Halloween Carnival, Volume 5

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  Halloween Carnival: Volume Five is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Hydra Ebook Original

  Copyright © 2017 by Brian James Freeman

  “Devil’s Night” by Richard Chizmar, copyright © 1996 by Richard Chizmar

  “The Last Dare” by Lisa Tuttle, copyright © 2017 by Lisa Tuttle

  “The Halloween Bleed” by Norman Prentiss, copyright © 2017 by Norman Prentiss

  “Swing” by Kevin Quigley, copyright © 2017 by Kevin Quigley

  “Pork Pie Hat” by Peter Straub, copyright © 1994 by Peter Straub

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Devil’s Night” by Richard Chizmar was originally published in Midnight Promises (Colorado Springs, CO: Gauntlet Press, 1996).

  “Pork Pie Hat” by Peter Straub was originally published in Murder for Halloween edited by Michele Slung and Roland Hartman (New York: The Mysterious Press, 1994).

  Ebook ISBN 9780399181054

  Cover design: Elderlemon Design

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Devil’s Night

  The Last Dare

  The Halloween Bleed

  Swing

  Pork Pie Hat

  Dedication

  About the Editor

  Devil’s Night

  Richard Chizmar

  One

  It all started on a windblown Friday night in October. It was the night before Halloween, the night we always called Wreck Night or Devil’s Night back when we were kids and Halloween was second in our hearts only to Christmas.

  At least the newspapers got that much right. The day, I mean. They pretty much screwed up the rest of the story.

  I was there that night. Let me tell you what really happened…

  Two

  In the chill autumn months after my first child was born, I spent many late-night hours driving the streets of my hometown. It became a routine. Two, three nights a week, around about midnight, I’d creep into the nursery one final time to check on the baby (a healthy boy named Joshua, after my father) and then I’d kiss my amused wife good night and off I’d go, driving the streets in random routes until my eyes went blurry and my spine sprouted kinks the size of quarters.

  Driving and thinking. Thinking and driving. Some nights with the radio. Most nights in silence.

  That was a little more than four years ago, but I still go out and drive some nights. Just not very often now—maybe once or twice a month, tops.

  My wife, Janice, is wonderful (and wise) and she’s known me for more than half of my thirty-six years, so she innately understands the need for these trips of mine. We rarely talk about it, but she somehow knows that this town where we both grew up and still live today, this town—its streets and houses and storefronts and lawns and sidewalks and the very sky above—gives me a real sense of peace and understanding I could never hope to find elsewhere. I know how funny that sounds, how old-fashioned, but it’s the best and probably the only way I know how to describe my feelings for this place.

  When little Josh was born, it was an event that thrilled me to new heights but also deeply troubled me. That’s actually a pretty big understatement, the part about it troubling me. You see…I worried about the baby. I worried about my wife. I worried a lot about myself. I worried a lot, period. There were just so many new and important questions, and more and more of them seemed to be born with each passing day.

  Could I be a good father?

  Could I provide for the family with just a teacher’s salary?

  Could I protect the baby from a world so different from the one I grew up in?

  Fact is, I never found the answers to most of the hard questions that arose during that period in my life—hell, most of them still exist today—but the answers that I did find usually came to me during those midnight drives. They got me through some rough times.

  So, you see, that’s the reason I went out for a ride on that windy Friday evening. There were budget problems at school to be dealt with the following week and budget problems at home to be dealt with that very weekend, and I needed a dose of cool night air to help clear my head. We were just recently a family of four, having added a terribly fussy but nonetheless adorable baby girl to the mix. Josh and the baby were sound asleep and Janice was upstairs resting, a few hundred pages into one of those romance paperbacks she loves so much. The house was too damn quiet. It was seven minutes past nine o’clock when I steered a hard left out of our driveway.

  Three

  I was sitting in my car smoking a cigarette when the madness began.

  It was just a short time later—sometime before ten—and I was parked off to the side of the road, halfway up Carson’s Ridge, which overlooks the back of the old post office property. The place had been closed down for a number of years, but the town’s braintrust had yet to figure out what to do with the large plot of land. The matter was quickly becoming a front-page item in our little weekly newspaper. There were two schools of thought: tear it down and build a mini-mall or convert it to a clubhouse and surround it with a couple fancy swimming pools and an outdoor picnic area. Neither idea did much for me. We already had two shopping plazas, and why we needed a planned picnic area when we lived right smack in the middle of the North Carolina hills was a mystery to me. A better question, if you asked me (and no one ever did), was who the heck built a post office five miles out of town in the first place?

  The ridge was one of my all-time favorite spots. I usually went there when I was feeling old and sappy and nostalgic. I’d park among the trees and think about the great Friday-night bonfires we used to have deep in the woods after the high school football games and all the sweaty nights that Janice had sent me home with a hard-on in my jeans, having let me touch her breasts but never quite reciprocating with her own fingers.

  I hadn’t been a big sports star in high school—second string on the soccer team was the best I could muster—but my older brother, John, had lettered in three sports and made All-State in two, so I was automatically invited to most of the parties and was generally deemed okay to be seen talking to.

  Those school years seemed so long ago now, and I looked back on them often (probably too often) and fondly (thanks, mainly, to Janice). And I remembered them as a time of such innocence. Compared to today, anyway. Sure, there had been some drugs—pot, mostly—and plenty of alcohol and more than a few drunken brawls. And, yes, there had even been a handful of sex scandals, like the time Tracy Anderson got caught sleeping with her boyfriend and Tammy Wright’s boyfriend both on the same weekend. But it was nothing like today. Nothing like the big cities. No crack cocaine, no guns, no fourteen-year-old mothers. Things had changed so much, so fast.

  So there I was, smoking my cigarette and listening to The Doors on the radio, feeling every inch the crusty old high school English teacher, when the red Mustang glided into the back lot using only its parking lights. At first, I thought it was just a couple kids sneaking back there to neck or maybe planning to do a little something more. But then when the Phantom of the Opera staggered out of the car—and I didn’t care if it was almost Halloween—I knew something weird was going down.

  Even from a dis
tance, it wasn’t a pretty sight. As soon as the car jerked to a complete stop, the guy in the costume was out the door and down on his knees. Throwing up.

  I shook my head and laughed. This guy was royally plastered.

  The Phantom stayed on his knees for record time, and each time he dipped his head and convulsed I felt a little sorrier for him. He looked like a dog that’d gotten into a bad bowl of chili. Still, I had to admit it was pretty damn funny: the Phantom of the Opera down there puking in the parking lot, mask still in place, black cape flapping wildly in the wind. It was a grand performance.

  After a while he got to his feet and looked around self-consciously. He took a few wobbly steps, then stopped and stood very still. I figured the parking lot was probably doing cartwheels in front of him. Either that or the dead leaves swirling across the lot had suddenly taken on the appearance of a hungry swarm of giant brown rats. Depended on how much he drank, I supposed.

  I started to feel a little guilty for spying on the poor guy, but he obviously didn’t see me parked snug against the tree line.

  He obviously didn’t see me because of what he did next.

  He took a quick swipe at his chin with his shirt sleeve and slowly walked to the back of the sports car and popped the trunk. The trunk lid sprung open, momentarily blocking my view, then quickly closed again.

  When the Phantom walked back again into sight, he was carrying a woman.

  A very dead woman.

  “Jesus,” I whispered, pressing forward against the steering wheel, squinting for a clearer view. Suddenly my heartbeat was very loud in the car.

  The Phantom headed for the tree line, the body cradled in his arms.

  I was parked a good fifty yards away and it was pretty dark, what with only a handful of lights still working in the lot, but I had a bird’s-eye view and I knew right away that it was a body. Fairly petite. Long blond hair fanned out toward the ground. Slender white legs hanging limp from beneath some type of skirt or dress.

  Suddenly the Phantom stopped walking. He leaned over to the side a little and shrugged, adjusting his grip the way a shopper might do to get a better hold of a particularly bulky bag of groceries. Seemingly content, he glanced over his shoulder once more, then continued toward the trees.

  It was like watching television. Maybe it was the fact that I was staring through a windshield and the picture before me was perfectly framed. Or maybe it was because suddenly everything seemed to move in dreamlike slow motion. All I can tell you is that for those first few seconds after I saw that body, it didn’t seem real. Nothing seemed real. I might as well have been kicked back in my basement watching NYPD Blue with a bowl of pretzels in my lap.

  Amid all of this, my fingers started burning and I remembered my cigarette. I stubbed out what was left of it in the ashtray and clicked off the radio. When I looked up again, the Phantom had disappeared into the woods.

  And it hit me then. What I had seen.

  I sat there feeling scared and numb and excited all at the same time, fully understanding for the first time what it was that I was witnessing. I sat there and didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

  He surprised me by returning so quickly—five minutes at the most—a time when, for some strange reason, the idea of leaving the scene never once crossed my mind. At first there was only the night and the whipping wind. Then a subtle shifting of shadows at the wood’s edge. Finally, the Phantom appeared like a ghoul from a nightmare.

  Empty-handed.

  He hurried back inside the car, his stride more confident now. This time even the parking lights stayed off. And then he was gone, and there was only the wind and the darkness and the silver shine of moonlight.

  I looked at the glowing red numbers on the dash. They read: 10:03.

  Four

  I found her maybe a hundred yards in. Buried beneath a tangle of dead tree limbs and a lumpy pile of wet leaves.

  The Phantom had done a crummy job. If I could find her in the middle of the night with only a flashlight, trust me, anyone could.

  I lifted a couple of the larger branches off her and pushed them aside, careful not to make contact. And then I simply stood there in the darkness, staring. Just staring.

  Dim flecks of moonlight filtered down through the trees, pleasing only the shadows. The wind lashed at the back of my neck, seeming to focus there, and the cold sting of the metal flashlight tickled my palm. It all seemed very real now.

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the body.

  I’d been wrong earlier. She wasn’t a woman at all. She was just a teenager. A girl.

  And I knew her.

  A part of me wanted to gather her up into my arms, brush the dirt and leaves from her hair, take her far away from this place. But take her where? Another part of me wanted to flee as fast as my legs would carry me—back up the ridge to the car, straight home, and upstairs to my bed. Back to where my family waited, where it was safe and warm and the wind couldn’t find me.

  I knew I was close to panic then—very, very close to losing whatever foolish courage still lingered within me. I could feel it building inside me like a scream. My mind, as if feeding the madness, turned traitor: I looked at the girl’s dress, filthy and torn, and thought how amazingly pretty it would look on Janice. How it would be just perfect for our Sunday-afternoon picnics at the creek. I looked at the girl’s face, at the dark, angry hole centered on her forehead. I found myself wondering if my tiny daughter might grow up to look anything like her, if she would wear her hair in a similar cut, if she would dress anything at all like the girl. And then I thought of Josh and wondered, if he’d been a dozen years older, if this girl would have been to his liking, if perhaps they would have even dated, maybe gone to homecoming or the prom.

  These were the thoughts of a crazy man. I knew that. But I couldn’t stop them from rushing over me. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by madness. Drowning in it.

  A gust of wind rattled the dark trees high above me.

  I felt the scream coming…

  I dropped the flashlight and ran.

  Five

  I drove across town with the windows wide open. It was chilly as hell, but I needed the fresh air to breathe. Besides, my stomach was still doing jumping jacks, and puking was definitely not yet out of the question.

  I figured—better safe than sorry.

  I drove slowly, with no clear direction, but somewhere in the back of my head I knew where I would eventually end up. It was just a matter of time.

  As I passed through the neighborhood, I noticed that most every house on most every street had some type of Halloween display or decoration.

  Glowing pumpkins rested on porch railings, smiling their jagged jack-o’-lantern smiles, slanted orange eyes winking at me in the wind. Mummies and ghosts and witches and zombies guarded shadow-webbed front yards, daring me to stop the car and trespass. Corpse-shaped mounds of leaves protruded from in front of countless homemade tombstones, silent remembrances of the dead and buried.

  I thought of my own narrow strip of front yard—adorned with a glow-in-the-dark graveyard and a Grim Reaper suspended from a fishing line—and I grimaced. Josh and I had a blast setting the whole thing up two weeks ago, but it didn’t seem very funny anymore. In fact, none of the houses looked like very much fun at all.

  In less than twenty-four hours, Sparta—and towns just like it all over the country—would be celebrating Halloween. There’d be trick-or-treaters and costume parties, candy apples and haunted houses…

  But that was tomorrow.

  Tonight was Devil’s Night.

  A night for mischief, as my father used to say. Yes siree, he’d whisper, his eyebrows dancing, Halloween may be a night for make-believe ghosts and goblins, but you’d better be sure to turn on all the lights and lock your doors on Devil’s Night. Because that’s when the real monsters lurk…

  And then my mother would hush my father with a swat of her hand and all us kids would giggle an
d we’d finish our dinners with smiles on our faces and nervous, thumping hearts in our chests.

  A night for mischief…

  —

  Her name was Amanda Hathaway. The girl in the woods.

  She was sixteen years old and a student of mine. One of my favorites. Not just from this year’s class but one of my all-time favorites.

  She worked part-time over at the ice-cream shop in the mall, and whenever Janice or I came in with Josh, she would always sneak him an extra scoop of chocolate and make him feel like a co-conspirator with a sshing finger to her lips and a wink of her eye. Josh loved it.

  Amanda was in my last period English class. This was her first year at Sparta High, and the semester was barely two months old, but she’d already proved herself a model student. Not straight A’s across the board, mind you, but certainly honor roll with more A’s than B’s.

  But it wasn’t her grades that made her my favorite. There were several other classmates, in fact, who regularly earned higher marks.

  No, it was more than that—Amanda Hathaway was simply special. In a time when many teenage girls were openly disrespectful or arrogant or flirtatious, she was a teacher’s dream. Extremely well mannered and on the quiet side, she was much more serious-minded than most of the other students. I sensed it the very first week of classes: She gave you her full attention because she wanted to learn, not because she had to.

  Yet at the same time, Amanda was popular with her classmates. She was quiet but not invisible. Polite and smart but not a geek. Pretty and well liked but not a snob. It was a precarious balance for a sixteen-year-old, but she carried it off in spades.

  I guess that’s what I liked the most about Amanda Hathaway: Here was a very decent and beautiful young girl who could have moved among the school’s elite but instead she chose her own path. She traveled in a circle of one.