Doorbells at Dusk

by Josh Malerman

  They’re onto me. They know I know. That means they’ll be coming. I’ve gotta get out of here. Quick.

  Possible escape routes suggested themselves—and were discarded. He couldn’t go out the front way. They’d be watching even if they didn’t seem to be. And the back was no good. He’d put an eight foot privacy fence around his backyard to keep out the kids and to make sure no nosy neighbors could look in on him. That fence had no gate and he’d have to use a ladder to get over it.

  Too much noise.

  There was one other way. When this house had first been built there’d been a coal fired furnace in the basement. Gus had long since converted to electric heat and removed the furnace. But the door to the coal chute was still there. He’d bolted it shut but had the tools to open it.

  He’d have to leave with nothing but what he could stuff into a gym bag and with the money he had in the house. Fortunately, he’d never trusted banks so a cubbyhole in his basement wall hid most of his slender fortune, enough to take him a long way from here.

  Rushing upstairs, he grabbed a gym bag he hadn’t used for years and stuffed it with a toothbrush, a couple of changes of underwear, some shirts and socks and a pair of jeans. It was little enough for the forty-plus years he’d spent in this house. But he’d never married or had kids; he had no keepsake photos and had never attached himself to material objects other than the house itself. He was glad of that now.

  After taking a last pee, he headed downstairs. A glance through the peephole in his front door showed a nearly empty street. Nearly everyone was probably taken over by now. If any real people remained in the houses along the road—or in the town—it didn’t matter. He couldn’t risk trying to identify any humans who were left. He had to save himself. And . . . And. . . . For a moment he couldn’t capture the thought he wanted. It finally came to him.

  Warn the rest of the world.

  With his mind a jumble, Gus opened the basement door, then paused. The lights were on; he could have sworn he’d turned them off. Was he getting forgetful as well as confused?

  “Losing it,” he muttered to himself.

  Had to be the stress, he imagined. He started down the steps, froze at the bottom. The coal chute door! He’d planned to unbolt it and sneak out that way. It already hung open.

  Impossible!

  The scrape of shoes on concrete sounded behind Gus and he spun around. The policewoman—Benton—stepped out from the shadows beneath the basement stairs. A lit flashlight filled one of her badly trembling hands; the other held her service revolver, which pointed generally in Gus’s direction. Vomit splattered the front of the woman’s blue, uniform shirt.

  “My God, Krebs,” she muttered. “My God!”

  Gus chewed at his lip. He looked over to where he’d stacked the trash bags full of body parts. They’d been torn open. A small arm hung from one, blackish blood dribbling down the ghastly gray fingers. Gus looked back at Benton. He held up his hands, spread them.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “I know what this must look like. But those things aren’t human!

  Benton retched, wiped her mouth on the back of the hand that held the flashlight. Her bloodshot gaze locked on his. Her lower lip quivered, then stiffened.

  “I know,” she said. “I saw . . . saw them. Some parts. I don’t know what they are. And . . . then, sometimes pieces move. They should be dead but they move. My God, what are they?”

  Gus swayed as he heard her words. Relief almost made him pass out. “Monsters,” he finally answered. “I don’t know what else to call them.”

  “Monsters. Yes, monsters. How many? Are there more? Do you think?”

  “A whole lot more, I bet,” Gus said. “I’m sure the parents of these three things are. Maybe most of the people in town, judging from how many were on the streets earlier. I thought . . . you were. And your partner.”

  “Reynolds,” Benton said. “I think you’re right about him. He’s been . . . weird.”

  Gus strained to focus his thoughts. His head buzzed. His bones seemed to rattle inside his body. “We’ve got to get out of here,” he finally managed. “That’s why I came down here. I’ve got money. Hidden. I was going to slip out the coal chute. You can go with me.”

  The woman wiped her mouth again, then slowly straightened as her training reasserted itself.

  “Yes. We’ll get out. But not through the coal chute. I told my partner I’d noticed something odd in your basement before, when you mentioned rats. I pried open the chute to slip in. He’s outside. Waiting. He won’t wait long.”

  “We can’t go out the front door,” Gus said.

  “We can. We’ll have to. I’ll take you to my cruiser. Put you in the back like I’m taking you to headquarters for questioning. Then we’ll just leave town. Find somebody to report this thing too.” She stared at him hard for a moment. “I’ll need to put you in cuffs. Temporarily. To make it look good.”

  Gus’s heart pounded. He didn’t want to be in cuffs. If the things came for him, he’d be helpless. But he couldn’t think. He had to . . . trust Officer Benton.

  Or give up, the thought came. Let them have me.

  He shook his head in negation of that thought. “Okay. Just let me get my money.”

  Benton nodded as she moved toward the stairs. “Hurry!”

  A hidden catch in the back wall of the basement opened a small cubby. Inside were stacks of bills and rolls of quarters, dimes, and nickels. Leaving the coins, Gus scraped the bills off into his gym bag and returned to Officer Benton. She led the way up into the house and they hurried to the front door.

  Benton flipped the latch and had just started to turn the knob when the door thrust open and Reynolds bulled his way through. He held a baton, and as he swung it brutally toward Benton, the woman shoved her pistol into her one-time partner’s chest and pulled the trigger twice.

  The nightstick struck Benton’s left shoulder and her sharp cry of pain was louder than the reports of the shots muffled by Reynolds’ body. Reynolds lost control of the baton as he stiffened from the shock of the bullets. His eyes blinked. Then he grabbed his chest and slid slowly to the floor. Benton leaned over him, pressed the fingers of her gun hand against his throat. She looked up at Gus, shook her head. He nodded.

  “Stay here,” Benton said. “We’ll have to do it differently now.” She picked up Reynolds’ cap where it had fallen and handed it to Gus. “Put that on. Your shirt’s dark already. I’ll get the car. Drive right up to your house. Hop in fast. Try not to let anyone get a good look at you.”

  Again, Gus nodded.

  Benton holstered her pistol and went out through the door, favoring her injured arm where the baton had struck. Gus stepped forward, pushed the door but didn’t latch it. He heard a squishing sound and looked down. Blood from the dead policeman soaked the carpet; tendrils of it had spackled his shoes and seemed to writhe even as he stepped back from the body and began wiping his feet off on the rug.

  Nauseated and repulsed, Gus backed farther from the body. The blood seemed to follow him, swirling into crimson patterns that almost had meaning. The buzzing in his head had grown louder. His eyes throbbed in their sockets. Something made him step around the blood and kneel beside the dead officer. He unsnapped the strap that held the man’s service revolver in its holster and tucked the gun into his gym bag among the piles of cash. Almost as an afterthought, he added the policeman’s taser as well. Then his thoughts cleared. He rose again and waited for his ride.

  When Gus heard the police cruiser pull up outside, he rushed out. Benton had the passenger side door open and he dove in. She immediately threw the cruiser into reverse and squealed out onto the highway.

  “Slouch down,” she said. “If we’re lucky, they’ll think you’re Reynolds.”

  Gus noticed that Benton still wasn’t using her left arm much, but it didn’t seem to hurt her driving. “How are we leaving town?” he asked.

  “Highway 23. It’s the fastest route to the I-12. Plus, it�
��s just past headquarters so it’ll look normal for us to head in that direction.”

  “What happens once we pass headquarters?”

  Benton glanced over at him. “We run for it.”

  Gus nodded. Then: “This thing. With the monsters. It’s some kind of infection. Passed through bodily fluids. Like blood. It makes me wonder . . . ”

  “Wonder what?” Benton asked.

  “Wonder how you weren’t taken over? I figured they go after the police first.”

  Benton frowned at his comment, then gave a small gasp. “Bodily fluids. Or maybe food contaminated with such fluids? A few days ago, one of the officers brought in some cookies. I ate some. I think everyone did. That night I got very sick. Headaches. Nausea. I thought I was dying. But it passed quickly. I thought it had to be the cookies. Food poisoning. But the next day, none of the other officers admitted being sick.”

  “They’d been changed,” Gus said.

  “Yes.” Benton nodded. “But it didn’t take with me. For some reason.” She glanced again at Gus. “Maybe I’m immune. Maybe you are too.”

  “Maybe,” Gus agreed.

  They passed Coleman’s police station and turned onto Highway 23. A half-mile down they’d find the on-ramp for the I-12. From there they could get to New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Jackson. It wasn’t going to be that easy, though. Benton slammed on the brakes as she saw what stretched across 23 ahead of them.

  A double-thick line of people covered the road behind a barricade of sawhorses and yellow police tape. Most had guns, though some held axes and hoes and other garden implements. As the police cruiser rolled to a stop, the crowd began filtering through the barricades and moving toward the car. There were men, women, and some kids still in their “Halloween” costumes, though Gus figured none of them were really men, women, or kids anymore. Then Gus became aware of a low, moaning sound arising from the crowd. It stirred him in his seat.

  “They know,” he said. “It’s no use. We better give up.”

  Benton shook her head. “No. Brace yourself. We’ll ram through.”

  Gus watched the policewoman wince with pain as she forced her left arm up to grasp the steering wheel. She revved the engine but let off the gas when he pressed the pistol he’d taken from Reynolds against her neck.

  “Don’t make me shoot you,” he said.

  Benton turned her head very slowly. “What are you doing?” she protested. “You’re not one of them. You killed those three monsters at your house. You’re human. I know you are!”

  The crowd was close now, close and watching. In another moment the police cruiser would be completely surrounded. Gus shook his head at Benton, then opened his mouth and began to moan in synchrony with the approaching monsters.

  Benton slapped at Gus’s pistol with one hand while her foot smashed down on the accelerator. Gus had been expecting the attempt and he shot her with the taser in his other hand. She cried out, wilting over the steering wheel. The car lurched forward, then stalled and died.

  The crowd’s keening fell silent as they reached the car. Half a dozen tore open the driver’s side door of the vehicle and pulled out Benton. She moaned at first, then began to thrash . . . and finally to scream.

  Gus waited until they’d dragged the policewoman off into the darkness. Then he got out of the car as well. The crowd began to disperse, except for the children who’d completed their metamorphosis. Those began climbing up on the car, or onto anything else that would get them off the ground. Gus recognized several of them as kids he’d seen around his neighborhood. They looked almost exactly as they had when they’d been human—except for the dragonfly wings.

  One by one, as Gus watched, the younglings spread their wings and took to the sky in a hum. Some flew south, others north, east, west. Gus thought of the towns they’d soon visit. Covington, Abita Springs, Hammond, Slidell, New Orleans. He thought of the new swarms that would soon be raised. And he wondered:

  How long could he pass for a monster?

  THE RYE-MOTHER

  Curtis M. Lawson

  David pressed his fingertip into the jagged edge of the school bus’s torn vinyl upholstery. There was a sharpness to it, but the thin material gave way and folded over before it could cut into his skin. He wished the upholstery was made of tougher stuff—something that might lacerate his fingertip and cloud his mind with physical pain.

  Other children laughed and hooted in their Halloween costumes. In the context of the day, their pageantry was normal. The wizard robes, clown wigs, face paint, and superhero capes had become temporarily commonplace, leaving David to look like a madman in his wool sweater and khaki pants.

  Only one other child, a Muslim boy named Bahir, was dressed as mundanely as David. The religious beliefs of their parents forbade either boy from celebrating pagan rites such as Halloween. This shared misery had made them temporary allies, or at least bus buddies for the ride home.

  “So, how come you aren’t dressed up?” Bahir asked, trying to spark a conversation with David, who had a reputation of being quiet and antisocial.

  “My parents are Jehovah’s Witnesses,” David remarked. “We don’t do anything fun.”

  “Oh,” Bahir responded. “We’re Muslims.”

  David didn’t respond, but rather stared out the window at the passing houses, decorated in cotton webs and crawling with plastic spiders. He admired the jack-o’-lantern grins that stared at him from porches, the sinister and the silly alike. Tomorrow they would be smashed, most of them anyway, their day having come and gone. There was a kind of beauty in that, or at least poetry, David mused.

  He wondered how much candy, and what kinds, where hidden behind the doors of these houses. It was his belief, which had been aided by the mutterings of other kids, that the better decorated the house, the better quality candy they gave out—stuff like Snickers, Twix, or Reese’s cups. The houses that didn’t decorate, he had heard, were more prone to handing out whatever was on sale at the drugstore.

  David would have jumped at the opportunity for any of it. Sweets, like Halloween itself, were not welcome in his parents’ house. Instead, they might allow him a box of raisins tonight as a concession for robbing him of the magic outside—magic they saw as sin.

  The bus turned the corner on to Route 2, leaving the school behind. Single and split-level ranches yielded to stretches of forest and the occasional gas station or fast food joint. David looked out the window with a steadfast gaze, not at the passing commercial banality, but through it and toward something that lay beyond—something he could feel in his soul.

  “My mother lets my sister and I each pick out two chocolate bars from the store,” Bahir added, after a long pause. “I guess she feels bad about us missing out, so that’s her way of compromising.”

  “The candy would be nice,” David responded, eyes still pinned to something beyond his field of vision.

  The candy would indeed be nice, but David’s concern was deeper than sugar, or even costumes. His interest in Halloween could not be explained in the limited vocabulary of man. To him, it was simply magical.

  The bus wound past a tiny strip of businesses featuring a liquor store and a bait shop, and on to some side road. A half mile down, Gingham Farms came into view, though it wasn’t a real farm like they have out in the Midwest, but a tourist trap. Rather than cows and grain silos, Gingham Farms was a glorified pumpkin patch with hayrides and a “haunted” corn maze.

  The corn maze.

  Something within it beckoned David. He’d felt its call every year, but only on Halloween. He never understood why until a few months back when he’d read a book on holidays in the school library, and learned the true nature of Halloween. On this last day of October, the veil between this world and the other—literally called Otherworld—is at its thinnest, and spirits, fairies, and all other manner of creature may travel from fairy hollows. David felt with every fiber of his being that the corn maze held such a hollow.

  That book had led him to another, and
this one had taught him about changelings—fairy babies swapped out with mortal young. The young fairies were then abandoned in the human world, left to wander in states of sickness or insanity. While he wasn’t sick per say, an allergy to iron rich foods did complicate his health.

  “Yes, the candy and the costumes would be nice,” David repeated, “but the corn maze is what I’d really like to do.”

  And he would. He wasn’t sure how, but he would go there tonight. Some of the other kids had mentioned this might be the last year for Gingham Farms. A big company wanted to build a soulless mega-store there, and the land was worth more than the farm could pull in. Tonight might be his last chance.

  “I wish I could get dressed up. I think I’d be something scary, like Jason or Jigsaw,” Bahir replied. “What would you be?”

  “I’d be myself,” David said, his hand pressed up against the window.

  ***

  “Who’s ready for Taco Tuesday?” David’s father asked, with an exaggerated excitement and a preternaturally white grin.

  His mother raised her hand and jumped up and down in the kitchen, feigning the same enthusiasm. Or perhaps it was real. David couldn’t ever be sure with such things. He had a hard time reading other people and even greater difficulty relating to them. His psychologist had called it narcissistic personality disorder, not to his face, but in loud whispers to his parents. There were other issues the doctor had brought up, but this was the most troubling, or so David had overheard.

  The doctor had put him on meds—little magic pills that subjugated his nature, like a whipped mutt. It worked for a while, but he eventually found ways around the soul crushing medicine. Some nights it was unavoidable, but most of the time he’d hide the pills under his tongue or palm them before they reached his mouth. His parents didn’t understand that he had no desire to be “better”. David did not wish to change.