What October Brings

  Should he go in? No. But then again, this guy said he could turn the damn thing down some, and he needed help doing it.

  McGrue growled to himself and shook his head, but he went up the stairs.

  Inside, he found that Tillinghast had already unpacked the bag in a space behind two humming, circular microwave transmission drums, facing the front windows. There were three metal “drums”, each ten feet across. Tillinghast was setting up a tripod.

  “Hand me that thing that looks a bit like a small movie projector, if you please, Mr. McGrue…very good.” He fitted it onto the top of the tripod, and tightened wingnuts to hold it in place. “This is my own new variation of my grandfather’s resonance manipulator. I will be testing it shortly…Ha ha, can you feel the intense electromagnetic field here? Even Tesla would have been impressed. Grandfather knew Tesla, you know, they corresponded…”

  “Nikolai Tesla! And your grandfather?”

  “Yes. My grandfather was Crawford Tillinghast.” He adjusted the manipulator and swiveled it. “You have perhaps heard of him?”

  “I don’t believe so. This humming…this place is giving me a headache…Smells like something’s burning…”

  “Crawford Tillinghast was a great scientific genius. His work was suppressed, by the usual bumpkins. I managed to find a way to adapt his system in a more…what is the contemporary expression? Ah! A more ‘user friendly’ way, ha ha! I will induce a localized resonance wave with this device. But it will be limited to a small area in front of the projector. Hand me that octagonal crystal there, please…”

  That peculiarly giddy look on Tillinghast’s face, and his odd tendency to articulate each syllable in a burst of laughter—it made McGrue uneasy. “You say your grandfather developed the, um, the prototype of what you have here? It’s kinda funny, you working for the cell phone transmission company, and using something in the job that was developed by your grandfather…”

  “Funny? Yes! Ha ha!” He clapped his hands together once and wrung them in quiet delight. “Now, I’ve got the booster ready—and we have the proper convergence of wave-transmissions. I believe we can run a short test, Mr. McGrue!”

  McGrue’s mouth felt dry. He felt hot and unsteady. “You feel kind of nauseated? Headachy?”

  “Oh, that’s merely the radiation. We’ll soon be done here, for today and the effect will pass. Please be good enough to hold this attenuator…”

  He passed McGrue a device that looked like a microphone with two crystal spikes sticking to the sides at the top. “Now, Mr. McGrue, if you will hold that device out at arm’s length…Just take a step back…a foot more…that’s it…and…hold it steady, a trifle higher…” Tillinghast looked through an eyepiece atop the device that resembled a little movie projector. “Ah ha! It’s coming…”

  A translucent shimmer emitted from the “projector”. A loud repetitive thudding sound shook the walls, followed by a hum that filled the world. Then, over the floor near the front door an oval shape glimmered, rippled, and formed what looked like a window…

  Through the vertical oval, McGrue could see a squirming thing resembling a giant centipede with a human head. Above it fluttered a baby with batwings flashing a long black tongue at another creature that was something like a jellyfish with legs. The odd tableau was lit by a sickly green luminosity.

  McGrue was coming to the conclusion that Tillinghast was definitely not a cell phone tower repairman.

  Something squished into view, within the oval. It was like a giant slug, big as a bear. It reared up, its front end opened and it inhaled the flying baby, swallowed it down, and then galumphed off.

  “Oh, my dear God,” McGrue said. Surely this was an illusion, a video projection, something unreal…

  Flying, transparent, wormlike creatures, long as a man’s arm, whipped through the green air in the other world. They squirmed in the air, spitting sparks. Beyond the flying worms was a mist the dull-green of mold—the mist parted, then, to reveal a faintly glowing metal cage. Standing in the cage was a young man, quite human, waving frantically at them…

  “There he is!” Tillinghast crowed. “My assistant! I am relieved to see he’s safe. The repulsor cage is holding up! I’m coming, Syl! I’ll be there soon! Hold on!”

  Then something that looked like a reptilian goat standing on its hind legs stepped up, within the oval, and blocked the view. It was a goat, a man, a snake all at once. It turned to look through the oval with the wickedest eyes McGrue had ever seen. It hissed and bounded forward, then stopped to sniff the air, squatted as if preparing to leap through…It thrust out a scaly hand red and yellow hand, reaching through the oval, into the room with McGrue and Tillinghast.

  McGrue, paralyzed with shock, shouted wordlessly.

  Tillinghast said, “Don’t worry, I’ll shut it off, it won’t get through! I hope…”

  “The Hell with this!” McGrue forced himself to move. He dropped the attenuator and turned to stagger toward the rail-less staircase leading to the second floor. He pounded up the creaking wooden steps, feeling as if that thing with the murderous look on its face was going to pounce on him from behind at any moment. He reached the second floor where another set of microwave drums aimed at the front windows. A dormer window looked out on the weedy backyard. He kicked at the glass, it shattered, he knocked out the ragged bits with an elbow and climbed through, in his hurry moving as lithely as a young man. There was a ladder from the roof line under the window. He scrambled down it to the overgrown grass, and ran, puffing like a locomotive, for his own house.

  ***

  The next night.

  Halloween was barely less boring than any other damn night, Brian thought. It was cold up here, it was dark, the crickets were calling, some owl was hooting. Whatever. He wanted to be somewhere else, where there was light, and music, maybe dancing. But all he had was this place, and these guys.

  He and the new kid Terry and that older kid Lon and his cousin Bud, and little Rudy who trailed after Bud, were all staring at Old Man McGrue’s house hoping he’d come outside to get egged. That’s what they had in mind this year.

  Lon especially liked to go after McGrue, because a few years ago the old guy had tried to get Lon arrested after he chased Andy McGrue off the top of the hill. Brian hadn’t been there, but he’d heard about it. Andy was eight years old, dressed like a fairy—his mom had put fairy wings on him for some reason—and that got Lon and the others making fun of him and Andy’d told them to shut up and they’d chased him, throwing rocks at him, and he’d fallen down a steep hillside, cracked into a rock and….boom, brain damage. So now he had to wear a special helmet and go to a special school and McGrue blamed Lon, calling him the ringleader. Which actually sounded like Lon. So, Lon had been taken to court and his attorney got him off, saying Lon was just a rambunctious eleven-year-old kid.

  So here they were, three years later, with a lot of old eggs. They crouched near the weird house with the machine guts in it, and Brian just did not like to be here. He felt the house putting off pulsations, waves, or something. Whatever it was, it was making him feel kind of sick to his stomach.

  And he could hear it. Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum. And then would come HUM HUM HUM and then back to Hum. Hum. Hum….

  Maybe it was the pot he’d smoked with his Lon’s brother Tommy, but it sure seemed like the hums had another sound in them. Like…Hum—hurt you. Hum—hurt you. Hum—hurt you.

  Imagination, that part. Right? But the humming itself was something everyone heard. That’s why Bud thought it was funny to call the place the Hummer.

  “I’m sicka hanging here,” he said. “Lon—let’s go around behind his house, throw the eggs at his window!”

  “Naw, he’s got it all fenced really good, hard to get over, barb wire along the top. Too high to see over.” Lon spat some of the smokeless tobacco he swiped from his dad. It was already making his teeth brown. “He’
d hear us. Probably got a shotgun.”

  “He totally has a shotgun,” Bud said.

  “Oooh, a shotgun, cooooool,” said young Rudy.

  “You’ll think it’s ‘cool’ when it blasts your nuts off,” said Terry, the tall, goopy looking new kid.

  Rudy just looked at him with his mouth open, his big eyes goggling. Brian had to laugh at that.

  “I got another idea,” Lon said. “There’s a ladder out back of the Hummer. We go up on the roof of the Hummer, we pitch the eggs high, so they hit his roof. He’ll come outside to see what the hell, then we pepper him with ‘em!”

  “I don’t wanna go up on this thing,” Brian said. He heard a new sound, then, from the house—a clattering metal sound. Was someone in there? “I heard something…”

  “You’re being all scared little bitch on Halloween?” Lon sneered, showing his big mouthful of huge brown teeth with braces on them and too much gums. “’Oh, there’s ghosts in the scary house!’”

  “Fuck off!”

  Lon looked at him, teeth bared in a different way now. “You want to get your ass kicked?”

  Brian, who was thirteen, was almost as big as Lon, and not bad in a fight. “Don’t be so sure how that’d turn out, dude.”

  “Oh, come on, Brian,” Terry said. “Let’s do it. Then we can put on the stupid masks and get our goddamn candy and see if Dee’s having a party.”

  “I don’t think we’re invited to that. But whatever.” It was some kind of a plan. And he was no fan of McGrue, who’d yelled at him for skateboarding around a supermarket parking lot.

  “Goddamn candy, hells-yeah,” said little Rudy, making them all laugh.

  Some people thought Brian and Lon were too old to trick-or-treat, but dude, free candy is free candy, especially good after a hit on a bong, and Brian had a mask in his coat pocket of Donald Trump with fangs.

  “Come on,” Lon said, and led the way around back. There was a ladder fixed to the back of the house, so workers could go up to that big metal utility box on the backside of the roof. It was tricky getting the four cartons of eggs up, and one fell, busting most of the shells.

  But they managed to get three cartons up, and then Lon said, “Whoa! The windows busted out!”

  It was true, the back-dormer window had been shattered, and there was broken glass on the roof.

  “I think I heard someone in there, before,” Brian said.

  “This shit was probably done a long fucking time ago,” Lon said. He had his cheap rubber Scream mask hanging from its rubber band down his back, till it was time for trick or treating, and Brian felt a clutching feeling in his gut from the way the mask was looking at him. Like some evil face just lived on Lon’s back. “They’re gone,” Lon went on, looking inside. “Let’s check it out. Might be some stuff we can sell. My uncle sells metal stuff. Leave the egg cartons on the roof.”

  Caught up in a sense of adventure made sharper by Halloween, the others followed Lon inside. Brian hesitated—then decided he had to go along or he’d never hear the end of it.

  Inside, those big humming metal drums that pointed out over the valley. And there was another row of them downstairs. “Man, that shit is loud tonight,” Terry said.

  Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum. HUM HUM HUM HUM.

  They looked around, saw nothing but stuff they were afraid to touch. Lon led them to the exposed-wood stairs going down to the first floor—and they all stared down at the man in the funny old suit.

  He had a short white beard, a gray cap, and muddy shoes, and he was adjusting something that looked like an old movie projector on a tripod. A little ways away a microphone-type thing with something like crystals on it hung from a string. It was glowing…

  “I told you somebody was in here!” Brian burst out, louder than he intended.

  The character tinkering with the gizmo turned and looked up at them. “It’s ready to go!” he called, shouting over the rising hum. “I must open the way! Get out, the way you came! Get out! Stay away! It’ll shut soon and you’ll be all right if you just go!”

  “Fucking burglar telling us to get out!” Lon shouted. There was something strange about Lon’s voice. And there was something strange about Lon’s face. It was twitching. And his eyes seemed like an animal’s, and he was breathing really hard.

  “That guy might have a gun!” Terry yelled.

  Lon was putting his mask on, maybe thinking of scaring the burglar away so he could take all his stuff….

  He started down the stairs.

  But now Brian was looking at the space in front of the tripod machine. It was glowing. It was an oval kind of picture of something hanging in space in front of the closed front door. Through it, Brian could see another place,

  “It’s one of those Halloween gimmicks people put up to scare you!” Bud yelled. “It’s bullshit! It’s like a video!”

  But Brian plain did not believe that. It didn’t just look real, it felt real—he could feel that place from here. It was like he could touch those things from a distance. And they felt nasty.

  It was some other…real…place—where electric snakes flew around, and a giant slug wriggled by—and a little way further in, there was a man in a cage, waving.

  Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum—HURT YOU. HUM-HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU.

  “I’m coming, Syl!” the burglar yelled. “I’m coming! Open the repulsor!” He rushed at the oval…and jumped through. He was there, in the place beyond, dodging a flying giant worm, sprinting to the cage—which opened up to receive him. The cage floated upward, carrying the two figures away from the portal.

  But something was coming at the portal—like it was outside a window and about to break through to Brian and the other kids. It was reptilian goatish thing saying, “HUM. HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU.”

  And now it was leaping through, and other things came with it, and Little Rudy was screaming as Lon picked Rudy up and carried him like a sack of potatoes under his arm down the stairs toward the portal…

  Was Lon insane going down there?

  Brian forced himself to look away and scrambled up the stairs, yelling, “Come on, you guys!”

  He heard Bud and Terry and Rudy screaming. But he couldn’t go back. The look on that thing’s face…that much pure evil, that much rage, that much lust for killing…You see something like that, you ran.

  In seconds Brian was through the window, down the ladder and sprinting to find the nearest help.

  ***

  McGrue called Mary Sue again, and again she didn’t answer, and then he remembered that last year she’d taken her grand nieces to a Halloween party for kids at the YWCA and that’s probably where she was tonight. He only had her land-line number, didn’t know her cell. Dammit. She might listen to him—she knew him well enough to know he wasn’t crazy. Cranky, sure. Crazy, no.

  He was having a hard time thinking things through right now. He needed to talk to someone. That hum seemed to get louder and louder. McGrue had barely slept the night before. And when he had slept—nothing but nightmares.

  If he could talk to Mary Sue…

  He hadn’t gone out since he’d seen those things in Tillinghast’s window. He just felt like he was too shaken up. He needed to process what he’d seen. Some kind of trick photography? A prank? But somehow, he knew…it just wasn’t that.

  For the dozenth time he thought about calling the cops. And again, he told himself they’d only laugh at him, or they’d investigate and find nothing, because Tillinghast had shut the thing down and gone away.

  But Tillinghast was coming back.

  McGrue figured he could drive away somewhere. But he had lived next to Mary Sue for years, he liked her, and he couldn’t leave her with that door into hell going on within spitting distance of her house.

  So, he lay huddled in his bed, in his bedroom, listening, thinking. The house lights were out except for
a lamp in the back bedroom. No trick or treaters bothering him so far.

  Then—he heard faint screams. Kids yelling for the hell of it? Or something else?

  It seemed to him the humming from the fake house was getting louder…and louder still. The windows began to softly vibrate in their frames.

  And a knock came at the door. Someone was yelling out there.

  “Mr. McGrue!”

  This was something he could deal with—a Halloween prank. He’d open the door, keeping the screen closed, and tell them the cops were coming, and then he’d point the unloaded shotgun to scare them away.

  Energized by having something solid to confront, McGrue grabbed the 12-gauge from the closet, and went to the front door.

  He hefted the shotgun in his most threatening manner, opened the door

  —and saw Brian Worth, that kid with the skateboard he’d given a talking to, standing on the porch, panting, mouth and eyes wide open.

  Beyond him were some kind of Halloween costumed kids or…

  No.

  Those weren’t costumes. That thing that was like a boneless human being moving across the grass like a snake, rippling its way to his house—that thing with the face of a boy he’d seen on the street, glowing a faint sickly green.

  And the flying creature, the size of a large owl, an infant with large batwings of human flesh, its face contorted—another child’s face. It was flying in a zig-zag moth way toward his window.

  And that one, a slug with a human face, glowing from within in purple-green coruscations. That was not a costumed child.

  Tillinghast was at it again. He’d made an error. He’d let them through…

  And there, the goat-headed lizard man McGrue had seen through the portal—head of a snake-skinned goat, body of a nude scaly man, hooves…loping toward McGrue’s house. And on its chest, fused there, was a mask from that movie Scream, and as Brian turned to look the mask’s mouth opened and showed big teeth and big gums and braces. The boy Lon—melded with the mask.

  “Oh fucking shit shit shit, it’s got Lon inside it!—”