked. “This is an emergency, isn’t it? Gun it, and break through the barrier!”

  “There are too many people,” Trevor said. “I can’t—”

  “Oh, for Oblivion’s sake, that’s why cars have horns!”

  Greg wasn’t wearing his seatbelt, and he slid close to the driver’s seat, raised his left foot, and jammed Connie’s shoe down onto Trevor’s foot. Trevor swore as the Prius lunged forward. Amber let out a yelp of alarm and gripped Drew’s leg.

  “Better get to work with that horn,” Greg said, sounding insufferably pleased with himself.

  “Damn it, get off—shit!”

  The barricades rushed toward them, and Trevor’s only option was to break through or swerve off the road, which would mean hitting pedestrians on the sidewalk. Drew knew which option he would take, and he told Amber to hold on.

  Trevor laid on the horn, and people turned to look in their direction, alarmed. The Prius hit one of the wooden bars with a solid thunk, and chunks of wood went flying in different directions. Once the vehicle was through, Greg lifted his foot off Trevor’s, and the Prius slowed. By this point, the people who had been walking in the street were now running like hell to get off of it, more than a few of them yelling in anger and flipping Trevor the bird. Greg waved as they drove past.

  Drew turned around and saw that Erin and Carrington had followed. Carrington had his cell phone out, presumably trying to call one of them and ask what the hell they were doing, but none of their phones rang. The Dark Lady was still jamming their signals.

  Even with Trevor honking the horn and Greg sticking his head out the window and shouting for people to get out of their way, they could only go so fast, and the crowd of pedestrians eventually became so thick that they had to slow to a crawl. People started kicking and hitting the Prius, and some hurled objects, mostly cardboard cups, plastic bottles, and cans. Soda, coffee, water, and beer splashed across Trevor’s windshield, and he hit the wipers to clear it off.

  “We keep up like this, and we’ll start a riot,” Drew said. The crowd was already revved up from the excitement of the night’s event, and wearing costumes gave them a sense of anonymity, which in this situation could be dangerous. Massed together like this, their identities concealed, people would be tempted to act on the aggressive impulses that they normally kept under control.

  “Drew’s right,” Amber said. “I can feel the anger building all around us, like a storm cloud ready to burst. Pull over and park, Trevor!”

  “Pull over I can’t do,” he said. “Not enough room. Park, however . . .”

  He braked to a stop in the middle of the street, put the car in park, and turned off the engine. Behind them, Erin did the same. Without a word, the four of them got out of the car. As soon as they did, a man with a shaved head came toward them. He was tall and full of bodybuilder muscle, and he wore a skintight skeleton outfit with skull makeup on his face. He looked damned intimidating, especially with his features contorted in rage.

  “What the fuck do you morons think you’re doing?” he demanded. “There are people walking here! And a lot of them are kids!”

  Before anyone else could respond, Greg stepped forward. “It’s my little girl! She left home without her inhaler, and I don’t know where she is! If she has an attack . . . Have you seen her? She’s twelve, thin, with long red hair braided into pigtails. She was dressed as a witch. Please, I have to find her!”

  The man’s anger drained out of him instantly. “Uh, no, I haven’t. But there’s bound to be some cops up ahead somewhere. Maybe they can help you.”

  “Thank you!” Greg said. “Thank you so much!”

  Carrington and Erin joined them then, and Carrington stepped forward and put his arm around Greg. “It’s all right, my dear. We’ll find her.”

  The two of them turned away from the man and started walking.

  “Pippi!” Greg called out. “Pippi, where are you!”

  Drew, Amber, Trevor, and Erin followed close behind them. Some in the crowd still gave them dirty looks, but no one challenged them.

  “Thank God there weren’t any theater critics in the crowd,” Trevor said.

  “Jealous much?” Greg shot back.

  They continued running down the street, weaving in and out of the crowd and ignoring the occasional shouts of “Slow down! and “Where’s the fire?” And from one kid, “No costumes? You suck!” After a few moments, they reached Sycamore Street and found the sidewalk in front of them jam-packed with costumed people standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting for the parade to start. From the looks of it, Trevor hadn’t been exaggerating when he had said that thousands of spectators came to town for the parade.

  Drew turned to Trevor. “Now what?”

  “The bookstore is on the other side of the street, a block north,” he said.

  “You couldn’t get us any closer?” Greg said.

  “Sycamore Street’s blocked off, remember?” Trevor said. “This is the best I could do. Now, let’s try to get across before—”

  A thunderous cheer went up from the crowd, someone blew a whistle, and the sounds of a marching band playing “Funeral March of a Marionette” filled the air.

  “The parade starts,” Trevor finished.

  A moment later, the Exeter High School marching band began to file past. They were garbed in black uniforms, and they wore dark eye shadow and gray lipstick. Drew wondered if they wore that makeup all the time or just for the Dead Days parade. The latter, he hoped.

  People cheered and clapped as the band marched by, and they were followed by the first float, a stereotypical haunted house, weathered and falling apart, with fake bats, ravens, and rats attached in various places. At the base of the float, a number of children stood waving at the crowd. Some of the kids were dressed as ghosts and some as witches, and standing at the top, on the roof of the house, grinning and waving for all she was worth, was an adult witch. But she was far from a generic one. She stood twelve feet tall, her long midnight-blue gown concealing the platform she was standing on, Drew guessed. Her skin was painted a light blue, and she held a crystalline staff with a dragon head on top. A steady stream of sparks shot forth from the dragon’s mouth, to the crowd’s delight.

  “That’s the mayor,” Trevor said. “She always leads off the parade in one gaudy outfit or another.”

  “If gaudy is the goal, then I say mission accomplished,” Greg said.

  Drew craned his neck to see over the top of the crowd. Coming up behind the haunted-house float was an old-fashioned funeral carriage pulled by a horse. Men dressed in black suits and top hats walked on either side of the carriage, waving, and behind it came six solemn-faced men carrying a black coffin. There was plenty of space between the float and the carriage, probably to make sure the horse didn’t get too nervous, Drew guessed.

  “We can cross right after the house float is past,” he said. “Let’s get moving.”

  Drew grabbed hold of Amber’s hand, and together they forced their way through the crowd on the sidewalk. Trevor, Greg, Carrington, and Erin followed, and although they earned more than a few curses—and a couple of elbows to the ribs—for their efforts, they managed to make it through and onto t
he street.

  They started running, but they weren’t more than a third of the way across when Drew saw a security guard break out of the crowd on the other side of the street and start toward them. Drew was trying to think of an excuse that would persuade the guard to let them pass, when the air around them shimmered and a strange feeling of vertigo overtook him. When it passed, the air cleared, and the man coming toward them no longer looked as he had a second before. In fact, he no longer looked like a man. He had become a distorted parody of a human, with some features and body parts grotesquely enlarged, while others were shrunken and withered. He came at them with a spastic, lurching stride, the best speed his twisted body could manage, and his eyes—one the size of a basketball, the other the size of a marble—were filled with rage.

  Drew shot Amber a glance. “Is it real?”

  “Real enough!” she said.

  Drew nodded, stepped forward to meet the crooked man’s charge, and swung a hard right hook at his malformed jaw. As a psychologist, Drew favored a more rational approach to solving problems, but sometimes you just had to punch a monster in the mouth. His fist connected quite solidly, and the pain that flared in his hand confirmed Amber’s analysis. Whatever transformation had befallen the guard, he was definitely real. The crooked man staggered backward, but he didn’t go down.

  “Try not to be such a nice guy for a change.” Greg stepped forward and delivered a savage kick to the crooked man’s crotch. Breath whooshed out of his lungs, and he doubled over with a gurgling moan.

  Before Drew could say anything about Greg’s crude—if effective—tactic, he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned toward it and saw that the black-suited men who accompanied the funeral carriage had become skeletons, bones bleached so white they almost glowed, the darkness within their eye hollows deep and endless. They moved with an eerie silent grace, their joints creaking softly as they came. The carriage driver had become a skeleton, too, as had the horse drawing the rig. The fleshless animal reared without making a sound, forelegs pistoning in the air, and when it came down on all fours again, it leaped forward, pulling the carriage after it.

  Drew knew they couldn’t fight their way out of this. There were just too many. He was about to yell that everyone should run, when Amber shouted, “Look!”

  He turned to see that she pointed toward the haunted-house float. Except that now it wasn’t a float; it was an actual dilapidated house sitting in the middle of the street. The children who had been standing at the base of the float had become actual ghosts and witches, although they remained kid-size. The ghosts looked like semitransparent shreds of white gauze clumped into vague approximations of human form, and the witches were wrinkle-faced dwarves with jagged teeth and long nails. They flew through the air, circling the house, the ghosts leaving trails of ectoplasm in their wake, the black-garbed witches cackling as they rode broomsticks fashioned from human spinal columns. But worst of all was the monstrous thing standing atop the house.

  Like the children, the mayor had become her costume. She was still twelve feet tall, but now her body was in proportion to her height, and her dark blue gown was shredded, revealing that her torso blended with the roof shingles. She no longer was simply standing on the house. She had become one with it. Her arms and neck were now long and thin, almost sinuous like serpents. Her flesh was still blue, reminding Drew of some images he had seen of the Hindu death goddess Kali. Her mouth was filled with sharp silvery teeth resembling knife blades, and her solid-black eyes gleamed like polished obsidian. In her clawed hands, she held her staff, only now it was a gnarled hunk of wood formed from braided tree limbs, and the end of it burned bright with fire. The Witch Queen let out a hate-filled hiss and stabbed her staff toward them, releasing a blast of flame.

  Drew yelled, “Run!” but he needn’t have bothered. With skeletons advancing on one side and deadly fire shooting toward them on the other, no one needed encouragement to get the hell out of there as fast as possible. Drew glanced back over his shoulder and saw the flames engulf the skeletons and the bone horse, along with the crooked man who still hadn’t recovered from Greg’s attack. Fire wreathed their bodies, and they flailed about, shrieking and stumbling, before collapsing to the ground and lying still as they burned. Amber had said that these transformations were real, at least on some level, and he feared for the people who had been changed by the Dark Lady’s power. Would the damage done to them in their new forms remain when they returned to normal?

  The Witch Queen shrieked in frustration at missing her intended targets, and she unleashed a new blast of fire at them. This one missed, too, but it came close enough that Drew felt heat sear the back of his neck, leaving him with what felt like an instant sunburn there.

  They were running toward the other side of the street in a blind panic, but when Drew saw what waited for them there, he shouted for the others to stop. The Dark Lady had done more than transform those participating in the parade. She had also changed the onlookers. A monstrous mob stood on the sidewalk, hundreds of creatures of every shape and size, all of them nightmarish versions of whatever costumes they had been wearing before their metamorphoses. One person’s head had been replaced by a giant pus-weeping eyeball, while another looked as if he or she—it was impossible to tell—had been turned inside out, glistening organs revealed to the world. A rotted pumpkin-headed thing stood next to a clown with a long coiled spring of a neck, like a jack-in-the-box come to life. A boar-headed butcher complete with bloodstained apron and dripping red cleaver stood beside a couple who had been dressed in that perennial Halloween cliché, the tandem horse. They had become a hideous equine-human conglomeration, a two-headed thing with a jumble of human and animal parts. Even costumes that should have been benign—football players, cowboys, French maids, superheroes, fairy princesses, and the like—had become grotesque distortions of mottled flesh, fanged teeth, and clawed hands.

  “She can’t have this kind of power!” Trevor said. “It’s not possible!”

  “It’s a trick,” Greg said. “At least partly. The monstrous appearance of the people is an illusion created by the Dark Lady, but their aggression is quite real. If they manage to get hold of us, they’ll tear us apart.”

  “You should all leave me,” Erin said. “When they’re busy with me, you can try to get to the bookstore.”

  “This is no time for suicide by possessed mob,” Greg said, “no matter how guilt-ridden you feel. The best way to fight illusion is with illusion.”

  Drew thought of the burn on the back of his neck. If the Witch Queen’s fire was an illusion, then he wasn’t actually hurt. But he still felt as if he’d been burned. “If the possessed believe they’re injured, they’ll react as if they are. But any wounds they suffer will be merely psychosomatic.”

  While they talked, the creatures on the sidewalk stepped into the street and started toward them. They moved slowly at first, as if they were in a daze. Drew glanced backward and saw that the Witch Queen was looking around, seemingly confused. The skeletons—upright again and moving, although their clothes were aflame and their bones blackened—milled about uncertainly.

  The Dark Lady is having trouble controlling them all, Drew thought. She’s spreading her power too thin. Good. That gave them a chance to figure out a way to deal with the mess.

  Trevor turned to Greg. “Illusion is your area of expertise. Can you do anything to help us?”

  He shook his head. “Not as long as I’m in this body. Amber will have to do it.”

  “Me?” she said. “What can I do?”

  “You’re already shielding us from the Dark Lady’s power, preventing us from being possessed,” Greg said. “You’re doing it instinctively. It helps that four of us have had experience resisting psychic assaults, but we couldn’t do it without you.”

  “Tell me what to do,” she said.

  “There’s a great deal of psychokinetic energy in the atmosphere right now,” Greg said. “You need to tap into it
and use it.”

  “But use it how?”

  He shrugged. “It’s up to you. You have to use your imagination.”

  She turned to Drew. “Help me.”

  He understood what she was asking. It was common for therapists to use guided visualization with their clients, although doing so would have been easier in the quiet confines of an office, as opposed to the middle of a street with a horde of possessed parade goers slowly advancing on them.

  Drew took hold of Amber’s hands and squeezed gently. “OK, close your eyes and concentrate on the sound of my voice. Take in a deep breath, hold it for a moment, then let it out slowly. Think of your mind as a pool of clear water, the surface still and calm. Take another breath, let it out. Now, picture the six of us. You, me, Trevor, Greg, Erin, and Arthur. We’re in danger, but that’s all right. We’re protected from the Dark Lady’s influence, and we have the ability to defend ourselves.”

  Amber did as he said, and her breathing became more relaxed as he spoke. At first, nothing happened, and Drew feared that she wouldn’t be able to summon the concentration necessary for the task, but then Trevor said, “Whoa!” Drew turned to his friend and saw that he now held a sword, as did Greg, Carrington, and Erin. He let go of Amber’s hands, and the moment he did so, a sword appeared in each of their hands as well.

  “You couldn’t have conjured up a few automatic weapons?” Greg said, giving his sword a few experimental swishes through the air.

  “Stop complaining,” Amber said, “and start moving.”

  “Sound advice,” Carrington said. He raised his sword to his face in a salute. “‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends.’”

  And with that, the six of them began running down the street in the direction of Forgotten Lore. They stuck to the strip of street between the crowd on the sidewalk and the parade participants, hoping to avoid both.

  As they ran, Drew looked at Amber. “Swords?”

  She grinned. “When you said Arthur’s name, it made me think of King Arthur. I guess my subconscious decided to whip up a bunch of Excaliburs for us.”