They both stood in the center of the trail and stared, the echo of their voices seeming out of place in a setting that for millennia had resounded only to the songs of birds, the buzzing of insects, and the rustling sounds of wild animals.
Evan raised one eyebrow. “Well, that’s…weird.”
Anne felt a sense of foreboding coil around her like an invisible serpent. It was a familiar feeling she had resisted for almost a year.
Same kind of noose, she thought.
She pushed the dark thoughts away. It was three weeks before she had to live through Halloween again. No need to dwell on it. Their day together had been as idyllic as any she could remember. She refused to ruin it with a panic attack in the middle of nowhere. Her husband wasn’t privy to certain aspects of her past, and she wasn’t yet ready to enlighten him.
Evan put his arm around her and she stiffened. “Hey, you okay?” he said.
“Sorry. Just a little creeped out.” It was a gross understatement. “Why would there be a noose way out here?”
“Probably just a joke. Some drunken ne’er-do-wells.”
She gave him an amused look. “ ‘Ne’er-do-wells’?”
He grinned. “I’m a word nerd, what can I say?”
When he grinned like that, the man was irresistible. He reached out his hand and she took it. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s go find a picnic spot. I’m starving.”
Anne nodded and followed him down the trail, glancing back at the noose several times.
—
Despite the occasional unwanted mosquito, it had been a romantic picnic surrounded by the autumn glory of the forest. They marveled at the fickleness of fall color—one slope glowing all gold, while right next to it were great luscious patches of summer green.
As usual, Evan had lightened her mood and she’d regained the appetite she lost on the way down the trail. They’d packed prosciutto-and-roasted-red-pepper sandwiches, a fancy cheese sampler, frozen grapes (now thawed), and chocolate truffles.
Each time they kissed she wanted more. Anne loved the smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of him. Most of all, she loved the way he made her feel: safe. It was something she’d never felt with anyone before.
Despite a nearly perfect day, the noose hadn’t strayed far from her mind. It was what psychologists called an intrusive thought, and it was something she had dealt with for most of her life. Calm breathing helped, and she’d attempted a revisualization technique, imagining the noose in a less threatening way. But some of the anxiety remained. After all, how could a noose be anything but threatening? It suggested all manner of macabre possibilities in this remote area, and all her training over the years to deal with anxiety couldn’t dispel them.
“Where are you?” Evan asked. “There’s a furrow in your brow.” He reached up and smoothed her frown lines with his fingers.
Anne wondered how long she’d been lost in thought. “Nowhere in particular,” she lied. “Just enjoying the quiet.”
Evan brushed her long auburn bangs away from her eyes and kissed the tip of her nose. “Me, too,” he said, standing up and brushing some leaves from his shorts. “I’ll be right back. Nature calls.”
Anne didn’t take her eyes off of him as he searched for a good spot to empty his bladder.
A voice in Anne’s head shouted, Don’t leave me out here alone, but she curbed it. Stopping herself from saying the wrong thing out loud had become second nature. A lifetime of embarrassing situations had taught her well. She watched in tense silence as her lover disappeared behind a cluster of golden aspen trees twenty yards away.
A moment later, something rustled behind her. She spun toward it.
Something was moving within the trees. Something big. A bear?
She looked back to see if Evan was visible. He wasn’t. Should she shout out to warn him? No, it’s probably just a hiker. Relax, Annie.
She wanted to run.
It was avoidance behavior typical of her disorder. In the past, she would try to escape the moment something scared her. But now, after a couple years of intense therapy, she had developed new techniques to help her manage her response to triggers like this.
She forced herself to breathe calmly and then turned to face her fear.
Standing in a clearing ringed by stalwart trees was a startling image. A large man stood motionless in the shadows. He looked to be more than six feet tall, wearing old jeans, hiking books, and a T-shirt stained with blood. She couldn’t make out his features, as his head was facing down.
A severed and crimson-stained noose hung from his neck.
Anne’s scream wouldn’t come, though she heard it in her mind. She couldn’t move, her eyes frozen wide in terror.
Slowly, the man raised his head to meet her gaze. His face was mottled purple with congealed blood and his eyes bulged hideously from their sockets. His swollen and blackened tongue was thrust between his teeth, protruding from purpled lips.
He reached out his hands, the skin a cadaverous hue, and took one step toward her.
That’s when everything went black.
—
Twenty-four hours later, Anne sat across from her therapist, Dr. Helen Brody, dabbing a tear from the corner of her eye. “I’ve never been so humiliated. And for me, that’s saying a lot.”
Brody sat across from her in an expensive leather chair, legs crossed, immobile, face empathetic. “I understand,” she said. And how did Evan react when you regained consciousness?”
“He was concerned, of course,” Anne said. “I’d never blacked out in front of him before. But he was gracious about the whole thing. It took every ounce of self-restraint I had not to tell him the truth.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Anne shrugged. “I told him I had occasional fainting spells.”
“Well, that is partially true.”
Anne shifted on the couch, her emotions still raw. “He was more upset that I’d never told him before. I said we’d talk about it later and he didn’t press, thank God. But it’s just a matter of time before he brings it up again. And it’s not fair to keep him in the dark like this.”
“Agreed,” Dr. Brody said. “We can certainly talk about how to broach the subject with Evan, but I think it’s important to acknowledge how well you handled the situation. Your controlled breathing, revisualization, and exposure response were very impressive.”
Anne nodded halfheartedly. The shame of fainting in front of Evan overshadowed her small victory.
She hated lying to him, yet she was even more afraid of losing him. She’d tried to do the right thing in the past, confessing to two different lovers that she suffered from serious panic attacks and phobias. Both had dumped her soon after, though neither of them had the guts to tell her why.
It didn’t take a genius to put it together.
Now she was gun-shy about revealing the truth to Evan. This was why she had avoided therapy for the last ten months; she knew Brody would call her on it.
So much had happened since her last session. She’d met Evan six months ago when he’d gotten out of his car to help her fix a flat tire. She was immediately smitten. He was a successful Web entrepreneur, intelligent, conscientious, and the most physically attractive man she’d ever been with. They’d been dating ever since.
She was astounded at their compatibility: similar political views, similar tastes in the arts, and a shared obsession with hiking, which was one of the main reasons she’d moved to Colorado a little more than three years ago.
Of course, the mind-blowing sex didn’t hurt.
Not that Evan was perfect. He snored now and then, drove a little too fast, and (to her horror) didn’t like subtitled films. But all things considered, she couldn’t have done any better. Of this she was certain.
She’d wanted to tell him about her lifelong anxiety issues, but the thought of scaring him off had been too great. Besides, she’d had it under control for the better part of a year, and hoped that when she finally did b
ring it up, it would be in reference to something in the past that she’d overcome, rather than something she suffered from now.
Facing him with the truth would have been easier if her phobias were of the common variety, like a fear of flying or spiders. But she had been diagnosed with phasmophobia—a fear of ghosts—as well as samhainophobia—a fear of Halloween. They were almost comical names for serious mental disorders.
People tended to be sympathetic to everyday fears, such as the fear of snakes. But a paralyzing fear of Halloween? Nope. Sorry, lady—you’re nuts.
There was an understandable reason for her fears, but few would have an inclination to consider that. It was far easier to make sweeping generalizations about people with phobias.
Evan was different, though. She knew he would understand. And even if he didn’t, he loved her enough that he would try. That’s what she hoped anyway. She felt guilty for not telling him about her fears earlier, but everything had happened so quickly between them: from their whirlwind courtship, to moving in together, to their decision to get married during a wild weekend in Las Vegas.
And yet it all felt so right.
Dr. Brody flipped to a new sheet in her notepad and jotted something down.
Then she said, “Let’s talk some more about this man you described, with the noose around his neck. You’ve had some time to process everything. Do you truly believe what you saw was a hallucination?”
Anne offered a heavy sigh. “Yes, of course. I know he wasn’t real. But that doesn’t make me feel any better. What if I regress to how I was before?”
Dr. Brody set down her pad of paper and offered a reassuring look. “A relapse would be a complete return of your symptoms, but this sounds like a lapse, which is a brief return to old habits, a perfectly natural and common phenomenon. Usually, it’s triggered by stress, depression, or simply fatigue.
“And while there is always the possibility of a relapse, our work together here is to prevent that from happening. That’s why it is crucial that I see you every week. In fact, I’d like to have you come in twice a week for the short term, until we’ve gotten things back on track.”
With a somber look, Anne nodded in agreement.
—
It took Anne a full bottle of wine to gather the courage, but she finally told Evan the truth over dinner. He didn’t speak for a long time. When he finally met her eyes, she saw pain reflected there.
“I don’t understand why you kept this from me,” he said. “I thought I’d earned your trust.”
“You have,” Anne said. “That’s why I’m telling you now. You have no idea how hard this is for me to admit. How much shame I’ve carried my whole life.”
She felt the tears coming but forced them away.
He reached across the table and took her hand. “Look, I admit…I’m surprised by all this. But it doesn’t change how I feel about you. I just want the truth. All of it. No more surprises.”
She nodded.
After a long moment, he said, “Has your therapist helped you figure out why? I mean, these phobias are very specific.”
Anne finished the wine in her glass before replying. “I told you about the deaths of my parents, my uncle Kyle, and my aunt Lucy. What I didn’t tell you…was that all of them died on Halloween.”
Evan slumped back in his chair, stunned. “All of them?”
Anne poured herself more wine. “Yes.”
“And all accidental?”
“Yes. My parents were in a car accident, Kyle drowned, and Aunt Lucy died of a heart attack.”
He held her hand firmly. “I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine. Of course you were traumatized. Jesus…who wouldn’t be?”
Anne realized at that moment that the hardest part of telling Evan the truth had been the anticipation of it. But as the full story was revealed, she felt a great tension expelled from her body. She confided in him how her beloved uncle Kyle had taken care of her after her parents died; and later, the horrors of living with her mother’s sister Lucy, whose solution for Anne’s Halloween phobia was to keep her locked in the basement every year on that day.
She confessed that she saw spirits when she was a child, or at least thought she did, and had been relentlessly tormented by a nameless demonic entity who spoke to her through jack-o’-lanterns and various Halloween paraphernalia. Its favorite catchphrase was “I’m coming for you.”
By the time her mother, father, uncle, and aunt had died, Anne had every reason to believe that her family was cursed to die on October 31. What she didn’t know was why the Halloween demon had saved her for last.
Reluctantly, she admitted how much of her life had been a dark pit of loneliness, as her disorder had ruined more than one promising relationship. Suitors hadn’t been the problem, of course. She was an attractive woman, and her parents—both real estate developers—had left her a great deal of money. But her fears and constant panic attacks had been too great for any relationship to bear.
She had tried every anxiety drug imaginable, followed by psychoanalysis, desensitization, even biofeedback treatment. Nothing had seemed to work, and for a time she had become suicidal.
On Halloween five years ago, after weeks of merciless torment by the demon, she tried to hang herself from a tree in her backyard. In part as a desperate attempt to reunite with her parents, who she had never stopped grieving for. But she’d made the rope too long and only managed to break both of her ankles.
After her recovery, she’d moved to Colorado for a fresh start and found Dr. Helen Brody, who had helped her manage her disorder through a combination of cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnotherapy, and exposure therapy. Eventually the voices, hallucinations, and panic attacks subsided.
But just when she thought she had a handle on her fears, the hiking incident had been a painful reminder that she hadn’t been cured. Hallucinations were a rarity with phobias, but they weren’t unheard of in extreme cases such as hers. Perhaps the best she could hope for was to manage her disorder.
When she finished her story, it was near midnight and she felt vulnerable sitting across from Evan. He hadn’t said much. But as she looked in his eyes, the repulsion she’d witnessed from her former lovers wasn’t there. Instead, she saw compassion.
Evan raised his glass at that moment. “For better or worse, Anne. Right?”
His earnestness coaxed the corners of her lips into the beginnings of a smile. She tapped her glass against his with a clink.
—
Anne’s heart beat frantically, like a trapped bird in a frail cage. It was the third night in a row she’d awoken from a nightmare. She stared across the bedroom at the dark outlines of the furniture, which stood like sentinels in the shadows.
The dead man she’d encountered on her hike now haunted her dreams.
Unlike the previous nights, she hadn’t awoken Evan. He was turned away from her, snoring lightly. It was a blessing not to have to explain her nightmare again.
She thought: What if the dead man hadn’t been a hallucination, after all? Sure, she had an anxiety disorder. Yes, hallucinations were possible under extreme stress. But she hadn’t been under extreme stress that day. Nervous? Yes. Uneasy. Definitely. But extreme stress?
She had never reconciled her phobias with the possibility of the supernatural. While her uncontrollable fear of ghostly happenings was a disorder, that didn’t mean ghosts didn’t exist. And while she had no tangible proof of the supernatural, she’d seen and heard many inexplicable things. Plus, having four family members die on Halloween would stretch the limits of coincidence for even the most logical of persons.
But there was a specificity of the dead man on the mountain that was unlike the amorphous spectres she’d seen in the past. He seemed far more detailed, more…real. With that thought, she slid out of bed, threw on a robe, and left the oppressive shadows of the bedroom behind.
She moved down the hall of the second story, soft carpeting muting her footsteps. Upon entering the study, she flipped o
n the light and turned on her laptop. The room was spacious and impeccably decorated, as was every square inch of the three-thousand-square-foot home.
The house was too large in some ways, but she had fallen in love with it the moment the Realtor had shown it to her, particularly the location. Nestled between two knolls, the views were directed out to an adjacent meadow, down through the valley’s nature preserve, and onto a staggering panorama of snowcapped peaks in the distance.
However, at this hour, the spectacular views from the study’s bay windows were cloaked in darkness.
Once her computer booted up, she searched the Web for articles on anyone who died from hanging in the area where she and Evan had been hiking.
It didn’t take long to find a match in the search results.
The headline was from a local paper’s Web archive. It read: man hangs self on remote hiking trail after shooting mother, daughter.
Fear moved down Anne’s spine like a trickle of ice water.
The news story was five years old, and from what little information the paper provided, forty-two-year-old Peter Amerling had shot his ex-wife and daughter upon learning that his ex had started seeing another man. Amerling had been discovered a few days later after his abandoned car was found in the area.
The black-and-white photo revealed that he was Caucasian and bald, and the age seemed about right. Yet Anne couldn’t be certain it was him. The man she’d seen on the mountain looked like a rotting corpse, his swollen features making him unrecognizable.
And yet what were the chances of someone else being hanged in that same remote area?
The next detail made Anne’s heart skip a beat, then stagger to catch up with itself: Amerling had murdered his family and hung himself on October 31.
She had hoped to put all of her Halloween fears behind her. But now she was convinced she’d seen a real ghost. Had a Halloween demon driven Amerling mad, as it had tried to do to her?
“Honey?”
Evan stood in the doorway of the study, dressed in his boxers, somehow managing to look sexy at 3:00 a.m. “You can’t sleep?”
“Take a look at this,” Anne said.
Halloween Carnival, Volume 3 Page 7