by Paula Guran
Smile . . . said a crawling clown with a head like a snake. Sing a merry tune . . . said a leaping clown with red axes for hands.
And she felt so scared she did begin to laugh, laughing so hard until she peed her pants and then laughing some more. Laughing so hard that when a clown no more than six inches tall and with an orange rat’s tail hanging out of the back of his pants handed her a tube of black grease paint she took it, and drew her own smile around her shrieking lips.
So that ever after that she could smile, no matter how she felt inside.
MASKS OF ME
Ronald went to the door and was surprised to see a little boy standing there wearing a mask that looked just like Ronald’s own face.
“Where’d you get that mask of me?” Ronald asked, but the little boy just turned and ran away. Ronald went out on the front porch and yelled as loudly as he could, “WHERE’D YOU GET THAT MASK OF ME?” But the little boy just kept on running, and never looked back.
Ronald jumped off the porch and ran after the little boy. Behind him, he could hear his mother and father calling after him in panic, but Ronald kept running, just knowing that he had to catch that little boy and find out about the mask of his own face.
“I WON’T HURT YOU! I JUST WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THAT MASK OF ME!” he called, but the little boy just kept getting further and further away, like he had leopard legs or something. Leopard legs and Ronald’s own face.
He chased that little boy with the mask of himself up Fredericks Lane and down Lincoln Avenue. He spun into Jangle Road so fast he almost fell down. The wind was blowing hard and the trees were moving like they were getting ready to dance and the whole thing made Ronald feel like he was flying, soaring after that little boy wearing his mask of Ronald.
“ . . . where’d you get that mask of me . . . ” Ronald tried to say but the wind caught his words and blew them away so hard he could hardly hear them himself.
“ . . . where’d you . . . where’d you . . . ” the wind spat back at him.
Then finally the little boy turned onto Halloween Street and Ronald felt pretty good about that because he knew Halloween Street was a dead end. But he wasn’t ready for all the kids trick or treating there, hundreds of them of all sizes, and all of them wearing these masks with Ronald’s own face.
“Where’d you get those masks of me?” Ronald cried out in confusion.
“Where’d you get that mask of me?” they all chorused back in panic and fatigue.
“ . . . where’d you . . . where’d you . . . ” the wind gently crooned.
And then there was nothing else to say. All the children with Ronald’s face sat down on Halloween Street and said nothing. Ronald wondered if maybe they were all waiting for the real Ronald to stand up, for the real Ronald to make it perfectly clear exactly who was who.
So the real Ronald stood up and tried to take his face off, just to show all the others that it wasn’t a mask. And all the other real Ronalds stood up and tried to take their faces off, to finally put an end to the crowded masquerade.
And all of Ronald’s faces did come off. And there were the Willies and the Anns and the Bobbies and the Janes. And there was no one named Ronald there at all.
And no one could remember ever knowing any kid with such a strange name.
PLAY PARTY
Ellen left the party early because she didn’t belong.
Freddie left the party early because he didn’t belong.
Willa left the party early because she didn’t belong.
Johnny left the party early because he didn’t belong.
They wandered their separate ways toward Halloween Street, empty and waiting sacks clutched desperately in their hands.
Behind them faded the community sounds, the get-together songs of cornhusking, apple paring, rock and roll dancing, bobbing for apples and stealing a kiss.
Come, all ye young people that’s wending your way,
And sow your wild oats in your youthful day . . .
But there would always be a place where the loners could go.
So choose your partner and be marching along . . .
Halloween Street was always open to the Ellens, the Willas, the Freddies and Johnnys.
For daylight is past, the night’s coming on . . .
Where the doors to the empty houses would open only to their special knocks.
And close them up safe. And close them up tight.
JACK
Marsha cut her thumb real bad last year carving pumpkins, so this year her dad said she couldn’t carve pumpkins at all. He said she was too careless. She didn’t understand how he could remember things that far back—sometimes she had trouble just remembering what happened last week—but he did. And she had made him mad the last couple of days and sometimes that made him remember more. She had let the soup boil over on the stove and she had borrowed her mother’s ring and lost it and she had let the baby crawl away when she was supposed to be watching him. Sometimes it was hard for her to remember things especially when she was excited about something like Halloween. But Dad didn’t seem to understand that at all. That’s why she’d taken the knife out of the kitchen and hid it in her treat sack. There was a big pumpkin patch behind Halloween Street and she’d find herself one there to carve.
All up and down Halloween Street the jack o’ lanterns were wonderful this year. She didn’t know any of the people who lived on this street, and she didn’t know anyone else who did either, and that made her wonder all the more what kind of people would carve such great pumpkins.
On the pumpkins there were faces with great moustaches and faces with huge noses. Enormous, deep-set eyes and mouths that stretched ear-to-ear. Some of the pumpkins had other vegetables attached—carrots and onions and potatoes and turnips—to make features that stood out on the pumpkin’s head. There were pumpkin cats and pumpkin dogs, bats, walruses, spiders, and fish.
There was every kind of face on those pumpkins a person could imagine: faces Marsha had seen lots of times and faces Marsha had never seen once in her entire life.
But there wasn’t a single pumpkin that matched anyone in her head she might have called a “Jack.” As far as Marsha was concerned there wasn’t a “Jack o’ lantern” in the bunch. So she’d just have to make herself one.
She slipped down a well-worn pathway that ran between two dilapidated houses, crept along a waist-high fence whose paint had peeled and furred to the point where it gave her the creeps just to touch it, until finally she stepped out into the pumpkin patch: yards and yards of green foliage studded with the big orange pumpkins.
She couldn’t see the ends of the patch—it stretched out as far as she could see on this side of the river. But for all the pumpkins to choose from, finding the right one for “Jack” was easy.
It was a squat, warped-looking thing just beginning to rot. But she could already see Jack’s face in the bulgy softness of its sides. She cleared off the dirt from its surface, pulled out the knife, and stuck it in as deep as she could make it go. The patch sighed and shook as she wiggled the knife back and forth. It felt icky, like she was carving up a baby or something. Finally Jack’s face started coming out of all that softness: a wide mouth with teeth as big as knife blades, a nose like a hog’s nose, or maybe some other animal that liked to stick its face down in the mud, and two deep deep little eye holes, like the eyeballs had sunk way down so that you couldn’t look at them, so that you could never know exactly what old Jack was feeling. That was the other thing—somehow Marsha just knew that Jack’s face was old, as old a face as Marsha had ever seen. So old it was like Jack could have nothing in common with Marsha, or even care.
So that after she’d made Jack, Marsha decided she really didn’t like him very much. The fact was, she hated him. So she dropped him on his big ugly face and ran out of there. She ran out of the patch and back down the path that led between the dark houses and out into the shadowy lane that was Halloween Street itself. Then she remembered she had forgotten the ki
tchen knife.
It wasn’t an ordinary knife—it was part of a set her parents got for their wedding and it had a different sort of handle and once her dad found it gone then he would know who had taken it.
Marsha went back up the pathway slowly, but when she reached the pumpkin patch she saw that a man was standing there, right in the middle of the Halloween Street pumpkin patch, just staring at her.
He wore a big black coat and a big black hat and his hands had been swallowed up by big orange gloves.
And Marsha could see that he was standing right where she had dropped Jack. So her parents’ kitchen knife had to be some place near his feet.
“Excuse me, sir?” she said and the man took a step toward he. “Did you see . . . ” And the man took another step. “ . . . a knife?” And the man stepped closer still.
When the man took several more fast steps Marsha turned and ran. She ran back down the path and she ran out in the street but when she turned her head the man was right there.
So she ran to the end of the street and beat on a door there but she could hear the man coming up the steps and so she ran to the edge of the porch and jumped off and ran to the next empty house with a pumpkin on the porch and then the next and then the next but nobody ever answered even though all the jack o’ lanterns were lit and she could hear the man behind her with every terrified step.
Finally she was stuck in one corner of a dark yard and there was no place to turn and the man was coming right up to her he was so tall she couldn’t see the top of him and he had one orange hand held up high.
“Your knife, I’ve got your knife, little girl,” the man said in a friendly voice and she felt all better again.
Until he took off his hat with that big orange glove of his and his head was that pumpkin she carved, that big old ugly Jack with the knife blade teeth and her parents’ kitchen knife was stuck in all the way to the handle right beside his nose but he didn’t seem to mind.
OWLS
All night long the owls gathered in the trees up and down Halloween Street.
All night long they rustled their feathers and stared with their eyes of glass.
All night long they wept while the children played.
For owls know that some days the sacks are empty. For owls know a sack can’t be filled with wishes.
And owls know the children eventually go home, lock their doors, and never come out again.
The children hooted and screeched their way from house to house, the tears of the owls glistening on their shoes.
TREATS
Almost midnight, when the last of the children should have been home, but were not, their bags too full of treats to carry, and Halloween Street full of the sounds of rustling costumes and laughter, candles were seen to light up all over the lane and both sides of the creek.
The children, if they hadn’t been so excited by the bizarre and exciting shapes of each other, by the heady scent of colored sugars in their bags, might have been a little frightened by this, but for the moment it seemed like a great deal of fun. The world was full of treats for them, and each new event offered them more. They all laughed out loud.
Some of them cheered.
But then the individual flames began to drift away from their individual candletops, rising swiftly to join one another in the sky above, where they paused as if sad and reluctant before floating up into the dark night.
As quickly as that. As quickly as a hungry child emptying his bag of its bright and shiny, but ultimately unsatisfying, treats.
Only one child cried, but all the others recognized what he felt. For a brief moment they thought of the ends of things, of how alone they were in this dark and treatless night.
One by one the children drifted away to home and their separate dreams, even the youngest among them trying to pretend he was younger still, a baby, some unknowing sprite who might last this night forever.
MEMORIES
Peter Crowther
It has become a tradition to disguise oneself for Halloween. There are several theories about the origins of dressing up for the holiday. Some think it was first an attempt to impersonate the spirits in order to placate or confuse them; others posit obscuring identity may once have been seen as a way to trick ghosts, to keep them from recognizing you. Others see it simply as a way to protect those guilty of pranks—or worse. But what if . . . something . . . appeared and stole your identity, obliterated every trace of your existence: all memories and evidence there ever was a “you”? How would we even know such a threat existed? Perhaps Peter Crowther knows something we’ve . . . forgotten . . .
“Ezzie?”
“Bea, that you?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Why you whispering?”
“Where you been? I been calling you on and off for a couple hours now.”
“I had to take the store keys into Mil. She’s going in early in the morning. Jack took her bunch of keys by mistake.” Then, “Why are you whispering, Bea?”
“Go to the window.”
“What?”
“Go to your window and look over.”
“Bea, I’m right in the mid-”
“Please, Ezzie. If you can’t do this one thing for me then I just don’t—”
“Okay, okay . . . but this had better be good.”
The line went quiet for a minute or so and Beatrice Duke heard a laughtrack Doppler first into earshot and then out again as Elizabeth Rafaelson walked from her kitchen, through the living area and into the hallway.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m at the window.”
“See anything?”
Elizabeth couldn’t hide the chuckle—and maybe just a hint of frustration—from her voice. “Bea, you’re gonna have to be just a little bit more specific. I see lots of—”
“Outside my place—can you see anyone? Outside my house?”
Ezzie flicked off the hall light, leaned on the windowsill and put her forehead against the glass. “Uh-uh,” she said softly. Then, “Hey, now you’ve got me whispering!”
“Someone’s out there, Ezzie.”
“Yeah, there’s lots of folks out there, Bea . . . kids mostly, and moms and dads herding them around door to door—it’s Hallowe’en, for chrissakes. Every kid in the nighborhood is out there, armed with a cloak, some stick-in vampire dentures and a plastic punkin tub to store their plunder.”
The line was silent for a few seconds and Ezzie moved back from the glass. Had she seen something out there? Just for a second, there had been the faintest hint of movement, over there behind the bushes that lined the pathway around the back of Bea’s house. She was sure of it. She leaned forward again and, shielding her eyes as she squinted into the gloom between her house and the house across the street, she hit her head on the glass. On cue, the TV set behind her chose that very moment to burst into a wave of laughter. When Bea spoke again, it startled Ezzie.
“It’s not kids, Ezzie.”
“So if it’s not kids, who is it?”
Silence. Then, “I dunno, but he does stuff . . . and then, I think he makes you forget. And he did something to little Billy Westlow.”
It must be getting unseasonably cold, Ezzie thought and she wrapped her free arm around her tummy. Here it was only fall and already it felt like it was the depths of January. “This some kind of Hallowe’en prank, Bea because if it is then I tell you thi—”
As though reading her friend’s mind, Bea said, “I called the police.”
Somewhere outside, a siren wailed and Ezzie wondered if it was a police car or an ambulance.
“They came over? On Hallowe’en? Boy, you musta touched the hem of God’s robe, girl. And the guy’s stayed around with the cops tramping through the bushes?”
“He wasn’t on my place. Not then.”
“So . . . why’d you call the police?”
“Ezzie, do you remember Bill Westlow?”
“Bill Westlow? Bea, who’s Bill Westlow? Don’s brother? I didn’t even know he ha
d a—”
Bea let out a deep sigh that just stayed a breath short of all-out breaking down and crying. “He’s Don and Margie’s boy,” she said. “Their son, Ezzie. Leastways, he was.”
Ezzie turned away from the window. It sounded for a second there as though Bea’s voice had drifted away off someplace. “Bea, you okay?”
No answer.
“Bea, Don and Margie don’t have any kids. You know that.”
“Ezzie, he was a boy . . . just a kid. And that . . . that thing—”
“Thing? What are you talking about, Bea?”
“It looks like . . . it looks like he’s a man but I don’t think—” She paused and lowered her voice to a whisper. “I don’t think it is.”
“You mean he’s a woman?”
“No!”
Ezzie’s hand came up to her neck involuntarily. “You mean to tell me he’s one of them trans-vest-ite fellas?”
“For God’s sake, Ezzie,” Bea snarled.
“Hey, honey, will you just slow—”
Bea finally broke down in tears.
“Bea, you want me to come over? I got a cake in the oven but—”
“No!” Bea snapped. “Stay in your house.”
There was that chill feeling again and Ezzie shivered. “Bea, please . . . come on now: you’re scaring me.”
“Ezzie, he’s still out there.”
“Who? Who’s out there?”
Silence. Then, her voice even softer, Bea said, “I told you. The man. At least—” She lowered her voice even more. “—at least I think he’s a man. And I think there are more of them out there.”
Ezzie turned around again and squinted at the house across the street. “I’m looking at your house right now, Bea and there’s—”
Wait a minute? What was that?
“Ezzie?”
“It’s okay. I’m still here. I thought I saw something.”
“What? What did you see?”
“Nothing, honey. I didn’t see nothing at all. Just thought I did, is all.”
“So what did you think you saw?”
Ezzie shook her head to the darkness that surrounded her in the hallway. “A shape,” she said at last.