by Tony Ortiz
“He doesn’t like how we look!” blurted Kala.
“Kala, that’s enough.”
“There are only three of us left! We are being wiped out!” Kala thought for a second. “Maybe it’s the de-moan demons or . . .” he whispered, “the woman from Brazil. We’re goners no matter what! And if it’s here . . .”
“If he were, the tortics would know, Kala.”
“How would they know?”
“You know they have a keen sense of smell. They could smell Jack’s stench from miles away. Jack is not here.”
“Maybe the tortics did come for the games,” said Dorian, walking away from the window.
“What did they look like?” I asked Katie as they continued to talk.
“Like huge elves with huge ears, and as tall as the ceiling.”
Kala was crouched in the corner, shaking his head. “They’re eight feet tall,” he muttered.
“Kala, get up,” prompted Jacoby.
Kala stood up. “What are we going to do now?”
“We are going to the festival.”
“But . . . that’s where they’re headed.”
“Yes.”
Two heavy knocks shook the front door, shattering the ice. Someone was trying to break in.
CHAPTER NINE
The HEE-HAWING DONKEY
Without waiting for an answer – not like anyone was going to answer anyway – the door flew open. A huge dark gargoyle ducked his head under the doorway and looked inside, spotting us right away. He was a beast, with twelve-inch claws, monstrous muscles and giant black wings. His skin was ashy and covered with rocky scales. He turned sideways and shuffled awkwardly through the tight entryway, cluttered with flying costumes.
“I am here for Kala,” the gargoyle growled in monotone, dipping his head under a pirate costume.
“No!” whined Kala, trying to hide himself inside a cauldron. “Hess, you can never take me! Dorian, protect me from this piece of coal.”
“It’s going to be fine,” said Jacoby. “We’ll be there to support you.”
“Yeah,” said Katie.
“Yeah! You will kill it dead!” I blurted enthusiastically. That was a stupid thing to say.
Kala let out a squeal and pushed himself deeper into the cauldron.
“Kala, you will not cause me to be late to my photo shoot,” snarled Hess.
“You can’t take me,” repeated Kala.
Hess half-flexed his wings, and Kala came out of the cauldron.
“What if something happens to me?” Kala asked Hess as he followed him through the front entrance.
“I’m sure Jacoby has told you: the festivals are the safest place to be.”
Everyone watched as Hess reached for a hot red doorknob that Kala had just conjured, but stopped himself just in time.
“Stop this werewolf’s tantrum!” he hissed irately. “You are a grown sixty day old menala!”
His large claws confidently crushed the smoking knob and pushed the door open. Kala gave in to his fate and shambled after Hess.
“Looks good, Lin,” said Jacoby, glancing over my corpse makeup.
“Thanks,” replied Lin, who had lost the mohawk and was wearing his striped overalls again.
“I think I’ll dress up next–”
“Really? And you’ll let me dress you?”
“Of course.”
Lin headed toward the back of the store while he talked to himself. “This is going to be so great. Tomorrow is going to be the best day ever. . . . Jacoby, I’ll meet you there!”
“Is Lin okay?” I asked Jacoby.
“He is his normal self, yes. A melflin is prone to frequent personality changes. You’ll understand it better as you get to know him.”
“Are we going to the festival now?”
“In a few minutes. I need to speak to Soundrec first.”
I peeked at Katie’s watch while we walked out the back door.
6:39 PM
There was just over five hours left before Oz’s routine bedroom check. I didn’t want to make her angry anymore. I couldn’t wait to tell her I had found her jacket. She’s going to be so happy. . . .
By the time I stopped daydreaming, Jacoby and Dorian were already far ahead of us, making their way around a dark lake, with a thin layer of fog rolling over it. A few ducks bobbed their heads in the water and washed their broad bills. Without warning, a claw shot up and pulled the birds under, leaving but a ripple in its wake.
Exhausted, Katie and I settled comfortably under a small tree as Jacoby and Dorian stepped out onto a grassy ridge overlooking the lake.
“He’ll be here soon, you two,” Jacoby informed us, listening to the distant sound of flapping wings. Soon after, Soundrec emerged out of the fog and landed next to Jacoby.
“Jacoby, Dorian,” he greeted and then nodded at Katie and me. “What’s the death count?”
“Above average,” said Jacoby quickly, looking preoccupied with something else. “What do we know about the murdered girl?”
“She has the mark of a Dark Death. But it couldn’t be Jack. There were at least two hundred halloweens within a mile of her when the murder took place. You know Jack wouldn’t venture out into a crowd.”
“Do you know anything else?”
“A tortic was spotted there a few days before.”
Soundrec gazed across the still waters as his arachnid companion poked its beady eyes out of his branch arm. “There’s one more interesting bit: the child was the granddaughter of the eighth Dark Death,” said Soundrec. “Let us hope it’s not Jack.”
“Why don’t we want it to be Jack?” I asked, coming up from behind.
“Because nothing can be done if it is.”
The lake became silent. A frightening deep growl was moving through the fog. Everyone stared anxiously at the lake. But the growl soon ceased, and a family of ducks waddled back into the water.
“It’s funny what legends can have on an entire race,” commented Jacoby. “Alright, that’ll be it, Soundrec. Give my hateful regards to your friends.”
“I will,” grinned Soundrec. “Going to the festival? It’s been a while for you both.”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for helping us,” put in Katie.
“It’s my pleasure. There was a premonition by a stranger an hour before the event. . . . I saw how you defended Jesse. You’re a brave girl.”
I lowered my head, ashamed of myself.
“Soundrec?” said Jacoby. “Keep a close eye on the games. One of the tortics entered.”
“They’re letting one play?” asked Soundrec, genuinely startled. He pondered it for just a moment and then placed a friendly hand on Dorian’s shoulders. “There’s a position opening up tomorrow – next Halloween. Everyone has decided to let you in. This can help you prove to halloweens you’re not dangerous.”
“Thanks, Soundrec,” Dorian said politely, “but I like what I do.”
“Yes, digging graves. The legendary gravediggers from somewhere in the south.”
Soundrec’s wings flung open to span the length of a school bus, and in just a few mighty strokes he was high up in the sky. He turned to me. “That’s a much better costume, my friend! Don’t hesitate to scream for help.”
“What is that spider that lives in your arm?” I shouted back.
“A parasite . . . and a good friend.”
Soundrec gave Katie a quick nod, and vanished into the fog. As we headed back to the city we saw Lin dragging his feet out of a lantern-lit alley.
“I’m going to die–” he sniveled.
“You’re not going to die,” said Jacoby calmly.
“I need to go see my mom. Do you think heaven will accept someone like me?”
Jacoby placed his hand on Lin’s head and quickly recited something under his breath.
“Hey, I thought we were going to the festival?!” reeled Lin, regaining his glee. “Let’s go before we miss everything! Who cares about death!”
“We’re
heading over there right now,” said Jacoby.
“Oh, boy, shrubby head, this is going to be fun! You should come, Dorian! It will be great! This is the best Halloween day ever!”
“I am coming along,” said Dorian.
Lin spun around, almost looking up at Dorian’s eyes. “Really, really, really?”
“Yes.”
“Your first festival! You won’t be disappointed! What are we waiting for? Let’s go! Let’s move our feet!”
“Lin, stop yelling,” said Jacoby. “We are walking, in case you haven’t noticed.”
Lin looked down at his own feet to see them moving, then at ours. “Oh. Sometimes I just can’t tell.”
The alley was crawling with tiny samhains that looked like hairless werewolves. Lin said they were called spectacalons. They didn’t do much – just squeaked and fired minuscule light beams at us – as Lin kept accidentally trampling on their teeny homes. We walked onto a wider street. A few young witches on their brooms flew by, heading toward a pitch-black alley.
“Where did you get the tickets?” said the taller witch.
“I stole them from Murlie. Come on, we’re going to miss it. A tortic has signed the Beneficiary.”
“Do we need tickets?” I asked.
“Don’t worry about that,” said Jacoby.
“Same as last year?” said Lin excitedly.
Jacoby nodded.
“We always get in for free,” Lin told me.
“How?” asked Katie distractedly, eyeing a check-in counter at the entrance to the dark alley. Sitting on top were a pair of thin scarecrows, a glowing pumpkin and a shrilling crow.
“It’s them, Vince,” said the scarecrow with no arms. “Sorry, Jacoby, you can’t scare us this time. Bringing a posse is not going to help you get in. We’ll stay put like . . . that pebble over there.”
We all turned to see where he was looking and saw a pebble lying on a bench. Just then, a gust of wind blew it off.
“Well,” Vince added, “you can’t move us like . . . that bench.”
Meanwhile, a slimy green zombie was shuffling down the street kicking empty candy boxes into the gutter. As he reached the bench, he kicked it into a shop.
“What the heck! Well, the bottom line is, no one is coming in,” Vince quieted his voice as the zombie trudged by, “except for that thing. He must’ve just entered. Crazy new h-h-halloween–”
Vince then noticed Dorian and disappeared immediately, along with his buddy.
“That was easy,” said Lin.
We climbed up a steep alley, following Lin, who was skipping excitedly ahead of us. Embedded into the walls were dead tree trunks and roaring gargoyle statues, half of them with infernal flames dancing in their mouths and the other half emitting sounds of an applauding crowd.
“Sounds like they’ve started the pre-show,” said Jacoby.
“Lin, how did you get in here last time?” I asked.
“We summoned welgo droppings.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Me neither,” Katie chimed in.
“They thought the smell was Jack’s smell. You should’ve seen . . .” Lin’s words were drowned out by a thunderous cheer. “Please, please, can we go to the monster’s ball?” he shouted. “Please, Jacoby! I haven’t gone in ten days!”
Jacoby waited for the noise to die down before he answered.
“Tomorrow, Lin. We promised to support Kala.”
“But that’s at the end,” whined Lin. “We’ve got time!”
I peeked at Katie’s watch at the same time she did.
7:11 PM
“You two are always checking the time,” remarked Jacoby, ignoring Lin tugging on his oversized shirt. “I guess it’s alright.”
“You don’t think we should?” I said.
“It really doesn’t matter. Lin, stop pulling on my shirt.”
I hadn’t realized until then, but we were inside the festival grounds, which were a mix between an amusement park and a small city – with spider-haunted hotels, a windowless skyscraper towering into murky clouds, a super-dome for Halloween events, admission huts, outdoor exhibits displaying skool skeletis artifacts, and tall pillars blaring Halloween music.
Just to our right, there was an information booth and two long lines of eager samhains waiting to get into The door To Nowhere, shrouded in green fog. A child monster kept running in and out of the fog, tiptoeing in cautiously and storming out with a smile. Next to the information booth was a tilted black sign splattered with blood.
T h E F o u R G a m e S
Boral'S SpeeD RoaD - prelims - line population: 10 (waiting)
WanderinG LosT - prelims - line population: 95 (waiting)
Jack'S MemoriaL - prelims - line population: 58 (waiting)
JacK O'GameS - quarterfinals - line population: 28,194 (entering)
Jacoby informed us that there were four major games played at the festivals and that we only had time to attend one of them. Lin threw a wild fit. He bit his feet twice and swallowed his own skin, which was a pretty gross sight. Jacoby also explained to Katie and me that Lin had to be supervised at all times because of his transformations.
The festival was split into four sections: a food court, a merchandise pumpkin patch, a scare park, and an amusement park, with each section housing one game. We started at the amusement park to our left, which was where the Jack O’Games were held. I was glad to start there because the posted stats showed that they had the lowest number of deaths per hour: 0.5. The scare park’s was the highest, at 4.0. It also had a murder rate of 1.0 per hour.
All the booths and attractions were to the right of the main road. To the left were the giant walls of the stadium and a huge moving line. The right side had everything: scary shows, souvenir shops, one-minute psyclin classes, Mildewy Lime drinking fountains, flying flyers, and educational and scary tours of Berlin, the historical home of the tortics.
We walked for a few minutes and stopped where a crowd of samhains was gathered around a tall pole that soared into the fog. As a tall skeleton screamed into an opening at the bottom, a ball of light shot a quarter of the way up the shaft.
“Any bets, Jacoby?” said a teenage gargoyle, brushing by us. “Leonard?”
“Eight Red Rollers,” said Lin, wiping his tears.
“Not today, Peter,” said Jacoby.
Peter dropped a package of candy in a cauldron and, without bothering to put his mouth up to the opening, just roared. The light rocketed up the pole and disappeared into the fog.
The small crowd gave him a round of applause. Lin slipped over to the cauldron and stealthily dropped six individual pieces of red balls into it. Peter hadn’t noticed and hoisted it onto his shoulder and walked off.
“Jacoby, don’t miss Hess!” Peter yelled back to us. “He’s going to be the first one to make it to the next round! I know he is!”
“You see that?” Lin said to Katie and me in a conspiratorial whisper. “Good way to play games for cheap is to be cheap. Peter got gypped.”
“Lin, if you ever get caught, you’re on your own,” said Jacoby.
“So what he did was bad?” I said.
“Yes. Only a sealed package of candy may be used as legal tender. No individual pieces. Even for a bet. If he had been caught, Lin could’ve gotten a serious thrashing. Young melkian gargoyles like Peter are quite strong and quick-tempered.”
We started again, moving along the walls of the stadium. The history of the Jack O’Games was written along the bottom. Most of the writing was obscured by giant thorn bushes and knotted trees. However, the name of the games was clearly visible between two massive pillars:
JACK OTTAGGAEMENEL LANTERN’S GAMES
“Jack O . . . taga . . .” I tried pronouncing with great difficultly. “The ‘O’ actually stands for his middle initial?”
“His real last name,” corrected Jacoby. “Over time humans shortened it to the ‘O’ and added ‘lantern’. Only a few can pronounce his real name, and, su
rprisingly, they’re all human.”
“But isn’t the ‘O’ an abbreviation for Jack ‘of the’ lantern? Back at the cemetery, you said that was what it meant.”
“No. I said that was what it meant to some humans, but I didn’t say it was accurate.”
“Is that the actual spelling?”
“Why don’t you ask him? We got it from him. He wrote it on an old tree a long time ago. I doubt he would have misspelled his own name.”
I was no longer paying attention to Jacoby, trying to see what had captivated Katie. A skinny warlock was dragging a frightened donkey over to a caged monster.
“What’s he going to do?” asked Katie. “Is he gonna feed it to that–”
“I think he is,” I muttered.
The hee-hawing donkey flopped, and the warlock slid him the rest of the way and shoved it inside the cage. The drooling monster approached the donkey while the donkey snorted and kicked in frenzy.
“What’s wrong with this place?” exclaimed Katie in a huff.
Katie was right. What was the deal with this psychotic place? That warlock had just fed a donkey to a monster!
“Come on, you two,” said Jacoby, motioning for us to move across a log bridge. “You don’t need to see this.”
Spanning the top of the bridge was a dangling sign that read:
MONSTER MASH
2:00 – SOLD OUT 4:00 - SOLD OUT
6:00 – SOLD OUT 8:00 – SOLD OUT
We all heard the music booming from within an orange-and-white-striped circus tent behind a cornfield.
“Please, Jacoby,” begged Lin. “Can we just stick our heads inside for one second? Just one tiny look. No bat dance, I promise.”
“Lin, I told you not until–” Jacoby paused to let a loud foot-stomping thud tremble by us. “We had better get moving.”
No one argued as we followed Jacoby back over the bridge, startled by the unexplained ground jolt.
“Katie, Jesse, stay very close,” he said, without turning around. “I don’t want to lose you. The games commemorate Jack. Many of the fans like to play pranks on newcomers. You are an obvious target to them. I can’t have you two wandering off. Is that clear?”