Doorbells at Dusk

by Josh Malerman

  Halloween. Distorted macrocephalic squash glare at me—imbeciles perched on weathered porches and peeling fences. Their hollow eyes watch and carved mouths open in silent shrieks. I imagine the long knives, reflecting the clenched teeth and narrowed eyes of the assassins, plunged deeply into the tense burnt ocher flesh. They saw steadily, lobotomizing the pale pulp within and replacing it with gobs of melting wax. Their flickering faces taunt me. Toothy grins and silent circles of mouths beneath triangular eyes. A few are more complex, with glowing swirls and letters.

  Halloween. Even the weather is infidel, sultry and sensuous one moment, seducing me to remove my clothes, to bathe in her crackling, musty warmth. Then, with a casual snap of barometric fingers, I am chilled to the depths of my soul, shivering in the unblinking stare of a street lamp. Who can I trust? I shake my head, trying to clear it for the celebration to come.

  I learned early that trust and faith are fleeting things, as ephemeral as mother love and safety.

  ***

  An owl-headed woman leans over to shout into the shoulder of a headless man. “God, I can hardly hear myself think over that damned music.” His torso bobs in agreement, and he places a bloody severed head on the ashtray and stuffs some potato chips through an opening in his shirt.

  “I hate Halloween parties,” he yells. “You spend weeks planning your oh-so-unique costume and some jerk shows up in the same thing. Then you have to spend an hour stuffed into it, sweating, until everybody decides to show up.” The severed head is tucked back under an arm and the hand disappears under the cape.

  The owl-headed woman nods. “I know what you’re saying. These damned feathers are driving me mad. They constantly tickle my nose and get in my eyes. I keep sneezing, and I can hardly see anything without my glasses. I can’t wait until the unmasking at midnight.”

  A red satin demon holding a martini enters the conversation, moving around the iced keg. “You know what I hate the most? Until the unmasking you really don’t know who everybody is. I mean, some people you know. They just wear half masks like this.” She points to the red fabric molded around her eyes. “Or maybe you recognize a voice or two. But there are always a few who won’t talk and lurk someplace, watching . . . waiting. I don’t know, it gives me the creeps. I know that’s the idea, but I’m afraid that when that mask comes off, the face underneath it will be even worse—or maybe it’s not a mask at all . . . ”

  “l know exactly what you mean,” says the owl-headed woman, blowing a feather out of her face. It’s like that person dressed like a clown, sitting in the armchair in the corner. He doesn’t say anything, just sits there, watching everybody else. He doesn’t even have a drink.”

  “Or she,” the demon says. “It could be a woman. You can’t tell with all that makeup and the yellow wig. It could be anybody.”

  “I tried talking to him—or her—earlier, offering to get a drink, but he wouldn’t say anything,” the headless man says. “He wouldn’t respond, just turned his head to look at me with those weird blue eyes. If you ask me, I think they’re tinted contacts. And I don’t remember anybody I know having eyes that color. I don’t mind saying, it gave me the heebie-jeebies.”

  The owl-headed woman shudders and finishes her martini in one gulp. “I’ll stay ‘til midnight, but not a minute longer.”

  ***

  A spasmodic wind coughs around me, clearing brown leaves from the cement gutter of its throat as I struggle against it. Filthy gauze ghosts with oversized Styrofoam heads dance madly, blindly beneath branches and electric wires. How thin those wires, how dark and slender in the twilight. Electric umbilicals connecting each solid brick embryo to the invisible womb of the night. Watching the wires, I can see pulses of power swell and swim into the houses, promising safety, security, comfort.

  Safety. I laugh, thinking of what is safe for them and what is safe for me. My safety is here in the night wrapped around me, in the voices whispering in my mind, in the familiar hunger gnawing at my gut. My comfort is in the things that make children afraid of this night: revenants, witches, the “things that go bump in the night.” But also the more concrete things that their parents fear: the poisoned popcorn balls and the apples with bits of razor blades embedded in them, waiting for the unwary, the less vigilant. I shudder deliciously at the thought.

  No one knows to fear me, though I am the living embodiment of all those terrors, the one who holds their future in my hands, at least for tonight. I’ve learned to love the pain and terror this night can bring. The delicious tears of their anguish. This is my night for retribution.

  My hand drifts to my pocket, easing along the smooth metal, stroking the blade. Long thin steel, colder than my icy fingers, colder than hate. Colder than the endless empty years until tonight. This is what it’s all led up to. I feel blood surging through my blue veins, my red arteries, pushing past the pliable valves of my heart, filling its hungry cavities, satisfying its need. For the moment.

  ***

  The doorbell (hooked to a recorded gong, just for the occasion) rings three times in quick succession, and Saint Joan struggles through the crowd to the door, her sword parting the merrymakers like Moses at the Red Sea. A papier-mâché frog croaks angrily as she knocks him out of the way with her shield, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza duck quietly out of the way before she reaches them. They know there are doors upstairs, hiding quieter rooms and make their way silently up the carpeted steps. Sancho Panza opens a door marked with a homemade sign: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE. The bathroom.

  “Very funny,” Don Quixote mutters as they back out.

  There’s another door at the end of the hall. This door is partially open, and they can see it’s a bedroom, with a flowered silk bedspread and matching drapes pulled to the sides of the windows, over sheer curtains. When their eyes adjust to the dark after closing the door behind them, they sit together on edge of the bed. Sancho Panza is the first to speak.

  “I’m sorry I dragged you here, Charlie. I thought it might cheer you up. I guess I was wrong—again. I never was very good at reading you. It’s my timing or something. We can make a graceful exit pretty soon, when all the guests have arrived. It’s almost midnight.”

  Don Quixote is silent, rising and crossing the room to the window. He looks through the sheer curtains to the few mottled leaves on the branches outside. A group of Halloweeners passes below, shrieking and laughing and rattling candy in their plastic pumpkins. “For some reason,” he says, “those kids in their masks and costumes make me sad.”

  “I’m the one who should be sorry,” he continues. “I’m being a shit. You were considerate enough to invite me at the last minute, even if it was just a gesture because Sibyl left. God damn it. Who’d have thought . . . I suppose that’s always been my problem, hasn’t it—acting without thinking. It was nice of you to ask me, and if I’d been thinking then, I’d have realized I wouldn’t have any fun, ruining the night for you. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “We need to talk about Sibyl,” Sancho Panza says. Don Quixote starts to speak. “No, don’t interrupt me, Charlie. Some things have to be said, unpleasant things, even things you couldn’t know. Sibyl’s changed, she’s . . . I don’t know, wrong, somehow.”

  Sancho Panza’s voice drifts up to evaporate in the polyester canopy, and they sit in silence a while, both deciding how to continue the awkward conversation. The heavy bass of the music rhythmically vibrates something on the wall across from them, and a woman shrieks in laughter or fright near the bedroom door.

  Sancho Panza starts at the sound, then laughs self-deprecatingly. “I wish they wouldn’t do that. It always sounds like someone’s being killed or something. I guess this party isn’t the best place for me, either.”

  Don Quixote says, “It sounds like neither of us is in a festive mood. Let’s just go down and tell Michael and Carolyn that we can’t stay.”

  “Not until we’ve finished talking.”

  ***

  A dog barks hoarsely in the
yard beside me, exorcising the Halloween spirits in his own way. Maybe he’s lonely or frightened, or hungry. I turn on him, my eyes glowing hot with ancient passions, and he tucks his ragged tail and backs away, a snarl deep in his chest. He quivers, then slinks through a tattered privet hedge. He can feel my quest, my desire my hunger.

  I slowly approach a house. Its white pillars and wrap-around veranda valiantly attempt to emulate the great Southern plantations. But the fading clapboard house is dwarfed by its own façade. A rake and push lawnmower, both rusting, rest against one wall. A tasteful straw wreath wrapped in orange and brown ribbon hangs on the door above a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head. It sports smiling skeletons and colorful spiders. A comfortable, safe home. Safe—there’s that word again.

  I remember another home and child alone in the dark, waiting, listening, crying, and the stern voice of a man: “I’ll give you something . . . ” But memories are unimportant now, distant. All that matters is the night stretching out before me like a corpse and the silver song in my pocket. My hunger speaks a language of its own, and something laughs deep inside me, something growing like a dark light. A light I never knew was there before tonight. This is my epiphany.

  Caressing the white wooden siding, I watch small chips of paint snow to the dry brown grass. I touch my tongue to the boards and savor the heavy metallic taste of lead. In only a moment I know this house and its kind, but it is not what I’m looking for tonight, what will fill the emptiness inside my gut. Maybe after. Reluctantly, I turn back to the darkness.

  ***

  Sancho Panza tugs at the pillow stuffing behind the leather belt and speaks in a low voice. “I’m glad you’re here, but I was so surprised you came. I didn’t think you’d want to . . . be with me after everything that’s happened between us.”

  Don Quixote is still staring out the window. He doesn’t blink. “Sibyl’s living with you now, isn’t that enough? I had hoped . . . but I always knew she’d end up with you. It’s you she loved. Me, she feared, even pitied. If it hadn’t been for that, she would have gone with you right after the split. She said as much when she left. She has your sense of tact.” He chuckles mirthlessly.

  The door opens a crack for a moment, and the music swirls loudly around them. “Sorry,” mumbles a ghoul, holding the hand of Goldilocks. “I didn’t know anybody was in here.” He laughs. The door closes again before Don Quixote or Sancho Panza can reply.

  Sancho Panza takes off the large hat and runs her red fingernails through the graying curls. A sigh escapes her shadowed, trembling mouth. The lips open to speak, then press together again, and her head shakes slowly. A pickup truck rattles past and glass shatters on the sidewalk below. “Devil’s night,” she says, shaking her head. “I hope they didn’t soap the car.” Don Quixote doesn’t respond.

  Finally Sancho Panza speaks again in a near-whisper. “It’s so hard to talk to you when you get defensive like this. And I don’t think pity has anything to do with it. Sibyl . . . well, I can’t imagine her doing anything out of pity. Or love. Not anymore.”

  Don Quixote clears his throat. “God damn her. How can she just pick up and leave like that?” His voice breaks and his eyes glitter in the light from the street.

  “Charlie, don’t do this to yourself. Or to me. I should have called, I know. But she begged me not to, and you know how persuasive she’s always been. Please don’t turn away. We have to talk about this. You have to understand.”

  “Oh I understand. Always have. You were never able to say no to her. She chose to live with you and you let her. Never considered turning her away.” Don Quixote sniffs and straightens his collar needlessly.

  “She was living with me, yes, for a while. But now she goes off by herself for days at a time. I don’t know where she goes or where she stays. When she comes home, her clothes are a mess, and her eyes . . . I just don’t know what’s going on with her anymore.”

  Don Quixote’s voice is loud, hoarse. “I suppose that’s my fault now, too. You’ll want to blame all this on me. Well, why should I care where she stays? I don’t need this, Amanda, I just don’t need this.”

  Moonlight suddenly glows on the silver strands combed carefully across Don Quixote’s scalp, and Sancho Panza looks away, down on her pale hands clasped tightly around the wooden sword. She rises and slowly, almost imperceptibly, reaches over and touches his arm.

  “Things—and people—aren’t always what we want them to be,” she whispers in the dark. He nods and they sit in silence for a while, letting the heartbeat of the music pulse around them.

  “Hall of the Mountain King,” she says. “It always sounds to me like someone going mad.”

  ***

  I’m getting close; I can feel it. My very skin is electric with anticipation. Every hair on my body stands out rigid, aching. My breath ghosts around me, mingling with the cold fog like steam from a locomotive. I zero in on the emanations of my targets. Their desire to continue to live is almost as strong as mine to prevent it; our connection is unbreakable at last.

  Some late Halloweeners pass on the far side of the street, laughing and counting their take for the night. They pause in their revelry, looking across the dirty, pitted pavement toward me. I know they are not able to see me—I am very still deep in the shadow of a yew tree. Yet the children become silent for a moment, then run down the street shrieking, costumes whipping out behind. Children have that extra sense. I love children.

  I love their innocence and recognition of truth. They know what is real and what is an illusion. Adults lose that, to their detriment. I love children’s recognition of the dangers abroad in the night, dangers not always visible to the naked eye. I love to hear their screams.

  I want to chase them now, but my quarry tonight waits farther down this street. The voices of the night are growing louder. They demand to be obeyed, and I will not deny them. I grind my teeth and answer them with my pain. The two who call themselves Charlie and Amanda will be the first to feel my wrath, and their hearts will serve as a gift to the Eve of All Hallows. The rest are mine.

  ***

  Sancho Panza touches Don Quixote’s faded shoulder gently. “Sibyl has problems, Charlie. There’s something terribly wrong with her, ever since she left that drug cult or whatever it was. She’s filled with emotions I can’t begin to understand, or even recognize—hate and rage, and something more frightening than those. She seems . . . changed.”

  “Changed? What does that mean, ‘changed?’?” Don Quixote snorts and shuffles his feet in the shag carpet. “I can never understand you. You speak in riddles. You never say what you mean.”

  Sancho Panza starts to pace. “I’m not really sure what I mean, I guess. But I worry about what’s going on in her mind. She won’t eat at home anymore and she rarely sleeps there, no matter what I say. I don’t know who her friends are—or if she even has friends, for that matter.”

  Don Quixote stands, straightening his shoulders, turning away from her. “She’s an adult now, got her own life to live. I know better than anyone else that she has problems. If you remember, I raised her most of her life while you were out . . . ” The unfinished sentence hangs like a cobweb in the corners of the room.

  “Anyway,” he continues more softly, “she claimed there were no drugs involved in the group she joined a while back. They just prayed or chanted or something innocuous like that. She claimed she’s been away from it for almost a year, at any rate.” He still doesn’t look at Sancho Panza, but has to lean toward her slightly to hear her when she speaks.

  “There’s more.” Sancho Panza’s voice is like a thin wire. Her teeth clench as she speaks. “When she is home, Charlie, she talks in her sleep. I can hear her through the wall. She says things . . . awful things about us and people in general and mumbles strange names I can’t make out. I’m afraid for her—and for me, if you want to know the truth. I lie awake in the dark waiting. I don’t know what for, but sometimes I wait all night.” A tear glistens on her cheek and the door
bell gongs hollowly in the hallway as another reveler arrives.

  Sancho Panza reaches out in the dark and grips Don Quixote’s hand.

  ***

  Stopping on one deserted street corner, I run a finger along the thick shaft of the knife handle, savoring its ridges and curves. Hesitantly, I test the cold thin metal on my wrist, rewarded by a tiny splitting of skin as one warm drop of blood eases into the

  coarse fabric of my coat. I continue, following the thin diamond wire to my destination. The streets are empty now. The children are all tucked safely in their beds. The children . . . oh yes, the children. Later.

  I imagine the perfect chaos to come. I can taste the sweet-sour fear already, hear the thundering of twenty hearts beating in panicked unison, smell the metallic odor of blood and sweat pulsing through desperate pores. It has been so long and yet no time at all. The dark night will be clothed in scarlet sheets.

  I finally arrive. The house is a small brick cage, electric jack-o’-lanterns grinning happily from the windows. They are there—I can sense their sweet foulness already, and I want to retch with the nearness of them. They want to escape, but I am God tonight.

  I stare in for a moment, letting the fun-fright, the playing at fear, trickle around me. Shortly the farce will end, and I will wallow in their truth. My knife slices through the copper lifelines and the house blinks its eye and holds its breath.

  ***

  Don Quixote sighs. “All right, I guess we are her parents, even if we haven’t lived together for five years. If it’s as bad as you say—and somehow I believe it is—we have to do something. We’ll find her tonight and make her get help. Maybe if we approach her together . . . ”

  Sancho Panza mutters, “I only hope we’re not too late.” Louder she says, “Let’s skip out the back door. Neither of us wants to be here anyway.”

  Making their way through the crowd of bodies, like salmon swimming upstream, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza finally reach the kitchen. As they push the bar aside and squeeze around it to the back door, the lights and music suddenly go off. Someone mentions a circuit breaker, and Saint Joan begins bullying her way toward the fuse box in the kitchen.