Not while Grandma Patrice is around.
Then Halloween comes and the sky is filled with a blood moon.
My mother tries to explain to me that the doorbell will ring many times, and that people on the other side of the door won’t be like themselves at all. They will look like other people, with unmoving faces, strange clothing, and fake hair. I try to discern what she is telling me, but nothing makes any sense.
To make things easier for both of us, she serves me my macaroni and cheese early. She counts out my forty-seven peas and waits for me to finish them before giving me my Hostess Twinkie. Then she walks me to my bedroom, because sometimes I don’t know where it is, and tells me to be a good girl, even though we’re the same height, and I’ve been a good girl practically forever.
Once I’m by myself, with Everly, Justine, and Poe, I walk the eleven steps from my bedroom door to my window.
This time I see Grandma Patrice, so I know she is living next door again; however, she’s not alone in her sewing room. There is a shape in the corner behind the door. It’s tall and dark, and I think the shape might be a very large person. If it is, the person is dressed in a workman’s jumpsuit and is holding something long and sharp.
I don’t understand why there is a person other than Grandma Patrice in her sewing room. Does someone else live in the house next door? Has a man who is dressed in a jumpsuit come to stay with her for Halloween?
I want to know more, but the only way I can truly know more is if I spin and spin and spin. So that’s what I do. I stand on my bed, with my bare feet sinking into the mattress, and I spin in circles for hours and minutes and seconds.
I spin to make the connections in my brain light up with fire.
I spin to understand the world.
I spin to make sense of everyone and everything.
After a time, angles, formulas, and mathematics begin swimming in front of my eyes, and a theorem of if-then statements takes shape in my head. The statements are confusing at first, but the faster I spin, the more I comprehend their meaning.
IF there is a man hiding in Grandma Patrice’s sewing room, THEN she doesn’t know he’s there.
IF she doesn’t know he’s there, THEN she will be surprised.
IF she is surprised, THEN she may shout.
IF she shouts, THEN the man hiding may want her to stop.
IF the man hiding wants her to stop, THEN he may have to use the sharp thing he is holding.
IF the man uses the sharp thing he is holding, THEN he might stick it into Grandma Patrice.
IF the man sticks the sharp thing into Grandma Patrice, THEN she may die.
My mind connects my thoughts and strings them together with pinpoint accuracy. As I begin to understand their meaning, I stop spinning and finger the whistle around my neck. For a moment, I want to blow on it, but then I realize a simple truth.
IF the man sticks the sharp thing into Grandma Patrice, THEN she may die.
IF Grandma Patrice dies, THEN she will no longer be here.
IF Grandma Patrice is no longer here, THEN we can leave Haddonfield and move back to the city.
We can move back to the city.
Back to the city.
The city.
I look up from my mattress and watch as the man who is hiding behind the door in Grandma Patrice’s sewing room steps forward. His face is covered with a mask so that I don’t have to figure out if he’s smiling or frowning, happy or sad.
He just is. I can understand that.
With his emotionless mask, the man in the jumpsuit raises both his hands over his head, his fingers laced tightly together, and plunges the sharp object in his grip deep into Grandma Patrice’s skull.
She doesn’t make any noise. He pulls out the sharp object and plunges it down again. He does it half a dozen times before he stops.
As Grandma Patrice droops to the floor, all painted red, I lift my whistle over my head, curl the silk ribbon it hangs on into a ball, and dash it to the carpet. Then I begin rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
As I rock, I realize that my mother and I are going to be leaving Haddonfield soon to move back to the city. Grandma Patrice is no longer living next door. Grandma Patrice is no longer living at all. We now have no reason to stay.
And although I’m not sure exactly what one is, I think I smile.
Wouldn’t you?
D is for Dan
Who Gets Picked for the Pyres
I’VE COUNTED THREE of them so far. There might be more but I’m not sure. I know of at least three because I’ve seen their hands and their hands are different from one another. I’m pretty sure one is a guy because he has black hair on his thick knuckles. I think the other two are women.
They wear gigantic robes with great hoods that grow out of their shoulders and go over their heads, covering their faces. Their waists are wrapped with rope, sort of like pictures of monks I’ve seen.
I don’t know if they’re young or old, but somehow I get the sense that they’re young. Old people smell a certain way, different from people my age. I can’t explain why. Maybe younger people have that new car smell and older people just reek of something stale.
Every day one of them brings me food—mostly paper-wrapped hamburgers or burritos. Sometimes they bring chicken nuggets. Everything tastes artificial, with that weird, heated texture that microwaved food has when it’s really not supposed to be microwaved at all.
Someone once told me that microwaves break down molecules in food while it’s being superheated. The molecules turn into poison. That’s why so many people have cancer these days—because of bad, microwaved food. That, or maybe the world has devolved into a big tumor and bad food is just a byproduct of its slow and eventual death.
In either case the food makes me want to retch, but I keep it down because I don’t think they will give me anything else if I don’t.
I don’t know how long I’ve been here. There aren’t any windows in the dingy room where they are keeping me, and without sunshine or moonlight, time has turned into mush.
No one has taken away my dirty plates. There are twelve, which means almost two weeks, unless they aren’t feeding me every day or they’re feeding me more than once a day.
Thankfully there’s a toilet in the corner. At least I’m not soiling myself. Most people would have crapped their pants out of fear by now. I’m starting to get the idea that me being scared is what they want, so I’m trying to put on a brave face.
I don’t know why I’m being held, but I can sense a sort of anticipation in the air. The hair on the back of my neck is now regularly standing on end, and every movement I hear on the other side of my door makes little goosebumps erupt on my arms and legs.
The last thing I remember was being at Fun Town with Sadie. It was two weeks before the end of the month and we were stoked because there was supposed to be a blood moon on Halloween and both our parents had agreed to let us go to Riverside Amusement Park on the 31st for Fright Fest.
We were playing one of those old arcade games that still took quarters, and we were having a great time. Sadie was joking with me like she always does, while checking out this little blond guy at the air hockey table. She kept saying he was cute, and I kept telling her that he looked too much like a girl, and that I liked guys that were taller and darker, maybe even with tattoos.
“There are gay phenotypes,” I told her. I felt all cool using a new word that Mr. Blanchard taught us in Biology. A phenotype is how you look. A genotype is what’s in your genes.
“Like what?” Sadie laughed as she sucked on one of those soda bottles that are personalized. Hers had my name on it—Dan—because the bottles don’t come with names like Sadie.
“Twinks,” I said as I tilted my chin toward the little blond guy. “Or jocks.” I put my hands on my chest and puffed myself up a little. Sadie almost snorted soda out her nose.
“Like you?” she laughed, because I sort of am a jock. That’s why Sadie didn’t b
elieve me at first when I told her I liked guys.
“Not all gay guys act like girls,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she giggled while continuing to stare at the guy at the air hockey table. “Well I like cute guys,” she said. “He’s cute.”
“If you say so.” I shrugged and took another swig of my own soda. For some reason it had the name ‘Amanda’ printed on it.
Sadie pushed me aside and put another quarter in the old arcade game. This one was called Asteroids. All you had to do was maneuver a little triangular ship around and shoot at fake rocks until they blew into bits. Every once in a while a weird, flying saucer roamed across the screen, humming like it was about to explode, and shooting digital bullets at the ship.
I had already been taken out twice by the spaceship and was starting to get annoyed, so I let Sadie play while I scoped out Fun Town for a while, looking for any hot prospects. That’s when a funny feeling came over me, like the world had tilted sideways.
I grabbed the side of the Asteroids machine and took a deep breath.
“What’s the matter, friend?” said a voice behind me. Sadie was engrossed in the game and didn’t really notice. I turned and stared into a pair of slate blue eyes, a five o’clock shadow, and a face that was maybe two inches above mine. He was wearing a dark gray hoodie over his head and his hands were shoved in his pockets.
“Just got a head rush,” I said to the guy, mostly staring at his lips and thinking bad things while wondering if Sadie had noticed him, because how could you not?
The next thing I knew I wasn’t staring at his lips anymore. I was staring at the ceiling and the sticky floor was at my back. I went to say something to Sadie, like how I was an ass for falling, when a blanket of darkness rushed in from all four corners of my brain and shut me down—completely.
When I woke up I was on a dirty cot, locked in this room. I had cotton mouth, a head full of hammers, and no idea where I was. I remember thinking that someone must have dropped something into my Amanda bottle, maybe when I put it down so I could jam my fingers on the Asteroids button while Sadie checked out the twink at the air hockey machine.
Maybe it was the guy with the nice lips and the hoodie who had called me ‘friend’.
Maybe.
The first of the robed figures that I met didn’t say anything. She was a she, because her hands were tiny and she had a tattoo of a rose with thorns twirling around her fingers. When she opened the door she was holding a huge knife, like you would expect a hunter to use to gut a deer. She gestured for me to move back, which I did, because my head was still all fuzzy. She dropped a t-shirt and sweats by the door, and a plate with a hamburger on it.
I wanted to ask where I was, but what I really wanted was water. “Do you have anything to drink?” I croaked. She gestured at the toilet with the tip of her knife, backed out of the door, slammed it shut and tumbled the lock.
My lip curled in disgust. Still, it only took fifteen minutes for me to cup my hands and drink out of the toilet.
The next time someone came—hours or days later—she was also a girl, holding a long stick with another huge knife duct-taped to the end. Also silent, she shoved the pointy end at me until I backed up against the wall. I was really weak and disoriented, or I might have been able to take her, but she had a pole and a knife. For all I knew there were dozens more hooded figures on the other side of that door.
Sometime later, I met the hooded figure with the hairy knuckles. He was definitely a guy, a few inches taller than me. I could actually see his muscles through his robe. He didn’t have a knife. He just had himself. I tried a new tactic and smiled at him in that predatory way that I sometimes smile at older guys at Fun Town, the ones who are already eighteen and have started to fill out.
It didn’t do any good.
Damn.
I wondered where Sadie was. I wondered if someone had slipped something into her drink too, and she was someplace close, also locked behind a door, being fed fast food by three robed figures who were keeping us both jailed for some unknown reason.
I suppose that gave me comfort thinking that I wasn’t the only one being kept captive by silent monks with poles and knives. I didn’t even know if I was right or not. I knew nothing, except that after the guy with the hairy knuckles came, the other two never came back.
It was always just him.
“People are looking for me,” I said one visit. “This is Springfield. Kids don’t just disappear in Springfield.” That wasn’t exactly the truth. He was holding a plate filled with nachos and cheese, obviously from one of those packets where you have to peel back the foil to heat it so it won’t spark in the microwave.
“So?” he said in a deep voice. It was the first time he talked, but that ‘so’ sounded like someone else had sounded a million years ago.
‘What’s the matter, friend?’
“You’re the guy from Fun Town, aren’t you?”
“So?” he said again, but didn’t leave the doorway. After a moment, he put the plate down at his feet then kicked it across the room until it clinked up against one of the metal legs on my cot.
I slowly licked my lips, not taking my eyes away from where his face was hidden beneath the hood of the robe. I smiled again, like I did before, and this time he hung his head and maybe chuckled a little.
I wasn’t sure.
After a moment I reached down and picked up the plate with the nachos on it.
He watched me eat, so I let him, trying my best to make every bite look amazing, just like my father used to make everything he ate look like it was the best food ever. After maybe five minutes, and dozens of questions that silently ran through my mind, I said, “Are you going to let me go?”
Frankly, I didn’t care why I was being held. I didn’t care who he was or who his friends were. All I cared about was getting as far away from them as possible.
“Don’t know,” he said, which was about the most infuriating answer I could think of. I flexed my muscles, because I was a jock and had some, and stood up. He didn’t move. Instead, he seemed to grow bigger and more muscular underneath his robe because he was probably flexing his muscles, too.
In another world, maybe this scenario was some sort of weird fetish thing, but I wasn’t into being held captive and I didn’t care if he was getting some sort of perverse pleasure out of keeping me locked up.
“Why . . . why not?” I stammered, wanting more than anything to rush him in a full tackle, grabbing him low at the waist and using my size and strength to bring him down.
“Because,” he said before disappearing through the door.
That’s when I cried, which I know was a really wussy thing to do, but I was scared, and alone, and I didn’t know where I was, where Sadie was, or what was going to happen to me. Everything was so surreal that the edges of my mind were starting to fray.
That happens, you know. If you’re put into a weird situation long enough, you can start to come unglued, and just like that, I could feel the Elmer’s in my head begin to disintegrate.
I lay back on the cot, took my pillow, and put it over my face.
Then I screamed.
I screamed for me and I screamed for Sadie. I screamed for being drugged and kidnapped at Fun Town, and I screamed for the guy with the slate-colored eyes and the beautiful lips who could have been so nice.
He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t nice at all.
After a long sleep in which I dreamt about soccer practice, college applications, and moving to a bigger city where I could truly be free, I was woken up by someone saying, “Hey. It’s time.”
I didn’t know what it was time for, and I’m not sure I wanted to find out. I scrambled up against the wall, hugging my pillow to my chest, not wanting to move an inch.
He was at the door in his robe, with his hairy knuckles and muscular build. After a moment I heard a terrible scream outside the door. His hooded face tilted sideways because he heard it, too, and I started to cry again.<
br />
No, that’s too simple a word. I started to blubber like a little girl whose brother had stolen her Barbie dolls, cut off their heads, and melted them over a flame because he could. Another scream, louder and more insistent, came from the empty space behind the guy in the robe. He shook his head slightly, looked up, and said, “We’re letting you go.”
I didn’t hear him at first. All I heard was the terrible screaming and I could only imagine that I was living the last minutes of my short seventeen years. I was never going to have a boyfriend. I was never going to build a log cabin with him somewhere in the mountains, because we were guys and we could, and the idea was kind of romantic. I was never going to do a lot of things because my life was going to end very shortly and I would never, ever know why.
Finally, the guy in the robe stepped forward, grabbed my bicep and dragged me off the bed. I was still crying when he pulled me out of the room and into a warehouse—someplace urban with tall ceilings, like where Fun Town was—in the worst part of downtown.
There was a group of hooded figures there, standing in a circle. In the middle of the circle was a pyre of wood with a stake in the middle, and the little blond guy from the air hockey table, the one Sadie thought was cute, tied to it with thick rope.
He was screaming, and wailing, and begging incoherently, but none of the hooded figures even acknowledged him.
On the floor surrounding the pyre was a pentagram painted all in red, with candles on the five corners, and bones—I don’t know what kind—littered in the triangular spaces.
That’s when I saw Sadie. She was wearing sweats and a t-shirt like me, and she was barefoot. Her eyes were wild with fear and there were deep circles underneath them. Another hooded guy, like the one who was dragging me by my arm, was clamped onto hers, and tears were running down her face.
When I got to her, the guy who was holding onto me pushed me forward.
Little Killer A to Z Page 3