by J. W. Ocker
Once on the porch, they discovered that it wasn’t much safer than the stairs had been. Where the floorboards weren’t loose, they were rotten; where not rotten or loose, they were completely missing. The friends could almost see the thin, flaking columns trembling in their efforts to hold up the porch roof. A large door was flanked by two tall windows that were cracked in spiderweb patterns, and from which dangled the remnants of shutters.
Lowell grabbed the cuff of his right sleeve with his right hand and rubbed a clean spot at eye level onto one of the windows. He leaned in and, shielding his eyes with his hands, tried to see through the interior grime and mold and cracks into the house itself. Douglas lifted his mask and did the same on the opposite pane. It was like looking underwater in the dark. All he could see were vague shapes that could have been either furniture or otherworldly creatures. Every once in a while, he detected motion as old rags of curtains quivered in the gusts that tore through the many holes in the walls.
“What do you guys see?” asked Audrey impatiently.
“Spooky stuff,” answered Douglas.
“Here, my turn—” She was cut off by a quiet exclamation from Lowell.
“There’s somebody in there,” he whispered. Douglas couldn’t remember ever hearing Lowell sound so small.
“Shut up,” said Audrey.
Douglas instantly stuck his face back to the glass and caught the brief impression of a man-shaped shadow moving in an unmistakable man-type fashion.
“I’m serious. I saw a person move in there. Did you see it, Doug?” Douglas nodded and allowed Audrey to push him out of the way so she could look inside. “I don’t see anything.”
“It was only for a few seconds,” Lowell replied.
“That means he’s in there,” mumbled Audrey.
“He’s in there,” returned Lowell, in a much different tone of voice. “Come on, we have to get to another window.”
“What? What do you mean? We have to get out of here,” Douglas said urgently.
“No way. We need to see who the Day Killer is. This is what we’ve been waiting for. Who knows how much longer he’ll be here. All we need is to see his face, and then we’ll have something to tell the coffee-drinkers.”
Lowell dropped his bag of candy and cleared the porch steps in a single jump, landing in a splash of weeds. After a brief glance at Audrey, who returned his uncertain look, Douglas followed with much less exuberance, leaving his own hard-wrought plunder forgotten in a heap on the porch.
They ran to the side window, jockeying for position in front of the glass.
Douglas couldn’t see anything.
“The back,” said Lowell. It seemed even darker at the rear of the house, with the weeds almost twice as tall as the ones on the front lawn, but they were able to get up close to the back wall, where they discovered that the first-story windows there were all boarded up.
“Upstairs.” Lowell pointed at a second-floor window, right above a flat overhang that ran partway along the house. He threw his plastic ax into the weeds and said, “Doug, boost me.”
Douglas stuck his scythe under his arm and crouched with cupped hands. Lowell stepped into them and then onto Douglas’s shoulders, hugging the decaying wall shingles of the house before reaching his long, scrawny arms up to the edge of the overhang. Douglas heard him mutter something about termites as he heaved himself up. The overhang shook and sagged under his weight, but held.
“Do you see anything?” hissed Douglas.
“Not yet. Hold on.” In the dim moonlight, he could barely make out Lowell among the shadows. He seemed to be crouching as close to the window as he could. “It looks like an old storage heap inside,” Lowell whispered. “Hold on … I’m going to chance it.” Douglas could see him fumbling around until a tiny cone of light cut through the gloom.
On top of the overhang, Lowell aimed the pocket flashlight at the window. Most of the dim light bounced back off the solid grime coating the glass. “There’s not much. Some broken furniture, piles of trash, an old rocking horse that might be the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s about it.”
“All right, man. You checked. Now come on down,” whispered Douglas.
“Okay. Just seeing if there’s a better place to look inside.” Douglas saw the flashlight beam traveling along the exterior wall of the house before flicking abruptly off. “Okay. I’m coming down. Look out below.”
Lowell jumped.
Death House screamed.
Lowell crashed down onto Douglas in a shower of crumbling shingles, the two boys disappearing with a collective grunt into the deep weeds. Douglas surfaced first, his face blanched white enough to glow in the darkness. “What was that noise?” he asked nobody and everybody, Lowell, the weeds, Death House, Halloween night. “Audrey! Where is she?”
Douglas took off for the front of the house, plowing through the weeds and around the corner to the front porch. It was empty except for three bags of candy. One of the bags, black with an orange jack-o’-lantern on it, had fallen on its side, a colorful jumble of sweets spilling across the porch and down through one of the missing floorboards. The front door was open, vibrating crookedly on its bottom hinge. Across the front yard, he saw a tall, black figure lumber heavily through an empty lot toward the woods of Druid Park. It carried something that seemed to be struggling against it. Something shiny and familiar flashed briefly in the light of a nearby street lamp.
“Call your dad!” yelled Douglas in Lowell’s general direction while simultaneously breaking into a panicked run after the retreating shape. He had barely made it to the tree line, though, when he saw a tall form, lanky, horned, and breathing heavily, streak by on long legs to jump ahead into the forest.
Douglas quickly lost sight of the black figure, but he kept Lowell in his view the best he could while trying to avoid tripping over rocks or running into trees. It seemed like a race without an end, the black forest stretching on and on, and Lowell shrinking smaller and smaller in front of him. Soon enough, Douglas’s lungs began dissolving, his calves started splitting, and the cold Halloween air began freezing his throat. Eventually, he lost Lowell, and his short legs finally stumbled to a halt.
Douglas leaned over and placed his hands on his knees. His organs seemed to tumble into his throat, and he collapsed at the base of a tree, full of bitter failure and hoping desperately that Lowell would be able to catch up to the murderer before it was too late. While Douglas gasped for breath and fought back tears, he reached into his robe and pulled out a pocket flashlight identical to the one that Lowell had been using. It had been part of a set they had bought and divvied up for late night misadventures past. Shining the small beam around, he noted the usual dry leaves, fallen branches, moss, rocks, roots, little nocturnal beetles that twinkled as his flashlight beam reflected off their shiny shells … and something else.
Something startling.
A pair of hollow eyes stared at him from a pile of dead leaves.
It was a black mask, lined with feathers, with a long black beak … and it was about twenty-five feet away from the direction that Lowell had been running.
Douglas got up, brushed the leaves off his grandfather’s robe, and rushed over to the mask. He picked it up by the beak, the broken elastic strap dangling from it like a tapeworm. He shined his flashlight on it and thought furiously. It couldn’t be up to Lowell now. He was too far into the forest, running fast in the wrong direction.
It was up to him now. He started to feel nauseated and his eyes were getting wet, but he rubbed at his face and darted in the direction the beak mask seemed to point.
The thin beam of his flashlight did little against the darkness of the forest. The full moon had already given up its attempt at a vigil, barely glimmering through the cloud cover. Douglas hurried as fast as he could, scraping his hands on rough bark, feeling his skin pierced here and there by the webs of brambles. He kept going, exhausted, uncertain of what to do. Uncertain of what he could do except keep goin
g.
Eventually, he noticed a blue, flickering glow ahead. His mind immediately turned to the stories of wood imps that Moss and Feaster had shared. The kind that go for your eyeballs and keep eating until they leave through the soles of your feet. He turned off his flashlight and crept as softly as he could. As he neared the source of the blue glow, he heard muffled noises. Hiding behind a tree, he was glad he’d talked his parents out of making him put reflective tape on his dark cloak.
From behind the tree, Douglas could see the source of the light clearly. It was an electric bug killer, its caged bulb flickering and zapping a brave and solitary battle against the uncountable insect hordes of the woods. Looking further, he saw that it was hanging from a tree at the far end of a backyard. He was at the edge of the forest.
The house at the front of the yard was dark. They weren’t welcoming any more trick-or-treaters. At the back edge of the property was a picnic area with a table and chairs and a fire pit. Looking up, Douglas only saw the dark underside of a vast bank of cloud. Without the full moon for competition, the bug killer threw an unreal aura of blue light about twenty feet into the forest, deep enough for Douglas to make out a large, dark shape crouching in the undergrowth.
At first, Douglas couldn’t quite see what the shape was doing, but he could hear it whispering, the same sound that he had heard when he was being chased. The sound made Douglas want to run back to his house, to Lowell’s house, even to Death House. But Audrey … Audrey!
He looked closer and could see something bright winking underneath the dark shape … the reflective tape on Audrey’s raven costume—the same tape he had glimpsed in the lamp light as the figure left the haunted house in its wake. It was flashing in the blue electric nimbus as she struggled.
As Douglas’s eyes finally adjusted, he saw what the black shape was doing. In its black-gloved hand, it held a wicked knife, point up like it was a candle at a vigil. Its hooded head was bent down close to Audrey’s face. The monster was whispering to her.
The knife blade lowered. Audrey screamed.
In that exact moment, Douglas stopped observing, stopped being uncertain. His lungs reappeared and his calves sewed themselves solid and the furnace of his boyhood anger melted the frozen interior of his throat. He raised high into the night the plastic scythe that he still held and, running as fast as he could, threw his entire measly eighty pounds at the monster with a feral yell.
Had the Day Killer been alert—had he not been so distracted by the child-raven beneath him—he might have parried the small, black-robed missile with little effort. As it was, Douglas was an entire gutter of bowling balls hurtling at the speed of a playground sprint toward his dark target. The impact pulled a heavy grunt from the Day Killer’s chest, knocking him a dozen feet away. The knife flew into the air, gleaming briefly in the bug killer light, before its flicker was extinguished in the thick carpet of leaves on the forest floor.
The impact had knocked Douglas to the ground in the opposite direction, the scythe sliding from his hand and scraping across the leaves. The thin plastic skull mask that had been perched on top of his head the entire chase slipped down crooked over his face, obscuring half of it and blinding one eye as surely as if he’d poked it out on a branch. But he didn’t need to see clearly at that point. He only needed his voice.
“Run, Audrey!”
She didn’t.
She jumped up, but her feet remained planted in the dark leaf litter. Her hand was on her cheek. She removed it and stared at her palm. On her cheek was a blotch of red that was black in the blue light shining on her face.
The Day Killer didn’t move, either. He sat there, panting heavily from deep within the black hood he wore, so like Douglas’s own costume. Even though Douglas couldn’t see his face, it seemed as if the Day Killer was looking at him, staring. That was all. Staring. And then three words trickled like sewer water out of the dark hole of the hood.
“Sick of sun.”
One single moment too late, Douglas jumped up to go to Audrey. The Day Killer moved with predator speed and grabbed him by the face, the skull mask coming off easily in his gloved hand and snapping in two as he closed his fist. His other hand grabbed Douglas’s arm, almost snapping it, as well. The Day Killer threw the fractured skull to the ground and began scrabbling through the leaves with his free hand, searching for the lost knife.
Douglas tried to pull away from the black mass of the serial killer, but couldn’t free himself. Instead, the killer pulled Douglas closer.
Then he lunged forward.
Douglas screamed.
The killer continued past him, falling to the ground. On his back, Audrey had one arm around his neck and the other slamming a fist into his hooded head as she pushed him to the ground with her entire body. She screamed, “Douglas, a D!” It was a strange battle cry, but her attack was effective. She’d caught the killer off-balance, one hand on Douglas and one stretched deep into the leaf cover. As he dropped face first to the ground with a muffled exclamation, his hand released Douglas.
Audrey jumped back and whispered, “Run.”
And they did.
Douglas ran despite every branch slapping him in the face and every root twisting at his ankle. Ran despite the fact that he could barely see a single stride in front of him. Ran despite the fact that his robe kept twisting around his legs, threatening to send him sprawling. Ran because it mattered. Ran … by himself.
He thought that he’d heard Audrey following, but a quick glance over his shoulder showed the black form of the killer growing bigger behind him, ready to swallow him up. Ready to cut a letter into his face.
Douglas ran faster.
But he could only run so far before his short legs would be overtaken by longer ones, or before his body collapsed in exhaustion.
He realized he had been running parallel to the edge of the forest, and could see houses and lawns lit by streetlamps and the general glow of the town reflected off the underside of the clouds. He made a sudden exit from the woods, cut fast through a backyard and around a house. Spying a row of close-set rhododendron bushes covered in fake spiderwebs lining the front of the house, he dived behind them and settled into a dark corner beside the porch.
As he crouched behind the bushes, each second a fraying cord tied to a guillotine blade, he waited for the strange panting, for grasping hands to plunge into the bushes, for a knife blade already red from the blood of his friend to slide easily through the leaves.
Finally, silence piled on silence until it was so heavy that he had to move to get out from under it. He inched himself around one of the bushes and parted a few branches with his fingers. The street was empty. The houses were dark. He looked toward the adjacent doorway, gauging the height of the raised porch and high railing that barred the shortest distance between him and it. Like the rest of the houses, it was also dark. But it was his nearest possible sanctuary.
Douglas slowly stood up. He summoned the courage to slip around the bushes and leap the front steps to the door when, down the road, in the ghostly light of a street lamp, he saw a silhouette that scared his breath down into his throat and buckled his knees, folding him silently back down into the dirt.
It was only a few seconds of terror because, like an afterimage floating behind the back of his eyelids, Douglas could see that the silhouette was off. Too thin. Too familiar. Too pointy.
It had horns.
A different kind of fear enveloped Douglas. Any second, the Day Killer would come streaking into the neighborhood, and there was Lowell, on the street, out in the open, completely unaware of how close the monster was.
So Douglas leapt from the bushes and took off after him.
Lowell, apparently startled by the dark-robed shape erupting out of the shadows, bolted down the street.
Douglas felt hard pavement slam under his sneakers as he chased after his friend. He wasn’t trying to catch up to him, not really. Just trying to get him out of the area. He didn’t want to yell after him fo
r fear that the killer would find them both. He just kept running.
Before the strange race had gone two blocks, Lowell stopped suddenly and turned around.
“You’re kind of small for a serial killer,” panted Lowell. “Why didn’t you say something?” He bent over to catch his breath, grabbing the horns off his head and the large dangling nose ring out of his nostrils before dropping them to the street, where they landed with soft clacks of plastic. He had lost the ax at some point, and the hole in the right elbow of his sweater had pulled into a long tear. A shallow red scratch ran down the length of his exposed forearm. “I lost the killer and Audrey. I called Dad, but I couldn’t just wait around. I’ve been trying to find … anybody.”
Douglas eyed the open street around them. “I found her. She got away. I think she’s okay, but she ran off in a different direction than me. Right now, though, we’ve got to keep going. He’s here. The Day Killer. Somewhere nearby. He chased me out of the forest.”
“All right. Your house is probably closer.” Lowell pointed down the road in the opposite direction.
A direction from which a large hooded figure was barreling toward them.
The boys flew. Terror feathered their arms and the black street beneath their sneakers liquefied into a blurring torrent of tar. Lowell, with his longer legs, took the lead, but without even speaking to each other, they both knew where they were headed.
Soon, the large, familiar black gates loomed in front of them. The murderer had made almost the entire town of Cowlmouth seem alien to Douglas and Lowell, but the cemetery—Cowlmouth Cemetery—was their park, their backyard, their playground, their haven. Douglas and Lowell knew the stones of that final resting place as intimately as if every one of them marked the grave of a family member.
They veered away from the locked front gates toward the low side wall of the cemetery. Tonight, the entire wall of Cowlmouth Cemetery was alive with faces. Arranged across the top of the stone divider was a line of leering, grinning, scowling, grimacing jack-o’-lanterns. It was a town tradition. Inside, many of the graves would be sprouting miniature pumpkins instead of the usual memoriam of flowers. Halloween was a great night to remember the dead.