Gerald looked at Donnie’s gloves on the ground, in the dirt; the great dusty crossroad that seemed to stretch off into the horizon for all eternity. He suddenly understood.
“We’re still on Washington Avenue!” he said, half smiling at his epiphany. When he looked up from the road he saw Donnie and the woman scrutinizing him curiously.
“Such a clever child,” the woman said.
Donnie turned to his friend. “But how—this doesn’t look anything like home? It’s not even snowing here!”
The woman shuffled closer, her lips cracking with a smile, revealing jaundiced teeth nestled between oil-black gums.
“You are still there, yet you are also here at the same time—and in between.”
“What does that mean?” Donnie shouted, his whole body shaking with confused rage. Gerald reached out and gripped his arm in a bid to calm him.
“It’s okay, Donnie—we’ll figure this out and get back home—all right?”
Donnie swallowed and fought back the tears welling in his terrified green eyes. Gerald offered him a reassuring smile, but inside he wanted to scream. Once he knew his friend had calmed down, he turned to address the woman.
“What do you want…with us?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I want freedom.”
“Freedom?”
“I have been imprisoned here for a very long time and I want to leave.”
Gerald thought he saw sadness in her eyes, but how could someone who was clearly dead feel sorrow?
“So, you want us to help you?”
“Yes.”
“Then how?” Donnie chimed in, impatient.
She turned, or rather staggered, to the center of the crossroads. “This has been my cage for three centuries—ever since they hanged me as a witch.”
“A witch?” Gerald said.
“They claimed I cavorted with the devil, let him put his cold prig inside me. They even said I gave birth to his spawn. My neighbors dragged me here to this tree and hanged me like a chandelier for all to see!”
Gerald swallowed hard, easily imagining the noose in her hand being coiled around her neck, the bones snapping.
“Ever since that day,” the woman continued, “I have been waiting for someone to come—to take my place. I believed that eventually some poor soul in the land of the living would lose their lives on this spot—be it by accident or more sinister means—but I never dreamed a few drops of virgin blood could bring me my salvation.”
She stepped to them again, her arms reaching, gnarled fingers bending like spider’s legs.
“One of you must take my place!” she hissed.
“No!” Donnie cried, recoiling from her approach.
Strangely, and suddenly, neither boy could move. The woman circled them, and despite the midday sun beating down on the landscape, a foul chill emanated from her body. The skin of Gerald and Donnie’s arms bristled with goose pimples beneath their coats.
“Oh, and yet you will choose, my young pups—or both of you will die!”
“How can we choose?” Donnie said, sobbing, his body rigid through magic—or fear.
She moved behind them and placed her dry-ice fingers on the backs of their heads, like a mother ruffling her child’s hair.
“Perhaps it will not be such a challenge for two friends who trust each other?” she said, before circling again to face them. “You came here through blood—it is only fitting that blood should be part of the trial.” She traced both of their faces with a clawed finger. “You are close friends, yes?”
“Yes,” they replied, and their voices wavered with terror.
“Perhaps even as close as…brothers?” she asked further.
Donnie and Gerald turned their eyes to each other, then answered yes once more. The woman clapped her hands and revealed a slimy grin.
“Splendid! Now, have you heard of the saying ‘sworn blood brothers’?”
“No,” Gerald said, but Donnie interjected: “Yes—I know it!” he said. “My father told me about it once. He said it’s like a…a promise you make. A ‘blood oath,’ I think he called it. He even showed me. He took a knife and cut his palm and then he cut me and we shook hands.”
“That’s it!” The woman smiled wider and a string of drool slid from her lips.
Gerald didn’t like the concept of the “blood oath,” the mingling of blood. Seeing Donnie’s nose bleeding was bad enough—so what exactly was this woman proposing?
She leaned into them and took their hands, and it was like they’d both been forced inside a meat locker.
“Please let us go,” Donnie said, but the woman pressed a finger to his lips.
“Hush now, child. It’s too late for that; begging won’t help you. You must listen to Martha now. One of you must stay here so I can leave, but I cannot make that choice—it has to be decided between the two of you.”
Gerald felt tears on his cheeks, tasted snot on his lips. He wanted to scream for his mother, but she was impossibly far away. Martha smiled at him before turning her gaze to his friend.
“You, boy—what be your name?”
“Donnie, ma’am,” he said quickly.
“Donnie, I want to thank you—for opening the door and finding me. Your blood was the key that unlocked me from my cage of woe. A pity, I need you to shed much more.”
“What?” Donnie’s eyes widened.
Martha waited, savoring the boys’ reactions. Gerald knew she was asking them to perform some sort of ritual, asking them to hurt themselves—or each other.
“I’m not going to hurt Gerry,” Donnie said, and Gerald could tell he was trying to put a lot of bravery into his voice.
“Then you will die here right now,” Martha replied.
Donnie shook his head, a pendulum run on fear. “I can’t—please don’t make me!”
Gerald felt his pulse in his throat. A wave of nausea clenched around his stomach and he struggled to fight the urge to vomit.
“This is not a request,” Martha told Donnie. Donnie was sobbing now, spittle bubbling between his downturned lips.
“No—I won’t hurt him!”
“I demand blood!” Martha howled and the entire landscape seemed to flicker under the power of her voice, like a light bulb at death’s door.
Gerald watched as Martha moved behind Donnie. She placed her hands on his shoulders and eyed Gerald coyly. Miraculously, Donnie could once more move his body, but Martha still gripped him tight. She leaned down to speak into Donnie’s ear, all the while never taking her eyes off Gerald.
“Kill your friend,” she said, and Gerald heard her every word.
Donnie’s arms rose up from his sides. He looked so much like Frankenstein’s monster, a shambling horror reaching out for the nearest throat—and Gerald feared it would be his if he didn’t act. He saw Donnie’s face, his eyeballs so white, his lips mouthing at Gerald to run, his nose dripping mucus-stringed blood.
Blood.
Self-preservation overtook Gerald’s will, and somehow he managed to slip Martha’s psychic grasp. He lunged at Donnie and punched him as hard as he could in the face. Donnie toppled backward, falling to the ground. Gerald straddled him, raining down a barrage of blows until Donnie’s face burst with fresh blood.
Between the pounding blows and the cascading waves of agony through his little fingers, Gerald thought of home. Of his mother and father, worried sick about where he was, of the freezing white snow falling upon Blake Street. If he was to escape and survive this nightmare, then Donnie Psalter would have to die. So he wrapped his now slick red hands around Frankenstein’s monster’s throat and squeezed.
He’s not Donnie—he’s Frankenstein—and Frankenstein is a monster, so he has to die.
And only Dracula could kill him.
When Frankenstein’s eyes finally rolled back in his skull, the whites glinting in the perpetual noonday sun, Gerald released his grip. He stood and looked down at Frankenstein’s body for many moments, in awe of how still the monster was.
“He’s dead,” Gerald said to himself.
“Yes,” Martha said, almost sighing with pleasure. She went to Gerald and embraced him, cold, thin arm bones creaking loudly. “I always knew it would be you,” she said. Then she smiled at him and faded into the air like a dust mote.
The sunlit vista evaporated with her, plunging Gerald back into his wintry world, back to Blake Street. He found himself standing on the same crossroad, but without Frankenstein. Frankenstein had been left behind—to take Martha’s place for all eternity.
Eventually, the snow began to fall onto the intersection, the barrier that held it at bay seemingly removed. Gerald watched the snowflakes drift around him, and after a long while his mind felt clearer, calmer. He took off his Dracula cape and mask and stepped off the intersection onto Blake Street—toward home.
He found his parents standing at the front door, talking to Donnie’s parents and a pair of police officers. They were frantic, accosting him with tear-streaked eyes and never-ending questions. They all wanted to know where he’d been, but it wasn’t until they asked about Donnie that Gerald truly realized what he’d done.
As he sobbed over and over into his mother’s arms, Gerald told them that his friend was gone, but he didn’t know why or where.
That knowledge would only ever come to him when he slept, in the form of nightmares.
7
No matter how many times Kelli wiped the tears away, they kept on coming.
She stared at Gerald through those same tears, as if she were looking at the world through his sorrow; as if she’d become infected by it.
“I…I just don’t believe it,” she said.
The old man frowned. “It’s true,” he said, and he was adamant.
“No—no, I mean I believe you—it’s hard not to when the evidence is right outside that door. It’s just that the story sounds so…impossible.”
Gerald rubbed his hands together, feeling their roughness, their age. “I’ve lived with that story all my life. He sighed and sagged in his chair. “You’re the first person I’ve told the truth.”
“What—you never even told your parents—or Donnie’s parents?”
“What could I tell them—that Donnie exchanged his soul so a witch could go free?”
Kelli cringed, her sympathy waning once more. “So you just lied?”
“I had to!”
“You ‘had to’?” Kelli couldn’t believe his arrogance. “He was your friend!”
“Donnie was dead! Don’t you understand? He was gone, lost to that godawful place. Telling the truth was never going to bring him back.”
Kelli turned her eyes to the door. “Yet here he is.”
Gerald looked at the door, then, and she could see that her words cut him deep, his eyes lost in despondency.
“He’s here to torment me—to make me suffer, just as he does. He comes to visit me every anniversary—every Halloween. All I can do is lock the door and wait for him to go away.”
“I don’t blame him for wanting you to suffer,” Kelli said.
Now Gerald was the one to look appalled. “I beg your pardon?”
“I only feel sorry for Donnie,” she told him. “Maybe if you’d told the truth—maybe if you hadn’t killed him in the first place, then none of this would even be happening!”
Gerald almost rose from his wheelchair. “You think I don’t know that? Don’t you think I haven’t thought about that every day since he was taken? It wasn’t my fault—it was hers! That witch! She gave me no choice!”
Kelli almost spat. “There’s always a choice!”
“Really—then what would you have done? Tell me, Miss High and Mighty, what would you have done?”
She averted his furious eyes. “I…I don’t know. But I wouldn’t have left my friend there to rot.”
Gerald pointed an arthritic finger at her. “Don’t you judge me—you have no idea of the sacrifices I had to make. I had to tell his family that he was abducted, for God’s sake! I sat in the back of a police car for hours—days—while they looked for Donnie, all the while knowing that everything I’d told them was a lie. In the years after that day my childhood was hell. My parents took me to counseling every week until I was thirteen. I became a laughingstock at school. I even flunked out of college, forced to come back here and live with my parents. I think they must have been happy when they died, knowing they didn’t have to burden themselves with me any longer.”
Kelli stood and touched the door; she knew every inch of its flecked paint, every grain of wood beneath, but only because of what stood on the other side of it.
“You talk about suffering and sacrifices, but what about the sacrifice Donnie made—hmm? He’s dead—and you’re still here.”
The old man lifted himself up out of his chair, arms trembling with weakness, his face crimson with rage.
“I wish I was dead!”
The timbre of his voice almost knocked Kelli off her feet, and it left Gerald hollow, his frame dropping like a stone back into the chair.
“I wish I’d been the one to die that day!” Gerald admitted. “Not Donnie. But I was just a boy—a little boy scared of never seeing his mother or father again. I wanted to live, and I’m sorry—I’m so sorry that I have to say this, but it was either him…or me.”
Kelli’s lips curled in disgust. “And so you chose you?”
“Yes—and I’ve regretted that choice ever since. I’ll only ever be free of Donnie when I die—I know that.”
Kelli remained quiet, overwhelmed by the silence, her distaste for Gerald’s every word. She wondered if Donnie’s ghost could hear them, hear Gerald’s self-pity.
“Why don’t you just tell him you’re sorry?” she said.
“Oh, I’ve tried that! I’ve told him I was sorry a thousand times. I went to his grave so many times. I told my parents and his parents I was sorry so many times, but it was never enough. It tore both families apart and I’m certain it sent my mother and father to an early grave. I’ve apologized to Donnie every Halloween, but he still comes!”
“Did you mean it?”
“Screw you!”
“Oh, that’s nice, Gerald! You know something—your so-called suffering has left you an empty man, coldhearted and weak. But out there is a boy who can never grow old, can never know love or see his family again because of you. And he’ll certainly never rest in peace unless you let him!”
Gerald threw his hands in the air. “Then what would you have me do?”
Kelli crouched down beside him and looked him in the face. She had to choose her words carefully if she was going to convince him to do the right thing.
“You have to accept what you did was wrong. You have to ask his forgiveness.”
Gerald’s brow wavered with self-doubt. “I can’t.”
“Put yourself in his shoes—you said yourself that could quite easily be you standing outside that door. Would you expect Donnie to say he was sorry?”
Gerald put his head in his hands and released a prolonged cry of grief, a cry that had been pent up for more than fifty years. Kelli thought the old man had snapped, the weight of anguish finally shattering his will. Her heart quickened when his keening suddenly became gasps for air.
“Are you all right?” Kelli said.
Gerald lifted his head to reveal eyes wide with fear, a mouth wide in desperation, beckoning breath.
“Can’t—”
Kelli rummaged in the back of his wheelchair for the oxygen mask and put it over his face. She turned the dial on the oxygen canister, but there was no hiss of air being released. She sensed the oxygen was all gone, and the only other canisters could be found outside in her car.
“Oh, God!” she cried. “Gerald—listen to me. You have to try and take some deep breaths, okay? In through your nose and out through your mouth.”
The old man clawed at the mask, as if it was useless. “Help—me!” he wheezed.
Kelli leaned down behind the chair again and turned up the dial
to full. Still nothing came. She gazed up at him, her face a mask of defeat. Her expression melted to shock when she saw Gerald—straight-faced and breathing freely—raise his arm toward her face. He brought his elbow down hard across her face, plunging her into the black pool of unconsciousness.
—
Gerald checked Kelli’s pulse and breathing, all the while telling her repeatedly how sorry he was. When he was certain she was fine, he took a towel from the rack near the shower, rolled it up, and placed it beneath her head.
Grunting, he pulled himself back up into the wheelchair and wheeled around to face the door. It must have been the early hours of the morning now, and the razor-sharp cold was starting to creep into his home. He should have been in bed, but he’d stopped sleeping on Halloween a long time ago and now that his past had finally found a way into his home, he couldn’t afford not to keep his eyes open.
He reached for the door handle only to hesitate. He glanced back over his shoulder to look down at Kelli lying in a state of unawareness on the floor. He liked Kelli; she meant well, but she was wrong to think that Donnie was ever going to forgive him for what he did. There was only one thing Donnie’s ghost would ever accept.
An exchange of souls.
—
The bathroom door creaked open onto a shadow-soaked hallway. As quickly as he could, Gerald wheeled himself out of the bathroom and closed the door behind him, sealing Kelli safely inside.
Gerald scanned the sleeping world of his home, his old eyes struggling to adjust to the absence of light. He wheeled up the hallway toward the kitchen, often checking over his shoulder for the unmistakable silhouette of his eternal tormentor.
The wheelchair suddenly jerked forward, gathering pace. Gerald turned in his seat and saw the spectre of his childhood friend had control of his chair and was wheeling him through the house, up the hall and back to the living room.
“Donnie—stop!” Gerald cried as the hallway rushed past him.
The wheelchair barreled onward, knocking into a display cabinet. The momentum caused the chair to tilt, and Gerald tumbled out, landing hard on the living room floor. The old man rolled onto his back to look up at Donnie. The ghost child tossed the wheelchair aside and staggered toward Gerald, his cold, gray hands outstretched in search of vengeance.
Halloween Carnival, Volume 3 Page 14