HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre

by Paula Guran [editor]

  Roger bashed him again, but it didn’t do any good. The next blow crashed against my forehead, just above my left eyebrow. It opened a two-inch gash. Not that I knew I was bleeding . . . or falling. I don’t even remember falling into the lake. But the next thing I knew, I was underwater. I came up coughing a mouthful of sludge that tasted like something a frog had vomited up. For a moment I thought the mummy’s fist was coming at me again, but I realized it was only a clutch of cattails waving in the wind.

  The moonlight shone down, riding black ripples. My stomach roiled, and I retched. The sound of prowl car sirens still rode the night, but I saw no light cutting through the eucalyptus grove, and no light on the beach.

  I didn’t see Roger or the mummy. Apart from the sirens, there was no sign of activity behind me. It was as if they’d disappeared. And then I heard a splash out there in the darkness, somewhere near a large stand of cattails that cut in from the shore, and I thought maybe it was Roger.

  Sure. It had to be. Maybe Roger had dropped the mummy with his bat. He’d dived in to join the search, and now he was out there in the lake, looking for the girl.

  “Roger!” I shouted. “She went in over here . . . over by the road!”

  I didn’t get a reply. Maybe the splash I’d heard was Roger going under, looking for the girl. One thing was for sure, if I was right and he’d found her, he would have called out. But I hadn’t heard anything. And I didn’t hear anything now, except for the sirens drawing near.

  Quickly, I pulled myself onto the muddy bank and kicked off my shoes. Then I shucked my father’s jacket and sucked a deep breath, and dove back into that cold water.

  The girl was still out there.

  Maybe my brother was, too.

  Hitting that water the second time was like swallowing an iceberg. My chest froze up, but my thoughts cleared as that icy black water shocked my brain alive. I didn’t know how much time had passed between the mummy tossing the little girl into the lake and the time I went in after her. All I knew was that enough seconds—or maybe minutes—had been burned off the clock that the little girl couldn’t have too many left.

  I knew some other things, too. As big as he was, the mummy couldn’t have thrown the little girl far. I had a rough idea where she had to be, because I’d made my dive from the spot where I thought the mummy had been standing when he heaved her in. But the water was deeper there than I’d expected. The sand didn’t slope down from the water’s edge the way a beach does. It was a sheer drop-off from sandy shore into murky lake—maybe a foot or a foot-and-a-half drop in some places—and the water was deep enough that I barely skimmed the sludgy bottom when I dove in.

  I couldn’t see a thing, of course. Even on a sunny day, that water was nothing but thick murk. I swam forward, my hands sweeping before me, but all my fingers found was slick bottom and broken cattail shafts. I covered ten feet that way—maybe fifteen. Then I came up for air, turned, and immediately dove again.

  This time I reversed course, swimming back towards the shore, covering the area to my left. My hands sweeping out, sure I’d hit something solid any second. I didn’t find anything—not even a junked spare tire. Just that sludgy bottom and rotting slime a catfish wouldn’t want in its belly.

  Again I came up for air, breathing harder now. I was closer to the shore, and I could stand. A case of shivers rattled up my spine, and I was shaking now. The cold . . . the blows to the head . . . whatever the reason, I nearly lost it and passed out.

  But I caught myself. I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  “Roger!” I called. “Are you out there? Did you find her?”

  No answer.

  I sucked another deep breath, but it came up in a wet cough that seemed like a slap against the quiet night. I cleared my throat and got another breath down and held it. It was only then that I realized the sound of sirens was gone.

  Just that fast another sound replaced it.

  The sound of a shotgun blasting away in the night.

  I didn’t have time to listen.

  That little girl was down there somewhere.

  I had to find her.

  She’s alive, I told myself, and even in that moment I knew it was a wish as much as a prayer.

  She’s alive.

  Apart from that wish, I can’t say what I thought about as I searched for the girl. Diving, coming up for air, diving again. It happened a long time ago, though I still dream about it sometimes. Over the years, those dreams have come and gone, but they always seem to come around . . . the same way that night has never left me.

  Sometimes I dream about that mummy, too. And sometimes I think about him in the light of day. The mummy . . . Charlie Steiner . . . in my head, they’re a pair. I don’t know what emotions were squirming in Charlie’s guts by the time he found his way through the eucalyptus grove. He certainly wasn’t walking out of there with a black-magic dreamgirl on his arm, the way he’d imagined. I’m sure anger and betrayal boiled in his crazy brain . . . maybe even fear. But all that’s speculation. The only thing I know for sure is that by the time Charlie turned his back on Butcher’s Lake his fate was sealed, and in more ways than he could ever imagine.

  Because the preacher’s kid hadn’t chickened out. He had more stones than Roger or I had imagined. He’d run to the nearest house, banged on the door, and told the owner to call the cops because there was a crazy man loose in the woods.

  God knows how the sheriff and his deputy reacted when they rolled in and caught their first glimpse of that bloody mountain of cobwebs coming out of the trees. Of course, I’ve heard the stories over and over. And, like I said, I’ve had dreams, too. And it’s the dreams I see when I picture the scene in my mind’s eye: The mummy staggering backward when the patrol car lights hit him, then realizing he had nowhere to retreat because the cops were already out of the car. Sheriff Cross and Deputy Myers barking orders, drawing down. The mummy’s black pit of a mouth opening like a sinkhole, and words and blood spilling out that no one ever remembered because his wrecking-ball fist was rising in the air as he lumbered forward, charging the cops. Then the sharp bark of gunfire, and the thunder of shotgun blasts, and a rain of blood and bone and flesh slapping against a straight and tall eucalyptus trunk as that bloody mountain of meat avalanched to the ground, leaving a wake of shotgunned Egyptian cotton fibers floating on the October wind like its very own ghost.

  You kill something that dead, you don’t worry about it getting up again no matter what it looks like. At least, that the way Sheriff Cross and Deputy Myers saw it. They weren’t going to worry about a dead kid in a Halloween costume. And that’s what they saw when they looked at Charlie Steiner’s corpse. That’s all they saw. A dead kid in a Halloween costume.

  But that didn’t mean they were done for the night. Cross and Myers worked their way through the eucalyptus grove, guns raised, not sure what they’d find when they reached Butcher’s Lake. And the first thing they found was me, still diving in that black water, still looking for the girl in the princess mask. Sheriff Cross jumped into the water and grabbed me, and he always tells me I put up one hell of a fight, even though I was just a kid. I didn’t want to give up the search. I told him the whole story. Practically screamed it in his face. The mummy . . . the little girl with the princess mask . . . Roger and I fighting the mummy. All of it.

  The sheriff went into the lake himself that night, and he found nothing. Later a diver went in, and the next morning they dragged the bottom. But they didn’t find any trace of a little girl, dead or alive.

  They did find a body, just after dawn, but it wasn’t underwater.

  It was a boy’s body, and it was hidden in a stand of cattails.

  The kid was wearing a New York Yankees uniform. It was my brother Roger, and he’d been beaten to death. Blunt object trauma was the phrase they used.

  That could have meant a wrecking-ball fist had taken him down.

  Or it could have meant the mummy had used Roger’s own Louisville Slugger to finish
the job.

  They found the Slugger just a few feet from my brother’s dead body.

  It’s the one thing of Roger’s that I still have.

  Once people learned what Charlie Steiner had been up to in the weeks and months before that fateful Halloween night, they discovered he sure enough fit the m.o. for a kid who’d gone nuts enough to dress up like a Halloween boogeyman and charge a pair of fully armed cops.

  Behind Charlie’s house—which was just this side of the boondocks, and not too far from the dirt road that skirted the lake—Sheriff Cross discovered a path chopped through heavy brush. It was a little wider than a deer run, and it snaked up a hill. At the top of that hill was Charlie’s own private temple. Google the name of this town and the word “mummy,” and you’ll find pictures of it. Some people say Charlie built it, that it was some kind of plywood pyramid, but I’ve seen it inside and out and I can tell you that’s an exaggeration. It was (and still is) a simple A-frame design—that’s how the pyramid stories got started—but it had four sides. And, sure, Charlie did paint Egyptian-style pictures and hieroglyphs on it back in the day, but all that stuff faded away a long time ago.

  To tell the truth, there wasn’t much inside to the place at all, then or now. One large room with a narrower loft cubby up above, the kind of place that used to sit in a far-off corner of a large property so the owner would have a hideout with just enough space to get into some trouble out of sight of the main house.

  And maybe that’s what the place was in the old days, when the A-frame had been in better repair. The whole property had made the slide to rack and ruin by the time Charlie’s folks bought it. But in the old days—who knows? I’ve heard the old road along the swamp was once used by bootleggers who wanted to skirt the two-lane county highway on delivery runs. Hey, anything’s possible. Histories get lost—for houses, for places . . . even for people.

  But the little slice of history made by Charlie Steiner in his A-frame hideaway wasn’t lost at all. No, after the incident at Butcher’s Lake, the contents of Charlie’s own private temple were photographed, cataloged, and filed, using the best police science of the day. Examine that stuff today and it looks like it belonged in a clubhouse for an obsessed monsterkid. The walls were papered with one-sheets from the old Universal creepers, and there were lobby cards and eight-by-tens of Lon Chaney, Jr. doing his thing as Kharis. Comic books featuring an army of Kharis wannabes, too. Paperback novels, plus a couple magazines tipping monsterkids to Hollywood makeup secrets. There was even a stack of 8mm monster movies and a cheap projector. Remember, this was 1963—a long time before VHS, let alone DVD.

  There was other stuff, too. Charlie had taken Woodshop 1, 2, and 3 in high school, and he’d learned enough to build himself his very own Egyptian sarcophagus. A couple professors from the State U came out and looked at it, and they said Charlie might have made something of himself as an archeology student if he’d taken another path. They analyzed some other Egypt-ware he had in his little hideaway, too. There was a brazier that looked like a real-deal museum piece, a collection of little jars with odd-smelling oils, and a box with a bunch of leaves the guys at the local nursery couldn’t identify. The profs from State U fingered the brazier as a knockoff piece of bric-a-brac from the days of the King Tut craze in the 1920s, and the carved box came from the same era, but they didn’t have any more luck identifying those leaves than the nurserymen did. A rumor spread that Charlie had himself a stash of marijuana, but surely the profs would have known what that was. Even though Mickey Spillane always bumped Jack Kerouac out of the paperback racks around here, we weren’t that far off the map. There’s no doubt a couple of college guys would have known reefer when they saw it.

  But it wasn’t the drugs (or possibility of same) that kept the story pot bubbling. No. The mummy mythos did that job. Of course, there weren’t too many people around here who knew much about Kharis and his eternal search for a reincarnated princess, but that changed PDQ. The local all-night TV station took a clue and started running those old movies on the Late Late Show, and a lot of folks stayed up watching, looking for answers. Not long after that, we had a town full of experts. You’d hear people sitting around in coffee shops discussing reincarnation, black magic, and all the rest of it. A couple of tabloids picked up the story, too. One of them ran a piece called “The Terror of Butcher Lake.” That’s where the name came from, and it stuck.

  Sheriff Cross and Deputy Myers became mummy experts, too. Just like everyone else, they coffee’d up and watched those Universal movies on the Late Late Show. After the mummy marathon aired, Cross even borrowed the prints from the TV station and ran them on the big screen at the local Bijou for some of the guys from the D.A.’s office, the state shrinks, and a few other invitees. God knows what that crowd made of them. I’ve always wondered if they just sat there stunned, or if they ate popcorn and had themselves a ball. I especially wonder about Sheriff Cross—after all, he’d gunned down the thing. It must have been something to see its twin take loads of buckshot and keep on coming, even if it was just a Hollywood shadowshow up on the big screen.

  Of course, the Hollywood part of the equation was just the sizzle for the story, not the steak. The inventory of Charlie’s temple didn’t stop there, because there was more locked up in his personal madhouse besides the movie stuff. There were books about black magic, too. A stack of them. And there were notebooks Charlie had written with lots of missing pages, and other books with whole chapters cut out.

  But by then, it really didn’t matter.

  After all, Charlie Steiner was dead.

  For the next few weeks, I told the story over and over. My parents didn’t let me talk to any reporters, of course. It’s hard to believe with the way things are now. These days people spill their guts anywhere and everywhere, but that didn’t happen back then. You kept your business to yourself unless the cops told you otherwise, and that’s the way we played it. I talked to a couple of doctors, and I talked to someone from the district attorney’s office. Of course, I talked to Sheriff Cross, too.

  I told all of them the same story. How Roger and me and the preacher’s kid had come across the mummy—or Charlie Steiner. How he seemed to be working some kind of magic spell, and how he’d tossed a bound girl into the water after saying something about dreams, and wishes, and sacrifice.

  It really was a simple story, and it didn’t change. But every time I told it, the whole thing always came back to one question that punched a hole in the whole deal: Where was the little girl? They never did find her body in the lake. And, sure, there had been a couple young girls reported missing in neighboring towns during the preceding months, but that didn’t mean anything. After all, if Charlie had tossed a missing girl into Butcher’s Lake, they should have found her body. Drowned girls didn’t just disappear into thin air.

  Pretty soon, that girl in the princess mask was all the doctors wanted to talk about. I can’t really blame them. After all, I’d been busted up pretty good that night. I had a concussion. I was still having headaches several weeks after the fact. My sentences would run off to nowhere, and my thoughts would run to places I didn’t like. I wasn’t sleeping too well and I admit I had problems putting things together after a while.

  Not the story, but other things.

  The story was always there in my head.

  The story was always the same.

  I knew what I saw and heard that night, and I was sure it happened just the way I remembered it.

  But, in the end, it didn’t matter what I thought. The doctors brought in a headshrinker from upstate, and he put the word out that I was having trouble separating reality from fantasy. Something about disassociation, or misassociation, or something like that. All this, because I stuck to my story about a little girl who no one could find. That, and the fact that sometimes I talked about a mummy, and didn’t talk about Charlie Steiner at all.

  Like it mattered.

  Like that thing hadn’t been real for me on Halloween nig
ht.

  For most people, that delivered the entire episode to the closing gate. Sure, something had happened out there in the darkness, and my brother was dead. But as far as the state shrinks and the D. A. were concerned, they already had the culprit responsible for my brother’s murder. That kid’s name was Charlie Steiner, and Charlie wasn’t talking to anyone. He’d died in his very own boogeyman suit. The undertaker didn’t have to do much work on him—Charlie’s belly had been hollowed out by the sheriff’s shotgun, and there weren’t enough guts left in his carcass to fill a whore’s nylon. So they sluiced the blood off Charlie and scraped off his makeup and dressed him up in a suit that had already been a couple sizes too small on him a few years before. Didn’t matter, because there was less of Charlie now. His family (such as it was) didn’t even hold a funeral. They wanted Charlie in the ground double-quick, and they didn’t have any money anyway. So the county took care of things, and they did a first-class, bang-up job.

  I’ve heard that some of Charlie’s wounds leaked so bad you could hear the formaldehyde sloshing around in his plywood coffin when they hauled him off to the local Potter’s Field. They dropped him in a hole and covered him over. They didn’t even put a tombstone on Charlie’s grave, though it didn’t take long for most of the kids in town to figure out where it was.

  Pretty soon guys were daring each other to climb the wrought-iron fence and take a piss on old Charlie, the trick being to do the job without the terror of Butcher’s Lake reaching up and pulling them down to hell by the short hairs. And not too long after that . . . well, people have short memories, don’t they?

  They forget.

  They forgot the Terror of Butcher’s Lake.

  They forgot Charlie Steiner.

  They forgot my brother Roger.

  And life moved on.

  For most people, anyway.