by Paula Guran
When Halloween rolled around that year, Johnny Meyers painted his right hand black.
Of course, that right hand didn’t really belong to Johnny. It was made of rubber, and he’d only had it three months. Brought it back from the war with him. Doesn’t matter which war. They’re all the same.
Now, Johnny didn’t paint his hand black because he wanted a costume. Sure, it was Halloween, but he didn’t care about that. It was more like he wanted that hand to do some things for him—things he couldn’t manage if it were pink and clean and ordinary.
So Johnny got out some black enamel he’d used to paint model cars when he was a kid. He loosened up a stiff brush in a jar of thinner, and he painted the hand from its fake fingertips to its socketed rubber wrist. Then he sat and watched a monster movie while the paint dried. Trick or treaters knocked on the front door that Johnny never answered, and Frankenstein and the Wolf Man went at it on the TV. But Johnny Meyers paid no attention. He sat there as still as could be, cradling that rubber hand in his lap.
An hour ticked by. The drying paint stretched like a new skin over Johnny’s prosthetic hand, pulling those rubber fingers tight, curling them into a fist sealed up by a rubber thumb.
That was all right with Johnny.
Tonight he needed a fist.
Because a fist was built for knocking.
Now, maybe that’s a little hard to believe. Not the part about a fist being built for knocking, but the part about a rubber hand curling into a fist because of a little black paint. But, hey . . . it doesn’t really matter if you believe it or not. That’s the way it happened. You can go ahead and fill in the blanks yourself if you need to. Figure someone cast a bucket of mojo over that fake hand while Johnny was in the hospital. Figure that a dying patient sweated some magic into that hand before he kicked off, and the folks in the PT unit decided to save the government a few bucks and pass on that five-fingered hunk of rubber to Johnny. Hell, you can figure the damn hand came from some haunted curio shop over on the far side of The Twilight Zone if you want to.
Doesn’t matter to me how you explain it.
See, I’m not here to draw you a diagram.
I’m just here to tell you a story.
So when Johnny got up out of his chair, he knew exactly what that mojo hand could do for him. He’d been thinking about it all week long—listening to dry leaves churn out there in the black October night . . . eyeing those fat pumpkins waiting for knives on all those neatly swept porches over in town . . . watching spookshows on his little excuse for a TV when sleep wouldn’t come.
What Johnny was thinking about was the power that painted hand would hold tonight, on Halloween, when witches and broomsticks and all that other crap that goes bump in the night holds sway. And what Johnny’s brain told him was this: his mojo hand would give him three magic knocks on three ordinary doors. And it didn’t matter who waited behind those doors—every one of them would open for Johnny Meyers, and whoever waited on the other side would be his to command.
And I know what you’re thinking now. Sure—I’ve heard of “The Monkey’s Paw.” Who the hell hasn’t? A bucket of sour mojo, three wishes going bad, a dead guy knocking on his momma’s door . . . all that. But that was W. W. Jacobs’ story. This one’s mine, and I’ll play it my way. It’s about a rubber hand that’s painted black, and a guy named Johnny, and three doors he’ll be knocking on before midnight rolls around.
So Johnny moved on—the screen door banged shut behind him, heavy footfalls thudded across the porch, dry leaves crackled beneath his boots as he crossed the yard to the gravel driveway.
Johnny’s pickup waited by the mailbox. It wasn’t much to look at. More rust than steel—a little bit like Johnny himself.
A yank courtesy of Johnny’s real hand, and the door ratcheted open like an old man’s jaw.
Johnny climbed behind the wheel, started the engine, and notched that sucker into gear.
Lucky for Johnny, the truck was an automatic. Would have been hell shifting with a rubber hand if he’d had a manual transmission. But Johnny’s truck was easy—the only thing he’d really had to do as far as conversion was tighten down a clamp that attached a little knob to the steering wheel. After that, all he had to do was grab hold of that knob with his good hand, and he could make his turns one-handed.
Johnny headed up a two-lane road. Country—not many lights out there unless you knew where to look for them. The truck’s radio didn’t work, and neither did the heater. The cab was cold enough to make a rattler sleep through the whole damn winter without feeling a thing. Johnny himself didn’t feel it much. He was a big guy. Lots of meat on him—minus that right hand, of course.
It was a familiar road, and it brought familiar memories. There were lots of things Johnny remembered about the way things were before the war. Lots of things he’d forgotten, too . . . but, hey, a couple of grenades send you twenty feet in the air and take a couple pounds of skin and bone off you in the bargain, you’d figure it would shake a few parts loose in your brainpan, too.
That’s the way it was with Johnny. Of the stuff he remembered, most of it was good. Like drives with Elena on nights like this. Banging around country roads in the old pickup, just the two of them. Driving down to the river where the water seemed to run cold and clear any time of year. Finding the moon down there waiting above the trees like some kind of searchlight, and finding the shadows that could hide them from it.
Laughter in the dark. Just the two of them. That was the way Johnny liked remembering it. Those nights by the river, and other nights before he’d gone away. That was what he had. See, Johnny hadn’t seen Elena since he’d come home. Mostly, it was because of her parents. They had their reasons. In fact, her dad had Johnny over for a beer when he first got home. Sat him down at the table. No one else in the house—not Elena, not her mom. The old man wasn’t what you’d call talkative but there were words, the kind that barely peak above a whisper. He explained things to Johnny, told him why he couldn’t see Elena anymore. But the words didn’t matter to Johnny. For him, those words were curled fists, banging away on a closed door inside . . . one that was locked and bolted and wouldn’t open for any-goddamn-one.
But Johnny didn’t want to think about that. He rolled down the window, searching for those other memories. The good ones. The side mirror caught the moonlight, but he didn’t try to hide from it at all. No. This night was different. He’d do his hiding later, when Elena was with him.
He drove on. The cold air combed through his hair, and he caught the smell of a dirt road still damp with the first rain of the season mixed up with the scent of the wild apple orchard that stretched from the county road to the banks of the cold, clear river below.
The night was crisp and tart with the smell of ripening apples. Johnny didn’t like it much. Somehow it made him think of Elena’s father, and the things he’d said after Johnny came home. So Johnny rolled up the window and went searching for more pleasant scents that lingered in his memory.
Like roses.
Elena loved roses.
Johnny brought them for her all the time.
By any other name, they were just as sweet.
That was Johnny’s first stop. A little florist shop downtown.
The truck door creaked open and Johnny stepped out. It was almost midnight now. Pretty deserted on the streets. He walked across the parking lot, black rubber hand swinging at his side, heart pounding so hard he couldn’t hear his own footsteps. Giddy as a little kid. Because the whole deal was getting too close now, playing out in Johnny’s head like quick-cut scenes in those late night creepshows he’d been watching all week. But these scenes weren’t creepshows at all. Uh-uh. No way.
These scenes were sweet. Johnny saw his beater of a pickup truck, that rusty bed heaped with more roses than anyone could imagine. The perfume washed over him, almost smothered him as he drove up the little dirt road that led to Elena’s place, and he imagined her expression when she caught sight of him with all th
ose roses—
At the florist shop door, his reflection waited on the glass.
He raised his hand, put black rubber knuckle to its twin.
And he waited some more.
Turned out, he waited a long damn time.
The door didn’t open. Johnny just stood there, staring at his magic hand, wondering what had gone wrong. And then it came to him. What had he been thinking? The florist shop had been closed since five o’clock that afternoon. There wasn’t anyone inside. So it didn’t matter that Johnny had himself a black fist that could work wonders. If there wasn’t anyone behind the door to hear his knock, that five-fingered hunk of painted rubber was useless. Even a mojo hand couldn’t command an empty building.
It took him awhile to get a hold of that idea. But once he got hold of it, he decided it didn’t much matter. He’d lived in the real world for a long long time, and there were other tools at his disposal besides the mojo hand.
He went back to the truck and got two of them.
One was a .38, which he slipped behind him, under his belt, barrel along his spine.
The other was a cinder block.
Now, a lot of people in town didn’t want anything to do with Johnny when he came marching home from the war. Ray Barnes was one of those.
Sheriff Ray Barnes, to be correct. Small-town cop going nowhere fast. Guy like that, of course he’s going to have a hard-on for a war hero with a drawer full of medals. But Barnes wasn’t prejudiced. He didn’t much like anyone, and that made Halloween his favorite night of the year. People did stupid things, and Barnes made sure he was around when they did them. That’s why the trunk of his cruiser was heavy with several cases of confiscated beer, courtesy of the town’s teenage population. Up front, the sheriff had a bag of candy he’d snatched from some little window-soaper over at the church, even had the sawed-off runt’s monster mask. Later tonight, Barnes figured he’d spook the little sweetheart over at dispatch with that mask. Make her jump right out of her skin.
But right now Barnes was chewing on one of the window-soaper’s Hershey’s bars and cruising the streets. That’s the kind of guy he was. And that’s why he got damn excited when a burglar alarm call directed him to a parking lot over on West Seventh. Because there was the war hero himself, Johnny Meyers, coming through the busted plate-glass door of the florist shop with an armful of roses, just as sweet as sweet could be.
Barnes grew a smile that was about half a yard wide. Everyone in town knew that Meyers was crackers, but the sheriff was the only one who was waiting to grind the soldier boy under his heel. Barnes hit the brakes. Ditched that Hershey’s bar. Had his hand on his sidearm before he even released his seat belt, which was a bitch to undo, but he did it.
His free hand found the door.
He was just about to open it when black rubber knuckles rapped the glass.
Hard. None of that gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door Eddie Poe stuff. This rap was loud enough to make Barnes’ spine snap purely vertical. Then his head swiveled like a ventriloquist dummy’s, and he saw Meyers standing right there at his side window, and the synapses in his miserable excuse for a brain fired off one serious barrage.
Barnes opened that car door double-quick.
Meyers didn’t budge.
He held out an open hand. The one that wasn’t rubber.
“Trick or treat, Sheriff,” was all he said.
Goddamned if he knew why, but Barnes just couldn’t help himself.
He put down his pistol.
He picked up a Snickers bar, and he placed it in Johnny Meyers’ hand.
Johnny ate that Snickers as Barnes drove across town. He wasn’t sure why he took the cop with him, but he did. The guy really was Johnny’s to command. Barnes was as docile as a puppy. And with the burglar alarm going off back there, and Johnny’s truck sitting smack dab in the middle of the parking lot—well, Johnny figured it wouldn’t hurt to have the sheriff at his disposal should any other law come sniffing around.
Johnny thought things over as they drove. At least his mojo hand really worked. That was the good news, and Barnes proved it. But the bad news was that Johnny wasn’t sure how many times he’d used his hand. He’d knocked on Barnes’ squad car door, and that one surely counted. But he didn’t know about the florist shop. He’d knocked there, too—only no one had answered. He had no way of knowing if that knock counted or not.
So maybe he’d used one knock, and maybe he’d used two. He’d planned to use that second knock over at the jewelry store, where he wanted to pick out a diamond ring for Elena. But that was going to have to wait. For one thing, he’d already set off one burglar alarm in town. For another, if there was only one knock left in that magic hand he had to save it for Elena’s door . . . and for the man who answered it.
Familiar road now. Familiar moonlight, too. And through the cracked window, the familiar scent of the river and that dirt road still wet with rain that cut through farmland. And then that other smell—that crisp, tart apple smell that reminded Johnny of Elena’s father.
It sliced straight through him like a knife. Johnny rolled up the window. Now all he could smell were the roses—the bouquet of white ones he’d managed to grab at the florist shop before Barnes showed up. He tried to settle in on it, but he had a hard time.
Johnny couldn’t finish the Snickers bar. He tossed it back in the bag Barnes had stolen from a kid. Then he noticed something else in there. A monster mask, some kind of rattlesnake man with great big fangs. Johnny pulled it out and looked it over. Ran his hand over those scales. Rattlers were cold-blooded; they’d sleep through a night like this. They’d sleep through a whole damn winter. Johnny wished he could be that way, but he was sweating something fierce.
Barnes turned onto the little dirt road that led to Elena’s house, and Johnny’s heart started thundering. He was thinking about Elena’s father, thinking how things would play out once the old man answered that door.
Barnes pulled to a stop.
Johnny swallowed hard.
He crumpled up that monster mask, shoved it into his coat pocket like a snakeskin charm.
He grabbed the white roses in his good hand.
He got out of the car and walked to the door.
He knocked.
It took a while before the door opened, but it did. And there stood Elena’s father, his eyes tired, his heart heavy. Johnny told him what he wanted. But somehow, Johnny’s words didn’t seem to matter to the old man any more than Johnny’s mojo hand mattered. Because Elena’s father didn’t have any more left in his heart or his house than he did in his words, and though he spoke them under the sway of Johnny’s magic hand, they were words that did not rise above a whisper, and they were the same words that had knocked hard on Johnny’s heart when he’d come home from the war three months before.
Johnny had denied those words entrance then, but he couldn’t deny them now. Not as the three of them drove to the cemetery across the road from the apple orchard gone wild. The crisp, tart scent sawed at Johnny as he got out of the cruiser, and he remembered the things Elena’s father had told him that day three months ago, and he recalled the details of a death that had come quietly while he was half a world away.
And now he remembered about the cemetery. And the smell of apples. And the scent of roses, too, for there were roses on Elena’s grave. White roses . . . just like the ones he’d stolen from the florist shop. And suddenly Johnny felt like he was coming apart, felt like a busted puppet ready to topple among the tombstones.
He reached into his coat pocket. He squeezed that rattlesnake face in his good hand. Then he took the mask out of his pocket and put it on. He knew what he had to do.
Of course, a one-handed man couldn’t use a shovel. Johnny didn’t have time for that, anyway. So he started up the backhoe the gravediggers used and he set to work, digging like a combat knife in a tin of rations. Elena’s father watched without a word. Ray Barnes watched too, chewing on a Snickers bar while he sat on a tombsto
ne. And while Johnny worked the backhoe’s gears, his stump of a wrist sweated inside the sleeve of his magic prosthetic hand, and his tears lined the inner skin of that rattlesnake mask.
But none of it mattered anymore. Not the mojo hand, not the white roses chewed under the teeth of the backhoe’s bucket. Not what Johnny remembered, and not what he’d forgotten. That’s what he thought as he emptied out that hole, and that’s what he thought as he climbed down onto the lid of Elena’s coffin with a dozen crushed roses and a rubber hand that had started off the evening swollen with the promise of three magic knocks.
One or none—how many magic knocks were left in that hand didn’t matter at all. Johnny knew that deep inside, even as he held that rubber hand poised above the metal casket, even as he cried inside that rattlesnake mask.
Even as he brought his fist down on that lid.
And here’s your kicker, folks—Johnny was right.
Because it doesn’t really matter what happened next, any more than it matters why Johnny’s hand was charged up with those three magic knocks in the first place. That’s not what this story’s about, because knocking on his dead love’s coffin wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to Johnny Meyers. Not by a longshot.
The worst thing that ever happened to Johnny was ending up down in that hole at all.
The worst thing that happened was falling that deep, and that hard.
So . . . that’s where Johnny is.
That’s how he got there.
And that’s where we’ll leave him . . . tonight.
AUNTIE ELSPETH’S HALLOWEEN STORY, OR THE GOURD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
Esther M. Friesner
A carved pumpkin lit from within—the jack o’ lantern—is probably the single most identifiable symbol of Halloween. (Look at our cover!) But the now-ubiquitous jack o’ lantern is really a fairly recently acquired holiday icon. As you may recall from the introduction, the term “jack o’ lantern” was first associated with marsh gas, transmuted through folklore into association with the Devil, and then twisted into many variations. Around the beginning of the twentieth century he evolved into a jolly decoration. Jack o’ lanterns have a dual nature these days. They are still cheery neighborhood beacons of a happy Halloween, but they are also creepy incarnations of frightful evil.