I nodded, hated myself.
To make up for it, two weekends later I saved up enough to take us both to the movies, and get a medium popcorn.
This was going to be our story, I told myself. Not my parents’. That’s why I’d gotten myself sick. Fifty-thousand years from now, Grace and me were going to come to the Big Chief, to remember. It was going to be better than any stupid football game.
Her mom dropped us off, slipped Grace a five for concessions, then went home to sit at her kitchen table some more. According to Grace, since her dad left five months before, all his money mounded in front of the television like that was going to make up for him being gone, that’s mostly what her mom did: sit there and stare, like she was trying to backtrack to where this part of her life had started.
My parents felt sorry for her, they said, and then would hold each other’s hands, like to show they were different, they were better.
I held the door of the Big Chief open for Grace, already had our tickets.
It wasn’t a horror movie, either.
After Marcus, none of us went to the horror movies any more, even though it was almost Halloween and there was always one playing. We were still watching them after lights out at home, of course, but on videotapes we’d smuggle from our big brothers’ rooms, handle with extreme caution, like, if we dropped them, if that plastic cracked, the blood was going to come out.
We were still getting our scares, I’m saying.
But, with Grace, it was a love movie, where the girl looks and looks like she’s not going to get the guy, then, surprise again, she does.
I could sit through it. For her.
Maybe it would give her some ideas, even.
The theater was just usual-full for a Friday showing. Maybe six or eight seats between everybody, some movie with screaming playing next door.
I sat between Grace and that scary movie—her word—and held the popcorn on my knee for us, and, I admit, I kind of got into our movie. The girl’s dad in this one was trying to find her the perfect husband. He felt he owed her or something, because her mom wasn’t around to help her. But he was overdoing it, was pulling in everybody from his office, where he was boss, and then his friends’ sons, and on and on, when the guy the girl really loved was the guy who fixed the copy machine at her dad’s office.
I mean, I got into it, but I was also tracking the movie next door, of course. Trying to time to the screams. Trying to imagine if we were over there, how tight Grace would be clinging to me. How her knee would probably be up on my thigh and she wouldn’t even be aware it was happening.
But this wasn’t bad, either.
She kept having to bat the tears from her eyes, and had pretty much forgotten the popcorn altogether. Not me. I never forget the popcorn.
With the Big Chief, too, if Willard’s working the counter, he’ll even slip you a free refill if you promise not to make a mess he’ll have to clean up later.
Right when the movie was winding up for its final pitch, I whispered to Grace about our empty box, slithered out to the lobby for more. Willard fixed me up, and even let me peek into the other theater.
It was mayhem in there. Chainsaws and werewolves, it looked like—no, werewolves with chainsaws. The chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath until my eyes started burning.
It was all older kids in there, though. If I’d taken Grace in there, there would have been a timer over my head, just counting down to when the first senior leaned forward, whispered advice to me that Grace would have to pretend not to hear. And then things would just get worse and worse, and it’s not like I could fight any of them and win, so it would be a coke-throwing thing, and I’d probably get banned for the month again.
No, the love movie was the better choice for us. Definitely.
I got back just in time for the end.
Instead of a marriage, it was back to the office. The dad had hired the copy guy into the office, and now, with everybody watching, was promoting him up and up and up, to next in line to run the place, the girl just standing there beaming, crying, her whole world coming together just the way it should.
Grace was crying right along with her.
From where I was I could see her cheeks, shiny and wet, her eyes closed to try to hold the rest of the happiness in.
When I brushed her arm, climbing back into my seat, she jumped, and started coughing like she was going to throw up.
She ran out hiding her face and I followed, and Willard fixed her up with water and she hid in the Ladies until just before the horror movie let out.
And that was it.
My dad was waiting for us at the curb like every time, the car filled with his menthol smoke, and I held the door for Grace again and she just kept batting her eyes.
“Good movie?” my dad asked back, meaning completely different things, and I nodded just to shut him up.
Two weeks later it was Halloween.
Because we were in eighth grade, none of us dressed up, of course. And because the Big Chief was the Big Chief, none of us went there either. Not yet. Soon we’d be high schoolers, though, we knew, and none of the high schoolers ever died from holding their breath.
The kid who got castrated, he was supposed to have been thirteen or fourteen. Maybe that was why they were safe. Why we weren’t.
Anyway, because of what happened at the last Halloween party for our class (my dad’s menthols, Lucas’s dad’s beer, some light bulbs in the basement somehow unscrewed), this year the guys were going one way, the girls another. Most of the girls had signed up to chaperone the first- and second-graders trick-or-treating.
Where the guys went was the old graveyard behind the convent. Of course.
I called Grace before, to just mention it casually, where we were headed, so she could get how brave that made us, how we might not be making it back, all that, but she was already gone with her second-grader.
“Look for Bo Peep,” her mom said, instead of goodbye. Because she wanted us to be happy, I knew. Because she remembered how your heart can swell when you’re in eighth grade.
I met up with everybody in the alley ten minutes later and we were gone, my dad’s menthols safe in my chest pocket. I’d sneaked one at a time all week.
The graveyard, as it turned out, was still the graveyard. Crooked headstones, weeds as tall as us, and, when we first got there, a couple of sophomores making out on the concrete bench. We ignored them, or pretended to pretty well, but I guess they could tell. Then it was just us and the grossest cigarettes ever invented. And the town, spread out before us.
Marcus was buried back wherever he’d lived before. Not here. And it wouldn’t have been in this graveyard, anyway. This was just for people who died a hundred years ago, before the convent got condemned and haunted.
According to the seniors, there was a zombie nun who still carried a candle around in there.
We didn’t believe them even a little bit. But we didn’t get any closer than the graveyard, either. The reason we knew the nun wasn’t in there was that she’d been in our dreams already for years, her candle going out right when she got close to us.
So we sat on the headstones like they were nothing, and we blew smoke up into the inky-purple sky, and, squinting like outlaws at the full moon, we held our cigarettes up to Marcus, wherever he was. Like we’d even really known him.
We were pretending he’d been the best of us, that he was some tragedy.
We’d been the ones who paid for his ticket that night, though.
Soon enough, like always happened, I took a drag too deep, that green smoke filling my lungs, and I had to stagger off into the bushes, to throw up. Because it had to be some kind of bad luck to throw up on a hundred-years-dead person. It might be like giving them a little bit of life. Just enough.
I fell through the trees, finally got to the little cliff we’d used to drop our action figures from to test our bandanna parachutes, and I splashed my dinner a
ll down that scar of white rock.
When my eyes could see again, what they saw was the east end of Saginaw Street, right before it hits St. Francis.
Five years ago, this was the best candy street of all. It was all old people, who only got to see kids on Halloween, pretty much. Better, they’d forget you almost as soon as you left, so you could go back to that same well again and again. Sometimes we’d trade masks, mix and match costumes, but I don’t think they’d have busted us anyway. Or cared.
Saginaw Street was still doing good business, too. Was still the place to be if you hated your teeth.
I stood up to go back to the graveyard, and, if I’d just done that half a second sooner, I’d have never seen the shepherd’s crook cresting over the Frankensteins and ghost heads. It was navigating through them, moving down the sidewalk.
Bo Peep.
Grace.
I smiled, nodded to myself, pinched the hateful menthol back up to my lips.
There she was, all right. Her second-grade robot holding her hand. Cars moving slow and heavy alongside her—all the parents who were driving their kids instead of walking them. That’s cheating, though. If you want the candy, you’ve got to earn it.
I waved my arms as big as I could then remembered one of them was glowing. I balanced my cigarette on a rock behind me then stood up again, waving bigger, and yelling.
By now Grace’s second-grader was moving up a sidewalk, his silver-tubed arms and legs making him look like he was going to topple over with every step.
And she heard me, somehow.
Because of love, I think.
At first it was only her head angled over, like being sure, but then she turned around, her lungs filling with hope.
I jumped, jumped, but what she fixed on instead of me was one of the parents creeping past.
She leaned forward as if she hadn’t heard something all the way and the dad behind the wheel leaned out the open passenger window, holding out a white bow, the kind that goes on a good Bo Peep costume.
Grace looked back to her second-grade robot, still cued up for some grandparent candy, and the way she looked I could tell she was timing it. That she felt she had to, because what was this dad going to do with a Bo Peep bow, right?
Right.
She lifted the front of her big skirt, kind of ran out to the car, and, because I was a good almost-boyfriend, I kept my eye on her second-grade robot for her, watched him stiff-arm his plastic pumpkin up to Miss Massey, who used to teach English, and always tied verses of poetry to her candy.
Once upon a time the poem on my candy had told me the fields were white, the fields were long, the fields were waiting, and I’d always wanted to ask her for the rest of it, but never had the nerve.
By the time I looked back to Grace, she was in the passenger seat of the car, and it was pulling away slowly, no rush at all. Just melting back into the parade.
“No,” I said—what about the robot?—and started to step forward but my foot stabbed into open space and I had to balance back hard, my arms windmilling in space.
I fell back, ran along the cliff for the next break in the trees, the last piece of road before the highway opened up, and I got there just in time for the driver to look right through the bushes at me, and nod.
It was the dad from the movie, the one Grace had wished into our world.
He smiled his winning smile, his trustworthy smile, his smile with the sharp, sharp corners, and that was the last time anybody ever saw Grace Lynn Andrews, except as a photo on the news for two states in every direction, and it was the last cigarette I ever smoked, too, and it was the last year Halloween was the same for any of us.
It was also three months to the night before I crept out my window one Wednesday after lights out, and filled one of my mom’s good glasses with kerosene from the lamp her mom had given her, balanced it all the way downtown in the cold.
It wasn’t cold for long, though.
The Big Chief had just been waiting for somebody to burn it to the ground.
I stood there beside it and I held my breath as long as I could, the skin of my face drawing tight in the heat, my heart shaped exactly like two hands holding each other, and when I finally turned to go home, Lucas was there, and Thomas, and Trino, and they hid me, and they never told, and I’ll never leave this town, I know.
Not for the usual reasons, though.
In the flames that night before anybody got there, I saw a boy, the front of his pants wet with blood, and I saw Marcus, wearing his swim goggles, and I saw a pale white shepherd’s crook ahead of them, leading them through, leading them on.
Someday she’ll come for me too, I know.
I’ll be waiting.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen books now. Most recent are Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth and Flushboy. Coming up soon are The Least of My Scars and The Gospel of Z. Jones lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado. More at demontheory.net.
THE MUMMY’S HEART
Norman Partridge
Who knows how dreams get started.
But they gear up in all of us, maybe more than anything else. Waking . . . sleeping . . . sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. Sometimes dreams are sweet little ghosts, dancing in our heads like St. Nick’s visions of sugarplums. Other times they’re a hidden nest of scorpions penned up in a bone cage they can never escape, digging stingers into soft brain-meat hour after hour and day after day.
Sugarplums and scorpions. Take your pick. Or maybe grab yourself a full scoop of both. Because we all do that, don’t we? Hey, I plead guilty. I’ve had my share of dreams. Most of them have been bad, but even a guy like me has had a few sweet ones. And every time I’ve bedded one of those and snuggled up close, a monster movie scorpion came crawling from beneath the sheets and jack-hammered his king-sized stinger straight into my brain.
That’s why I don’t trust dreams.
That’s why I’d rather have nightmares.
Nightmares are straight up. They’re honest—what you see is what you get. Dreams are another story. They don’t play straight. They take your nights, and they take your days, too. Sometimes they make it hard to tell one from the other. They make you want things and want them bad, and every one of those things comes with a price.
Of course, no one thinks about the price of dreams on the front end of the deal. We all figure we’d pay up, but that’s because the price is never self-evident going in. So we spend more time dreaming, as if the act itself will turn the trick. A few of us work hard, building a staircase toward a dream—but people like that come few and far between. Most of us look for a shortcut. We toss coins in a fountain or go down on our knees and say a prayer. We look for a quick fix from some mystic force, or one god or another.
After all, that’s the dreamer’s playbook. Dreamers don’t take the hard road. We look for instant gratification. We make a wish, or two, or a dozen . . . as if something as simple as a wish could be a vehicle for a dream. But you never know. The universe is deep, and odds are that someone has to get lucky taking the short road sometime. And wishing only takes a second. Like the man said: Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Nothing. It turns out that’s a key word, because the thing most dreamers end up with is a fistful of nothing. And for most of us, that’s when the whole idea of dreams becoming reality disappears in the rearview mirror. For others, that’s when the longer road comes in. It’s not a road taken by realists, or workers, or builders. No. It’s a madman’s road. It’s built on books of mystic lore, most of them written by other madmen. It’s built on half-truths and faulty suppositions and twisted logic that (by rights) should be nailed through with a stake, boxed up, and buried in a narrow grave. It requires a certain brand of blind faith codified in stories and legends, and it demands a high level of trust in things that are beyond fantastic. Wizards and witches, monsters and myths. The power of an eye of newt, a jackal’s hide, or even a child sacrifice.
Most of the time, it’s a twisted t
rail that leads nowhere, except maybe to a cozy rubber room or not-so-cozy prison cell, or (if we’re going gothic) a locked attic in the home of some rich relation. But that doesn’t happen all the time . . . and it doesn’t happen for all madmen.
I say that because I know it’s true.
I’ve seen where those roads can lead.
The night I first walked a madman’s trail I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, no more than a passerby in the darkness. It wasn’t my own dream or my own trail, but it was one I took.
Walk any trail and you’re bound to soak up the scenery. Might be there’s only one way to go, so you follow it. And you put one foot in front of the other, the same way as those who have gone before you, and sometimes the darkness takes hold of you as it did them. Sometimes it draws you in.
You might stay on that trail a long time, always looking for a way off, sure you’ll find one eventually.
But walk anywhere long enough, and that place becomes yours.
Especially if you walk alone.
The trail I’m talking about was cut by a mummy.
He did the job on Halloween night in 1963. He was mad as a hatter, and he came out of a plywood pyramid that was (mostly) his own making. And no, he wasn’t really a mummy. But that night, he was definitely living the part. Even in the autopsy photos, that shambler from the darkside was a sight to behold.
His name was Charlie Steiner and he was nearly twenty-three years old—too old to be trick-or-treating. And Charlie was big . . . football-lineman big. If you know your old Universal Studios creepers, he was definitely more a product of the Lon Chaney, Jr. engine of destruction school of mummidom than the Boris Karloff wicked esthete branch. But either camp you put him in, he was a long way from the cut-rate dime-store variety when it came to living-dead Egyptians.
Because this mummy wasn’t playing a role.
He was embodying one.
Which is another way of saying: He was living a dream.
Charlie’s bandages were ripped Egyptian cotton, dredged in Nile river-bottom he’d ordered from some Rosicrucian mail-order outfit. He was wound and bound and wrapped tight for the ages, and he wasn’t wearing a Don Post mask he’d bought from the back pages of Famous Monsters of Filmland. No. Charlie had gone full-on Jack Pierce with the makeup. Furrows and wrinkles cut deep trenches across his face like windblown Saharan dunes, and the patch of mortician’s wax that covered one eye was as smooth as a jackal’s footprint . . . add it all up and drop it in your treat sack, and just the sight of Charlie would have made Boris Karloff shiver.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 2