Todd took pictures.
“Do you want to know the best thing I saw, in the Black Chapel?” Todd asked. “I saw God. No shit. I was an agnostic… I guess that’s why I saw God… and heard Him… constantly. Telling me what was good and what was evil and making His miracles until I ate rat poison, just to shut Him up.
“God is just one of its masks, Pastor Gary. It never created anything but misery, but it sure likes to be called God… But you know what? The Devil isn’t God’s enemy. He’s just the garbageman. And we’re the garbage. Maybe behind our masks, we’re all God, burning ourselves….”
“That’s enough, Gary. I know you’ve been through a lot, but I won’t hear your blasphemy—”
“You already know it, Gary! You didn’t build this place to save people. You just want to rub their noses in where they’re going. But where are you going, Gary?”
No more.
Gary punched out with his fist. The box cutter made a neat slot in Todd’s neck just below his ear.
Blood sluiced down the front of his shirt. His voice was a relentless, breathless locust buzz. “God doesn’t want our love… It just wants to watch us burn… and hear us say its name… Do you know God’s true name, Gary?”
Gary stabbed him in the neck again.
Todd fell backwards, gasping, “You finally saved somebody.” He staggered out of the corridor and collided with a man in a cheap devil costume, who screamed like a little girl and knocked him down.
Gary turned and ran, rushing to the empty crimson throne that loomed over the three chutes that exited the hell house, but he couldn’t remember which was for the saved, which for the damned and which was the one for really bad kids. He dove into the middle one and closed his eyes and he was sliding and then he spilled out into darkness and kept running—
He was running, he was so scared he’d dropped his candy, somewhere back there, but he was never going back for it.
It was the first Halloween he was big enough to go trick-or-treating on his own. Dad helped him with his costume. The ones in the store were silly, he pointed out. The real Wolf Man would never run around in a rubber jumpsuit with a picture of himself on the front that said “The Wolfman” on it. He dressed Gary up in old torn up clothes, and swaddled his arms and legs in strips of an old, moth-eaten bearskin rug, painted his face with brown shoe polish.
Gary was beside himself with glee. He was scary! He was the Wolf Man! He’d never have a nightmare again, never wet the bed after watching monster movies on weekends. He was the monster, now. The world would cower in fear of him.
He went out with an old Space: 1999 pillowcase, growling in the back of his throat. He told his dad he was meeting friends, but knew Dad wasn’t fooled. Gary Horton had no friends. But the Wolf Man needed no friends.
The first house he came to, there was a garden party on the lawn. A bunch of people in funny costumes were drinking and carrying on over his costume, he was the most adorable werewolf of the night. They told him to go ring the doorbell for his treat.
He went up on the porch and pushed the button. The door opened. He looked up and wet his pants.
Its skull was a black orchid that opened and breathed mist in his face. A straight-razor claw unfolded from its radiator ribcage to hold out a box of Cracker Jacks.
Gary stumbled backwards on the porch, stepped in an overripe pumpkin and lost his balance. He fell on the ragged old couch on the porch, sank into it, felt the cushions tense underneath him like muscles, felt its arms wrap around him and clasp over his pounding heart—
He hurled himself off the couch, stumbled down the porch and across the lawn, explosively wailing and hot piss splashing down the insides of his legs.
Behind him, a big grown-up got up off the couch, wrapped in the old sheet covering it, and ran after him screaming, “Fucking kid peed on me!”
Gary ran to the edge of the property and turned around. The adults were all bent over with laughter, dropping drinks and swatting each other on the back. Dracula and Darth Vader and Wonder Woman and kids in stupid rubber costumes that said “Barbie” and “The Creature From The Black Lagoon” on the front laughed and pointed and laughed.
“Thanks for being a good sport, kid.” An old man in a pirate outfit tried to give him a fistful of Tootsie Rolls, but Gary’s terror had already turned to hot, righteous rage.
“All of you can go burn in Hell!” he shouted, and he ran, he was running, he was almost home, but he had no home, but next Halloween, he’d show them all—
Gary crashed through the turnstile at the exit to the Devil’s Dungeon. Wenda and Leah were taking the tickets. Burt looked at him expectantly.
“Something wrong, boss?” Burt asked, toothbrush clamped in his teeth as he discreetly averted his eyes.
Gary pulled the cape across his velvet pants to hide the wet spot. His heart was still pounding, but—
None of it was real, it was just a vision. But not of the future, he knew that. It was just a vision to test his resolve.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, looking out over the crowd of monsters and mistakes and empty vessels waiting to see the light. Or at least the fire…
“Open the doors,” said the Devil. And in his heart, he prayed for the strength to show them where they were going.
That Small, Furry, Sharp-toothed Thing
Paul Dale Anderson
Some smart marketing genius labeled the “new this year” Brown Jenkin Halloween Costume: “Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s scariest character ever.” Which wasn’t exactly true, but one seldom expected truth in advertising.
Brown Jenkin appeared briefly as a minor fictional character in Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” published by Weird Tales in 1932. He was a small, furry, sharp-toothed witch’s familiar, part king-sized rat and part tiny human that supposedly died at the end of the story. He was scary. But nowhere near as scary as most of Lovecraft’s other creations.
Consisting of little more than a child-sized—one-size-fits-all-children ages three through ten—zippered synthetic-fiber bag with oval holes for arms, legs, and face to fit through, each Brown Jenkin costume came covered with what felt like real brown-colored human hair. The brown was an odd hue, like rust on nails or stains from dried blood.
Each cheaply-made costume sold for under twenty dollars. That coarse brown hair had to be fake fur. Although strands did look and feel like real human hair, there weren’t enough heads in the whole world to provide all that hair.
The accompanying feral face-mask appeared human-shaped with two oversized plastic fangs, not unlike a vampire’s, and those teeth also looked and felt incredibly sharp and real. The mask sold separately for an additional nine-ninety-five. Kids loved the costume because the combined effect was breathtakingly menacing. Few if any children, or even their parents, had ever read a word of H. P. Lovecraft’s actual works. But the name itself—familiar from television, motion pictures, and derivative mythos tales—invoked an unexplained chill, as if Lovecraft and Halloween and inescapable horror were synonymous.
Those marketing gurus certainly picked a winner this year. Brown Jenkin costumes sold out within a week of initially going on sale. Orders continued to pour in by the truckload, and sweatshops in the Far East added multitudes of 24/7 shifts of child laborers to be worked to death to meet demand.
As evidenced by a man-sized mouse with big saucer-shaped black ears who greeted kids at fantasy theme parks, children worldwide possessed a natural fascination with anthropomorphized rodents. On the night of All-Hallows’ Eve, they would eagerly don Brown Jenkin costumes to become little sharp-toothed furry things. I refused to allow my own two children to be among them.
You see, I’d actually read the entire Necronomicon as a graduate student in Massachusetts, back when I worked part-time as Library Assistant in the archives of Miskatonic University Library. I knew Brown Jenkin wasn’t the Dev
il’s pawn.
He was Cthulhu’s.
I dared not permit my own children to dress and act as Nyarlathotep’s messenger on a night when veils between worlds were thinnest. Although eight-year-old Davey and seven-year-old Julie pleaded and begged, cried and cajoled, and finally threatened, I steadfastly refused.
Linda, my blissfully ignorant wife, chided me for being overly harsh and rigid. “Why not let Davey and Julie enjoy a pagan holiday? What’s the harm in it, John? Let them have fun while they’re young. Heaven knows, they’ll grow up soon enough.”
“No,” I said, remaining resolute.
Little did Linda know that I, in my own impressionable youth, became so enamored of Lovecraft’s weird tales of elder gods and witchcraft I fervently sought out forbidden books—the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junz—to read first-hand in their original incantations at Arkham. My duties as a student Library Assistant required me to accompany scholars researching those ancient texts into the archive’s vaults to assure they did not steal or damage priceless and irreplaceable artifacts. Many tried to do so. Therefore, I was required to leaf through each book or manuscript while wearing pristine white gloves before returning the work to its designated shelf. Of course, I read whenever possible.
By the time I graduated, I’d digested them all. I knew, for a fact, the fabled Lovecraftian mythos was not pure myth but hinted at a truth far beyond human understanding. There are indeed more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophies.
Lovecraft was, however, wrong about one essential. The oldest and strongest kind of fear was not fear of the unknown but fear of the known. Knowing what to expect and knowing there was nothing I, or anyone, could do to stop it from occurring, wasn’t simply horrifying but utterly terrifying.
As Halloween approached, fear gripped me with icy tentacles. Incredible visions—daydreams and nightmares—filled my head, awakened weird memories in the back of my brain. I grew feverish. Linda complained I cried out often and talked nonsense in my sleep.
Only I was certain it was far from nonsense. It was prophecy.
Each trip to the local pharmacy, grocery, or department store brought me face to face with sold-out Brown Jenkin displays near the front of a store. “We can’t keep them in stock,” a harried clerk at checkout informed the young mother in line ahead of me. “As soon as we get a new shipment in, it sells out. Come back next week. We may have more then.”
Television stations blasted Brown Jenkin commercials incessantly, at least every quarter hour, and my poor children were constantly bombarded with images of small, furry, sharp-toothed things toting bags overflowing with delicious treats on Halloween night. Davey and Julie wanted to be exactly like those kids in the commercials. They grew to hate me. I could feel resentment eating away at our already fragile parent-child relationship.
“You’re being totally irrational,” Linda said, repeatedly taking their side against me. “What harm is there, really, in dressing up for Halloween? Everyone does it, for Christ’s sake! You’re acting like a superstitious fool, John, making life miserable for all of us.”
She didn’t know what I knew. How could I tell her? How could I make her see what I saw?
“Too many fever dreams,” she would say. “You’re not well, John. You must see a doctor.”
“A shrink? You think I’m crazy? You think I need a psychiatrist?”
“You need something. Something to help you sleep. Go see a regular doctor. Maybe a physician can give you a prescription. You haven’t slept soundly for months, not since Halloween displays first appeared in stores. You toss and turn. You cry out. Sometimes you get out of bed to wander around like a zombie, and when you wake you have no memory of where you went or what you did. That’s not good, John. You can’t go on like this. I can’t go on like this. If you don’t see a doctor, I’ll take the kids and leave.”
Reluctantly, I agreed to see a doctor. Not today, but soon. I promised. Scout’s honor. “Hope to die if I lie,” I told her.
As the days passed and each night became dark longer than the night before, I grew ever more anxious, more fearful. I was certain something cataclysmic was about to happen. Those Brown Jenkin costumes were but a portent of terrible things to come.
Visions of giant rats and bloodied children filled my feverish dreams. I swore my children would not be among those sacrificed on All Hallows’ Eve. I would prevent it. Or I would die trying.
No matter how much they cajoled, pleaded, cried, or acted out, I stuck to my guns. No Brown Jenkin costumes for Davey and Julie. If they wanted to dress up for Halloween, they should dress like Count Dracula or Cinderella. I really didn’t care if they celebrated Halloween this year or any other. All I cared about was keeping my children out of the clutches of Cthulhu and his minions.
For was it not written in those ancient texts that on certain nights like All Hallows’ Eve, doors between worlds opened wide and the call of Great Cthulhu could be plainly heard by all creatures bearing the mark of the beast? In my visions, during my most fevered dreams, I saw children dressed as small, furry, sharp-toothed things responding to that call for sacrifice like rats dancing to the eerie tunes played by a fish-faced Pied Piper.
I dreaded Davey and Julie might be among them.
Linda kept insisting I see a doctor, and I finally relented and visited Doctor Jared Hornsby, our family physician. My boss told me to take a week of accrued vacation time to get well, because I sure as hell didn’t look good. He said my work had recently plunged downhill, and if I didn’t fix whatever was wrong, he’d be forced to fire me.
Doctor Hornsby determined my physical and mental health had rapidly deteriorated from recurrent panic attacks, diagnosed me as suffering from general anxiety and seasonal affective disorders, and prescribed powerful medications to help me relax and induce sleep. “Take two of these tiny tranquilizers in the morning and one of the huge horse pills every four hours.” He wrote another script for sleeping aids. “Take one tablet an hour before bedtime. You need to sleep, John, if you want to get well. These should do the trick. If they don’t, we’ll simply adjust the dosage until they do.”
I thanked the doctor and visited the local pharmacy to fill the three prescriptions. I couldn’t help but notice the store’s Brown Jenkin display had recently been replenished. When I came face to face with the object of my anxiety at checkout, the fear I felt threatened to consume me.
How could a child’s Halloween costume drive a grown man mad?
I don’t remember what I said. I don’t remember what I did. Later, I do remember police snapping handcuffs on my wrists and leading me to a patrol car, then placing protective hands on the crown of my head so I didn’t crack open my skull on a metal doorframe and sue the police department for brutality.
I was photographed, fingerprinted, and spent the night in jail. Linda bailed me out the next morning after she explained to authorities that I suffered from occasional panic attacks and I’d be fine once I began taking appropriate medication. In fact, I was in the pharmacy to pick up my prescriptions when I experienced another panic attack. I didn’t know what I was doing when I smashed the Halloween display, tore dozens of costumes to shreds, and nearly torched the entire store. Since it was obvious I was indeed ill, and I had no previous police record, I was released into my loving wife’s custody. Linda wrote a check for damages, and the pharmacy dropped all charges.
“What on earth got into you?” Linda demanded as she drove me home. “I swear, I don’t know you anymore, John. You’re not the man I married.”
She made me take all my meds. Then she put me to bed and left for her job downtown. If my job were in peril, she said, she definitely needed to retain hers.
Fortunately, I had the rest of the week off from work. I followed the doctor’s advice to the letter. I to
ok my prescribed medications religiously, got plenty of sleep, and began to feel more like myself.
Until, alone in the house all day while Linda was at work and Julie and Davey were in school, I perceived furtive scrapings and scratchings within the walls.
It sounded as if something tried desperately to get inside the bedroom from outside, something that couldn’t open doors but was nonetheless determined to reach and destroy me.
To tear me apart like I had torn those Brown Jenkin costumes apart.
One part of my mind said it was only my own overactive imagination while another part insisted the scratching noise was real. We lived in a nice, quiet middle-class neighborhood out in the landscaped suburbs, the house relatively new. Rats had never been a problem before. Why now? Why did I hear such noises only two days before Halloween?
I got out of bed and attempted to track those scraping and scratching sounds to their source. There! I heard it again! Scratching. Like tiny claws tearing away at drywall.
Our bedroom was on the second floor of a modern two-story Cape Cod. The children’s rooms were directly across the hall. Did rats climb? Had they climbed up inside the walls to get to me? To get at my children? Was no one safe? Was no place, not even the marital bed, sacred?
Don’t be silly, my rational brain coaxed. Maybe it’s time to take more meds. Double the dose. That’s what Doctor Hornsby would recommend. No need to call him. No need to shell out another co-pay. Just do it.
Get an axe, the other part of my brain urged. Rip into the walls and find the little bastards. Chop them up. Make mincemeat of them. Get them all before they get you.
Torn between two minds, I did nothing as the scratching sounds continued from within the walls.
Those clawing noises became even more frantic when the kids came home from school. They ceased entirely, however, when Linda arrived home from work shortly afterwards. She found me standing in the bedroom staring at the wall. The room was unearthly quiet.
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