Doorbells at Dusk

by Josh Malerman

  Well, I didn’t want to run across a dead kid. Luckily, they were all breathing. They all had a pulse.

  But some of those faces scared the living fuck out of me. I convinced myself that the worst of them had to be Halloween makeup.

  So many parents raced past us without kids. I knew they were parents because they were screaming out names, and I could tell they weren’t screaming for their husbands or wives—no irritation in those voices.

  And what I did hear in those voices, I didn’t want to hear again.

  We stopped at a street corner, and Monkey looked both ways, but not because he was worried about traffic; he was trying to figure out which way to go. I noticed then he had tears running down his face.

  I tried hard to catch my breath, had trouble asking, “Where we going?”

  We were breathing heavily. We were both smokers, despite Monkey saying he’d quit. Quitting cigarettes meant that he quit buying them, is all.

  Monkey coughed out, “Haunted Gardens,” before bending over to put his hands on his knees. He huffed for a bit, then stood upright again. His breath hitched, and he said, “Mr. Impossible’s kids love that place. Went through that thing about ten times last year. I’d say that’s where he was headed.”

  I looked around for some giant-ass sign with an arrow pointing to a place called The Haunted Gardens. I didn’t see one.

  “That way.” Monkey pointed to a mansion at the end of a cul-de-sac. Upward of two hundred carved jack-o’-lanterns cropped up across its lawn and ‘grew’ from two giant trees to either side of the driveway. With all the smoke in the air, it was a wicked sight.

  Monkey took off running in that direction and I followed, lagging behind. He didn’t smoke as much as I did, and he’s taller and not fat. I didn’t have a chance at keeping up.

  We had to take a serpentine path around bodies lying in the street, discarded burning costumes and Halloween decorations.

  When we were about a hundred yards from the mansion, Monkey was knocked flat onto his back in the middle of the street. The upper torso of a scarecrow kept the back of his head from cracking on the blacktop.

  Monkey’s chest was on fire.

  I sprinted to him, but when I got there, he’d already rolled around to put the flames out. He stayed on the ground, on hands and knees, and I couldn’t read his expression.

  “That could have killed me,” Monkey said.

  “What the fuck happened?” I asked.

  “Watch out!” Monkey screamed, and I looked up to see the evil grin of a jack-o’-lantern flying through the smoke toward us.

  I jumped to the ground, covered my head, and the flaming pumpkin came down with a heavy thud behind me.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Kids are throwing jack-o’-lanterns, dude,” Monkey said.

  “I get that now,” I said, but I didn’t really get it. “A kid couldn’t throw a pumpkin that far.”

  “You think some adult is doing it? Like maybe some dude ate a ton of those buckeyes and OD’d or something?”

  “I don’t think so. That’s pretty far. I don’t know if even an adult could throw a pumpkin that distance.”

  “Maybe it’s some guy on PCP?”

  “Could be. But I think we need to find another way. The Haunted Gardens is behind that big house, right?”

  “Yeah,” Monkey said.

  Another blazing jack-o’-lantern smacked down about ten feet in front of us. The thing smelled fucking awful.

  “Shit,” Monkey said.

  Two more sailed toward us and we rolled out of the way. They crashed down and belched flames.

  “Fuck,” Monkey said. “There’s got to be a bunch of dudes hopped up on PCP.”

  “Let’s get out of the street. Cut through backyards.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “Dogs.”

  “Right.” I didn’t like dogs, either, at least not strange dogs protecting their territory. “Then let’s cut through the front yards and stay close to the houses.”

  Monkey jumped up and raced to the nearest house. He was on the porch before I even regained my footing.

  When I got to the porch, I found him hiding behind a curtain of phony cobwebs populated with huge plastic spiders. The front door of the house was open, and I could see through the screen door a body lying in the hallway—an old woman in a bathrobe.

  I pointed through the screen and whispered, “Should we go in and see if she’s all right?”

  “It’s gotta be a trap,” Monkey said. “You know there’s a kid in there with a machete, wearing a goddamn paper bag on his head.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “All right,” I said. “We need to dash from porch to porch. I think that’ll provide us enough cover.”

  Three flaming pumpkins smashed down in the street, one right after the other.

  A woman screamed. It sounded like it came from inside the house. We jumped and ran over to the neighbor’s porch.

  This house wasn’t decorated and there didn’t appear to be any lights on inside. A metal sign screwed to the red brick beneath the house number read: No Solicitors.

  I guess that included trick or treaters.

  “Ready?” Monkey said.

  “Yeah.”

  And we ran to the next porch, and the next, while pumpkins smacked down in the street.

  When we reached the screened porch of the house two away from the mansion, we saw through the smoke who was throwing the jack-o’-lanterns.

  A half-dozen kids, all dressed as pirates, clustered in the mansion’s front yard. They’d set up four makeshift teeter-totters they were using as catapults. One kid hefted a glowing pumpkin onto one end of the plank, then two pirates jumped onto the other end and sent the pumpkin sailing through the air.

  “Fucking pirates,” Monkey said.

  “I used to love pirates,” I said.

  Monkey gave me a grave look.

  “When I was a kid.”

  Monkey turned back around. “What do we do?”

  “We’re close enough now that they can’t hit us with the pumpkins,” I said. “Let’s just truck it past them.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s too much light for us to sneak past them.”

  A knife blade stabbed through the screen.

  Monkey jumped back into me, and we both fell onto a potted plant that was little more than a barrel of dirt with a bunch of sharp sticks poking out of it. That hurt like hell.

  The knife sawed through the screen. It was one of those pirate kids holding the knife, and he wasn’t playing.

  We jumped to our feet, smashed through the screen door, and raced down the sidewalk just as two flaming pumpkins smashed down behind us.

  We sprinted through the mansion’s front yard, tripping over pumpkins, sending their flaming faces rolling.

  Around the side of the house, a wooden fence stood decorated with blinking bats, witches, and spooky skulls. The gate was open and hanging on one hinge. We raced through the gate and heard the pirates giving chase behind us.

  A long table, like what you’d find in a high school cafeteria, sat on the other side of the fence. A paper sign taped to its front read: DONATIONS. A lockbox was toppled over in the grass, bills and coins spilled around it. Two metal folding chairs sat empty.

  A wall of tall, spindly bushes loomed in front of us. At the center of the wall was an archway with a grinning plastic skull up top. A beaded curtain hung from the archway, and all the beads were tiny bones.

  I ran through the curtain and heard Monkey say “wait” behind me. But he didn’t hesitate for more than a second. The beads rattled, and he was next to me in the semi-darkness.

  We found ourselves in a long, open-air tunnel made of plywood that went on for about twenty feet and ended at a T intersection. Lights were strung along the tops of the walls, and each little light bulb was a goofy skull. But only half of the lights were lit. There must have been an event
at some point where the neighborhood kids had been invited to a painting party. Movie monsters and mythological creatures were smeared and splashed all around us. I noticed several creatures with enormous hands and thought back to something I’d heard in a psychology class about how kids often drew pictures of their parents with giant hands if they’d been abused.

  “Let’s go.” I headed toward the intersection and turned left. We found ourselves in a similar plywood passageway, surrounded by more unsettling artwork. More monsters with large hands.

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  The hallway led to a maze of bushes, walls of flowers, latticework overtaken with crawling vines. We followed twists and turns in the haunted maze. All the spooks who’d volunteered to haunt the place had abandoned it. The sounds from the surrounding neighborhood, of screaming children and weeping parents, of burning homes, and crackling police radios seemed far away, like sound effects from a loud movie playing inside someone’s house.

  The volunteer spooks were gone, but we were not alone in the maze. We heard the pirates creeping behind us. Branches snapped to our right. A plywood wall collapsed with a whoof to our left.

  “Mr. Impossible and his kids aren’t in here, man,” Monkey whispered.

  “We don’t know that yet,” I whispered back. “We need to keep going.”

  “We should bust right out of this maze,” Monkey said. “It’s creepy as hell.”

  “Let’s keep going.” I turned a corner and found a headless woman sitting in a rocking chair, her severed head resting in her lap. I jumped back into Monkey. He stumbled and gasped.

  I laughed at myself for letting such a goofy-looking prop scare me.

  And that’s what drew the pirate to us.

  A round kid in tricorn hat broke through a wall of bushes and started hacking at Monkey, a butcher’s knife in each hand.

  Monkey went insane. It looked like he was slap-boxing the kid. It would have looked humorous, like wussified slap-boxing always does, if I didn’t know the kid had two knives and Monkey just had his forearms to block with.

  Monkey screamed ‘fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck’ as the blades cut and stabbed away at his flesh, and before I could move in to kick the little bastard, Monkey decked him, and the kid slammed to the ground and stopped moving.

  Monkey held his hands up in front of him like Doctor Frankenstein waiting for Igor to pull his surgical gloves down over his fingers and said, “I killed him.”

  “You didn’t kill him.” Blood dribbled from Monkey’s elbows and pattered into the dirt at his feet. A lot of blood was collecting there, and I stared at the black pool. Blinking skull-shaped lights reflected in its surface.

  “Can you check?” Monkey asked. “I’m . . . I can’t.”

  I never liked the sight of blood. Seeing this much of the stuff stunned me. Seeing it pouring out of my best friend stopped me from breathing, from thinking, from being present in the world.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice thick and sleepy-sounding.

  I stumbled over to the kid and surprised myself by being smart enough to kick the knives far from his body before I knelt down to examine him.

  “He’s breathing,” I said. The chubby little guy was even snoring. I touched his neck. “And his pulse is strong.” I didn’t know a strong pulse from a weak one, and I only said this to make Monkey feel better.

  I stood and looked at Monkey. He was staring forward into nothing. His arms were wet with black goo. His blood.

  “I could have killed that kid.” Monkey sounded like a hypnotized killer in some cheapo political thriller.

  “It was self-defense, man.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Monkey said. “He’s just a kid.”

  “He’s fine,” I said. “But we better go. Get you fixed up before his buddies show up.”

  I kicked through a plywood wall and stomped over it into the next hall of the maze, not caring about being heard. I needed to get Monkey somewhere where we could see how bad off he was, under some light, get him bandaged up.

  “Come on.” I waved him forward and smashed through a section of old wooden fencing, stomped through bushes, kicked stacked milk crates, toppled over more plywood walls, until we arrived at a spot outside the maze, next to a birdbath and a woman holding a small limp form in her arms, a toddler dressed as a bumble bee.

  When the lady looked up, I saw it was Sandy, Mrs. Impossible. Tears streamed down her face. Her eyes widened with recognition when she saw us, but she didn’t greet us. She didn’t smile. Her bottom lip trembled, and her tears splashed down on the child’s yellow and black stripes.

  “Billy stung me,” she said. “And now he won’t wake up.”

  Monkey moved past me, still holding his arms up in front of him. They still drizzled blood, but Sandy didn’t appear to notice.

  “Is he . . . ?” Monkey couldn’t bring himself to finish the question.

  Sandy looked down at her child, his sweet, still face and said, “I told him this summer, what happens to a bee when it stings you. He thinks he’s dead.”

  I cleared my throat and asked, “Is he breathing?”

  Sandy nodded her head. “But he won’t wake up.”

  “It’ll wear off,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Monkey said.

  Sandy issued a sharp, derisive laugh. “Leif said that, too. That he’d come down.” Her face changed when she said ‘come down.’ She was angry as hell, to think of her baby on drugs, having to ‘come down.’

  Mr. Impossible wasn’t going back to a happy home.

  “I pressed him on it,” she said. “And, like I figured, he said he couldn’t be sure of that.” She squeezed her boy, held him tight against her chest. “My baby’s in a coma. He might never come out of it.”

  I stepped up next to Monkey, put my hand on his shoulder, and it came away gummy with blood. I wiped it on my singlet, and we stood there looking stupid for a while before Sandy looked up and noticed Monkey’s arms. She gasped when she realized what she was looking at. “Steve, what happened to your arms?”

  “Pirate,” Monkey said.

  She nodded her understanding and returned her attention to her boy.

  “Where’s Leif?” I asked.

  Sandy sniffled. “He just now ran after Betsy.” She cocked her head toward a wall of trees behind her. “Through there.”

  The trees were giant conifers strung from top to bottom with more strings of skull lights. Witches and goblins, and other monstrous decorations hidden in the branches.

  “I’m going to find him,” I said. “Steve, you should probably go get fixed up.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m coming with.”

  I walked into the trees, amazed to find that someone had spared no expense decorating what looked like a hundred great firs with lights and spooky creatures.

  Steve followed, and so did Sandy, her bumble bee cradled in her arms. We stopped at a tree taller than the rest. It stood at the center of a clearing. Skulls blinked. Monsters winked and snarled in its branches.

  Sandy cried out behind us. Her face turned up to the sky, new tears streaming down her cheeks. I followed her gaze and saw, perched at the top of the giant tree, a girl dressed like an angel. The glitter in her white dress danced, the teeny LED lights in her wings flashed, and the halo over her head glowed bright against the night sky. She held her arms out and her head tilted back as if she were blessing all of creation.

  “Betsy,” Sandy whispered. “No.”

  “Shit,” Monkey said.

  And I almost shit my pants.

  Betsy was no older than four, and she stood at the top of what looked like the devil’s Christmas tree, at a height of thirty feet.

  I did not understand how she was balanced up there, what she was standing on, but she didn’t waver. She stood perfectly still, just like an ornament is supposed to do.

  “Betsy,” another voice whispered through the night. It came from above. It was Mr. Impossible’s voice.

  Branches ruffled just u
nder the apex of the tree. Mr. Impossible had climbed up after his daughter. He was trying to talk her down.

  “My work here is done,” Betsy said in a voice that truly was the voice of an angel. “It is time for me to fly up to heaven. May God bless you all.”

  And with that, she leapt into the air.

  I think we all stopped breathing. I know I did.

  Monkey and Sandy both gasped when Betsy jumped.

  And Mr. Impossible sprang from the branches and wrapped his arms around his little girl. He twisted in the air so that his back would hit the ground first. He’d not given a second thought to giving his life for that of his daughter’s.

  And the angel fell in her father’s embrace.

  Mr. Impossible’s body hit with a thud, and I swear I heard bones break.

  Okay. I guess it might have been branches snapping beneath them.

  Then the world went silent. It even seemed that the chaos in the neighborhood had paused for this moment. I heard nothing but my heart pounding in my chest.

  Three angry beats. Like an ogre pounding at a castle door.

  Then the angel cried, and it was the most beautiful sound in the world.

  We all rushed forward, and the sound rushed back into the world. Sirens and screams and burning homes and fireworks. More fireworks.

  And that wonderful wail from that little girl that told us she was alive.

  Sandy handed me her bumble bee and scooped her angel up into her arms. “Are you okay, sweetheart?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “We are made of sterner stuff than mortal men, my lady,” the girl said, and her mother cried harder. But there was laughter mixed in there, too. But just a little.

  Monkey and I stood over Mr. Impossible. I winced when I saw his leg twisted up, snapped in two, and trapped behind his back.

  “Fuck,” Monkey whispered. “He’s dead, man. Gotta be.”

  “No, I’m not.” Mr. Impossible blinked. “And you’re bleeding all over me. Back the fuck off, Monkey.”

  Monkey and I laughed.

  Then Monkey collapsed at my side. He didn’t have enough blood in him to keep him upright.

  A single pool, almost a pond, of Monkey and Mr. Impossible’s collective blood formed around their fallen bodies, and I thought to myself that couldn’t be sanitary.