What October Brings

  The snake-skinned goat-headed creature, the giant slug with a boy’s face, the snake-thing, coming across his lawn. And over them the flying child flashed by, shrieking, “Mamaaaaa!”, then circled to come around again. McGrue opened the screen door and shouted, “Brian get in here!”

  McGrue ran to the armoire he kept his shotgun shells in, as Brian rushed in to the house, slammed and locked the front door. McGrue filled his jacket pocket with shotgun shells, cursing to himself and not even sure what profanities he was using.

  With trembling fingers he loaded the gun as something shrieked in agony and hate just outside the front door. There was a crash from the living room window, and the flying infant flew in—it had a face of a child about seven but the body of an infant, the legs of a giant fly, and it swished back and forth shrieking for its mother.

  Instinctively, McGrue aimed at the flying infant—and then Brian yelled, “No, it’s Rudy!” and knocked the gun muzzle up just as McGrue squeezed the trigger. One shell fired and knocked a hole in the ceiling, so that the room choked with a cloud of plaster. The flying infant flew shrieking out the window

  —just as the door crashed inward, splintering, and then the snake boy was there, the size of an anaconda swaying in the doorway.

  At the broken window the goat-headed lizard man with the cackling Scream-face in its chest was climbing through, snarling, the goat hissing, “HUM. HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU. HUM—”

  McGrue pushed Brian aside and fired the second shell almost point blank into the Scream face.

  Lon’s mask face vanished in a welter of blood and yellow effluvia, and the goat-thing staggered back. McGrue thumbed in another shell and fired again.

  The thing threw its head back and howled, the howl combining with a roaringly loud background hum; a hum and a howl and a bellow of rage…

  McGrue reloaded the gun and the thing turned and fled across the lawn.

  Brian was throwing a brass vase at the snake. “Get out of here, Terry! He’ll kill you!”

  The snake turned and rippled into the shadows out front.

  Heart pounding, McGrue, ran through the door. Time seemed to move in staccato flashes. From somewhere, a siren screamed, seamless with the sound from the goat-headed thing rushing into the fake house. And McGrue heard, “HUM. HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU. YOU. YOU…”

  McGrue ran across the lawn, through the gate, and it seemed to take forever for him to reach the house. His lungs and knees ached. He just knew he had to kill that thing, had to send it definitely away from this world forever…

  The front door of the false house was open, waves of energy rolled through it, invisible but palpable, like a current trying to press McGrue back. But he pushed upstream, climbed the stairs, entered the house—and saw the goat-headed thing turn toward him, hissing, in front of the shimmering portal.

  “You’re the one changed those kids!” McGrue shouted, even as the realization came to him. He fired one barrel from the hip and the thing was knocked off its hooved feet, backwards through the portal. The second shot he aimed at the projector.

  It shattered, in a coruscation of sparks, and the portal vanished. Then the projector burst into flame—and the flame seemed to feed on the very air, spreading out, coming at McGrue in a wall of fire.

  He turned, stumbled out the door, almost fell down the steps. Brian was there, now, steadying him, helping him down.

  The light of the fire made the circular street area as bright as day, and McGrue felt the heat on the back of his neck.

  Brian helped him back to the house…and he saw three kids curled up in the grass. They were moving, but shaking, weeping. But back to human again.

  Brian went to kneel by the smallest one—Rudy, was it?—and McGrue found his way into the house, tossed his shotgun on the sofa, and sank down beside it, gasping.

  ***

  Four days later. McGrue woke up groggy, the sleeping pill still with him. What was that sound?

  Hammering, from the front of the house.

  He pulled on his pants, and came out into the living room, to find plywood over the front window, someone nailing it in place from the outside.

  McGrue went to the front porch and found Brian, nails in his mouth, a stepladder set up, nailing up the last corner of the plywood.

  “Kid, what the hell?”

  Brian climbed off the stepladder and took the nails from his mouth. He shrugged ruefully. “I…um…you had flies and stuff getting into your house. Mary Sue said it’d be okay. She loaned me the ladder.”

  “Oh, she did, did she.” He went to look. Was surprised. “You did a good job. Not a crooked nail. The whole thing’s squared. Nailed minimally because…temporary. Where’d you learn that?”

  “My dad was a construction guy. He taught me some. I always thought I might want…”

  “What?”

  “To be a carpenter. Or something. Maybe make cabinets.”

  “No kidding?” McGrue rubbed his forehead. “Damn I need coffee. Well—thanks, Brian. I should’ve done that myself. And you did a good job, I gotta admit.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. McGrue.” The kid beamed at the compliment.

  Mary Sue came to the gate, and, despite his pajama top, pants with no shoes, and rumpled hair, McGrue walked out through the crisp November morning to join her. They looked at the burned-out shell of the cell-phone transmitter house.

  “The police been back?” she asked.

  “Naw, they went with the kids smoking pot and seeing things and an electrical fire. That’s the official line. And that Lon kid vandalizing my house.”

  “He still hasn’t turned up.”

  McGrue thought, And he never will. But he didn’t say it. He and Brian had decided, that night, they shouldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Neither wanted to be ridiculed. And neither wanted to think about that night any more than they had to. The three other boys didn’t remember much of anything.

  “Looks like the boy did a good job blocking up your window.”

  “Yeah. I guess…I could teach him some stuff. He’s got talent. Maybe want to learn more about woodworking…”

  “McGrue—is that icy heart of yours melting? It’s going to run down onto your shoes.”

  He laughed softly. “I don’t know.” He smoothed down his hair with a hand. “I must look like a bum. I should go in and clean up. Maybe you and the kid could come over for, I don’t know, hot chocolate.”

  A teenage couple was walking down the sidewalk together, hand in hand, their other hands occupied by their cell phones. They gazed fixedly at the cell phone screens. They passed McGrue and Mary Sue, never looking up from their phones.

  And as they passed, McGrue heard a sound from the phone speakers. The same from both phones…

  “HUM. HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU.”

  Cosmic Cola

  Lucy A. Snyder

  Millie leaned her forehead against the back window of her stepfather’s new Toyota van, morosely watching the weather-beaten, navy-on-white “Welcome to Marsh Landing!” sign approach and recede. Welcome to what? There was little but some bone-white dunes and shuttered, peeling bait shacks so far. Nothing she’d learned about the isolated coastal town in her school’s library made her feel any better about moving here. Population: twenty thousand. Primary export: fish and Cosmic Cola. Total Dullsville. It was probably one of those stuffy communities that forbade trick-or-treat at Halloween. Marsh Middle School was barely half the size of her old school and didn’t have any Girl Scouts troops she could join. It didn’t even have an orchestra. She’d only just started playing violin and already she was going to have to quit, probably.

  Quitters never got anywhere in life. That’s what her grandfather Ernest always used to tell her anyhow, before he had a stroke and quit living. In the months before he died, he’d argue about physics when he was alone in his room, as if the em
pty walls were his audience. She could play her violin in her room and pretend she had an audience, she supposed, but her bedroom walls wouldn’t tell her if she dropped a note, or if her bowing was scratchy, or if her phrasing was awkward. So even if she kept going on her own, she wasn’t sure she’d get anywhere anyway.

  If she was honest with herself, giving up violin didn’t bother her nearly as much as the notion of giving up Halloween. It was her favorite holiday, even better than Christmas, though she could never say that out loud. Her mom would say it wasn’t ladylike to prefer Halloween over Jesus’ birthday. And her love for it wasn’t just because of trick-or-treating. It was the one night when all the things she dreamed of seemed like they could actually become real. The one night when she didn’t have to always be nice and demure and could be something besides a girl from a little town in a flyover state. She could be a ghost. A witch. A werewolf. Something mythical, something to be feared and respected. Running down the street in her costume, she could close her eyes in the frosty fall air and just for a moment imagine that plastic teeth and waxy paints were enamel and skin, and she could go anywhere at all that she wanted on her own. What was Christmas compared to the chilly frisson of becoming?

  “Gimme!” On the middle seat, her little half-brother Travis reached for his twin sister’s Cabbage Patch doll.

  “Nooo!” Tiffany hugged the doll to her chest and turned away from her brother’s grabby hands. “Mooom!”

  “Leave your sister’s toys alone.” Their mother’s tone was one of utter exhaustion. Was exhaustion an emotion, or the lack of it? Millie wasn’t sure. “Play with your Star Wars figures.”

  “Fifty,” Millie announced.

  “What?” Her mother turned in her seat and squinted at her tiredly.

  “That’s the fiftieth time you’ve said those exact words on this trip.”

  Her mother’s lips twitched into a half-smile. “You counted?”

  “I did.” Millie couldn’t keep the satisfaction out of her voice. She was very good at counting. Last year she’d won a fifty-dollar gift certificate in a contest at Harmon’s Grocery to guess how many jellybeans were in a big jar, and was a little sad afterward when she found out that since she won once she couldn’t compete again. She’d missed the count by two hundred and forty eight, and was sure she could have done even better the next time.

  Her stepfather cleared his throat, obviously annoyed. “Doesn’t Madame Curie have a book to read?”

  Her mother shot him a dirty look but didn’t say anything. Millie felt her face grow hot. Her stepfather had started calling her “Madame Curie” after she won the school science fair with her homemade electrolysis set. And at first it had seemed like a nice thing, as if after five years of being her stepfather he was starting to like her a little bit and to be proud of her accomplishments, like he was proud of Tiffany and Travis. After all, Marie Curie was the only person in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences! So calling her Madame Curie couldn’t really be a bad thing, could it? But the way he started saying it after the first couple of times … it tasted like a razor blade inside a Tootsie Roll. But if she said anything, he’d just accuse her of not being able to take a compliment. Of not having a sense of humor. Of being a brat.

  “I had a book to read,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady, “and I read it.”

  “Then you should have brought more.” His tone was hard as the pavement beneath his van’s black tires.

  “I brought four. And I read them all.” Her heart was beating so fast her vision was starting to twitch.

  The twins had gone silent in the seat in front of her, like nest-bound fledglings beneath the shadow of a hawk.

  “You did not read four books in the past six hours.” He stared at her in the rearview mirror, his gaze as steady as any raptor’s.

  “Did, too.” She grabbed her library book sale copies of Bunnicula, Superfudge, Blubber, and From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and held them up so he could see them. “I read them cover to cover. Ask me about them. Ask me anything.”

  She wasn’t lying, and she knew that he hadn’t enough of a clue about any of the books to even begin to question her about them. He’d made it clear he considered them to be kids’ books, girl books, and he was a man. A man with a brand-new van and a fancy important job. Nothing in the books could interest him, so why bother? The idea of seeking a subject to discuss with his stepdaughter was so far from his orbit it could take him millennia to discover it.

  “If you were so busy reading back there, how could you possibly know what your mother said to the twins?” There was a talon of warning in his tone: she had better stop challenging him, or else.

  Or else what? she wondered bitterly. Or else you’ll take me away from everything I care about and drop me in some dumpy awful town that probably stinks of fish? Just because you got a job at some stupid soft drink company?

  Why couldn’t he have gone away to work and left them where they were? Other dads did that to keep from uprooting their families. But her half-siblings weren’t in school yet, so she was the only one being uprooted. Her real father had brought her mother to Greensburg so they could be closer to his father, and Mom hadn’t liked it there since Grandpa Ernest died. She said that seeing his old room every day made her feel sad. And Millie wanted her mom to be happy. She did. But … ugh.

  “I can count and read at the same time,” she replied defiantly.

  “Hey, look, it’s our street,” her mother exclaimed in the loud, overly cheery tone she used when she was trying to distract her stepfather.

  “Craftsman Lane!” She patted his hand on the steering wheel. “This is so exciting, isn’t it honey? Our first real house together!”

  Millie glared down at her lap, feeling a spike of irritation at her mom’s comment. The old house had been real enough, but Millie’s father bought it before he died, and so it wasn’t their house. But now they could move someplace new and pretend that Millie’s real father had never even existed. It wasn’t fair.

  “Oh, what a lovely hibiscus!” her mother said.

  Millie finally looked out the window and blinked in surprise. They had gone from dunes and bait shacks to a proper town with tree-shaded neighborhood streets. Teen boys were kicking a soccer ball around on a well-kept corner field. This place didn’t look too bad, she had to admit. Maybe there would be some kids her age in the neighborhood? She hadn’t had a lot of friends at her old school. She and Chrissy Romano were pretty tight, at least until Chrissy started having eyes for Mike Walhgren. Millie walked to school with Jeff Laramie for years and had thought of him as a friend until he joined Little League and decided he was too cool to hang out with girls. Sixth grade was confusing; everybody wanted to be with the boys and nobody wanted to spend time with Millie.

  So, maybe seventh grade would be better? Maybe meeting new kids would be the one good thing about having to leave everything she knew behind?

  Her stepfather slowed in front of a three-story white Victorian with a wraparound porch. “And here’s our new home!”

  Millie couldn’t take her eyes off the amazing porch. It had steps wide enough for pumpkins on each side, and a railing that was begging to be decorated. “That’s the perfect Halloween porch!”

  “Aren’t you getting a little old for Halloween?” her stepfather said.

  “Not yet,” Millie suddenly felt anxious. She couldn’t tell from his tone if he was being serious.

  “I think you are.” He pulled the van into the driveway and parked. “I think you’re getting much too old for things like Halloween and trick-or-treating.”

  “You said teenagers are too old. I’m not a teenager. Not until next April.” She turned to her mother, her stomach churning. She couldn’t be too old for Halloween. Not yet. “You said I could still trick-or-treat this year.”

  “Oh, honey, that’s a whole three
months away,” her mother said. “Let’s go in and see our new home!”

  ***

  The house was fine. Millie’s new room got too much sun in the mornings, but as her mother pointed out, at least she wasn’t running late for school any more. Her stepfather was frequently gone on Cosmic Cola business—he bought her mother a Honda Civic so they wouldn’t have to share his van—and frankly his absence was a relief. And Marsh Middle School was fine, too, at least as far as her classes went.

  The kids were weird, though. She was used to the cliques at Wendover: orchestra kids, theatre kids, rich kids, poor kids. Pretty kids from wealthy families who were good at sports were at the top, and the special ed kids and the immigrant kids from poor families were at the bottom. It wasn’t fair but it made sense. But at Marsh, it was mostly about whose families had been around the longest. Even the kid with crooked, discolored teeth and a limp got to sit with the popular kids at lunch because he was a real Marsh. So did the kid with the threadbare clothes. Sure, they had a hierarchy within their hierarchy, but nobody who was “new blood” got let into that club no matter how cool they were. And apparently you could still be new blood even if your family had lived in the town for several generations … but meanwhile some of the other kids were considered old blood even though they’d moved to town just a few years before. The situation wasn’t any fairer than at Wendover, and Millie couldn’t quite make sense of it, not entirely.

  The old blood kids were actually friendlier to Millie than they were to some of the new blood kids they’d grown up with, simply because when the teachers introduced her, they made sure to mention that her father was the new Vice President of Operations for Cosmic Cola. Millie never would have guessed that being the daughter of an executive at the soda company would be such a big deal. It was nearly as good as being a featured soloist in the choir! She didn’t make new friends, not like Chrissy had been, anyway, but she always had a place to sit at lunch and people to talk to and nobody picked on her.

  Once she realized the social advantage she had, she could never let on that she didn’t even like Cosmic Cola. It was sickly sweet, and it had an unpleasant licorice aftertaste. And the bubbles seemed too harsh and made her sneeze. Everybody in town seemed to drink gallons of the stuff. Whenever someone offered her a bottle, she’d politely pretend to sip it and then pour it out first chance she got.