“Well, I’m excited. New house, new back yard, new neighbors,” said Mr. Hall as he stuck his nose out his car window and snorted a huge heap of air. “Smell that? That’s new life smell. Like a new pair of shoes.”
“You’re not a dog, Dad,” said Jill as she covered her face in embarrassment. “People are staring.”
And indeed, they were. One kid even pointed.
Mr. Hall drove past a festively orange and black pumpkin shaped sign that read: Welcome to Crestwood, third safest town in America, population 856. There was a seven above the number six but it was crossed out with a green painted X.
“Correction, 859,” said Mr. Hall with a prideful smile.
“Third safest, so in other words this place is boring?” Zach mumbled as he glanced up from his comic book about solar powered superheroes and slimy coated villains.
“I’m sure there’s lots of fun to be had here, sport,” said Mr. Hall. “Just use your imagination.”
Zach didn’t have one of those.
“We could all go bowling tonight,” suggested Mr. Hall.
“On Halloween night?” protested Jill.
“That’s right!” said Mr. Hall. “I almost forgot. It’s Halloween.”
Jill planted her face into her hands again. “Yes, because people dress up in silly costumes and beg for candy every Friday.”
“Hey, you guys want to go trick-or-treating tonight?” asked Mr. Hall.
“Not a chance,” they both replied.
The first thing they ever agreed on, probably the last too. Jill was at the age when she hated being seen with her father in public yet still needed things like rides and cash. Compromises were a necessary evil in her world. Zach, on the other hand, just hated pretending. People are always pretending, he surmised, lying with a smile. They were plastered on every billboard and on every television screen, not an honest smile among the sea of manipulation. The world had enough fake smiles as it is. It didn’t require his. Even his mother had that same fake smile on the day she left, which was the last day Zach smiled back. Halloween is every day, people just don’t know it.
The car slid into the driveway and Mr. Hall eagerly stepped out to greet his new castle. It was a quaint little house, only a slightly different model from the rest of the homes on the block. No better, no worse. The charcoal red roof shingles were the best part because of the state-of-the-art solar panels that were woven in between each little shingle. Mr. Hall surmised they would save him thousands on energy expenses in the years to come. They would break in December.
“I get dibs on the room next to the bathroom,” said Jill, bailing out the car door.
Zach just sat and waited. Soon he would have to unpack and lift heavy things upstairs. He wasn’t looking forward to that. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had looked forward to anything in particular. Best to stay put for now.
He gave a melancholy stare out his window. A zombie stared back.
“Got any fresh brains?” asked the zombie.
Zach didn’t reply, he just looked away. Best to avoid eye contact. He just might catch the hint and walk away. He didn’t.
“Where’s your costume, stranger?” asked the zombie with a cowboy accent.
“I don’t have a costume,” replied Zach.
“But it’s—”
Zach cut the zombie off. “I know what day it is. I just don’t believe in holidays. It’s not my thing.”
“Mormon?” asked the zombie. “My cousin in Nevada is Mormon. He’s not allowed to drink soda and coffee. I’m just not allowed to drink coffee… not after last time.”
The last time the zombie, when he was still among the living that is, had coffee was Christmas Eve. His uncle Rob had given him a cup to celebrate his passage into manhood. He didn’t sleep for three days, dug a seven-foot hole in the front yard, and declared war on all bees and wasps. He was hospitalized after being stung over a hundred times.
“I’m not Mormon,” insisted Zach. “I just don’t like dressing up like some kind of fool.” With that he stepped out the opposite side door and onto the driveway.
“Oh yeah, well, I refuse to substitute your limited and highly subjective reality for my own conscious and subconscious perception of identity,” said the zombie, quite proudly at that.
Zach stared back like he had just seen a cow with a rocket strapped to its back launch into space.
“Sorry, Kevin can’t help it, our mom makes us listen to self-help audio books,” said a little girl’s voice.
Zach looked down to find not one but two interlopers standing before him. One zombie and one witch. Correction. One small witch, so small in fact that Zach hadn’t seen her next to her fourteen-year-old brother, Kevin, whom she was standing by the whole time. Her name was Alice and she was twelve. In one hand, Alice carried a black handled broom with hot pink colored straw sticking out and, in her other hand, she held a book of spells she bought off the internet for 20 dollars. Its previous owner was a witch doctor from Venezuela who reportedly used it to raise the dead and exorcise demons. Alice was the only one who bid on it.
“Our mom says gradeschool is the most damaging period in our lives and it took her 23 years to build back the self-esteem she lost during adolescence,” said Alice while she adjusted her pointy black hat. “The other kids used to throw hotdogs at her in gym class.”
“Why would they do something like that?” asked Zach.
Kevin shrugged. “A ritualistic display of ostracization within a ridged social hierarchy.”
Alice snickered. “They said she smelt like a wiener.”
Mr. Hall waved over to Kevin.
Kevin waved back.
“You kids live next door?” asked Mr. Hall.
“Yeah, we’re the Lovejoys,” replied Alice as she pointed across the street to her house. A two-story home, painted blue with countless concrete gnomes and plastic flamingos sticking out of the crabgrass laced lawn. “My name’s Alice and this is my brother, Kevin.”
Kevin waved again.
“Pleased to meet you, we just moved in so we don’t know many people here,” said Mr. Hall as he turned his sights on Zach.
Zach immediately knew by the expression on his father’s face that the next words out of his mouth would be trouble.
“Say, my cool hip son here is in need of some new play buddies,” said Mr. Hall. “So, what do you say—want to be best friends?’
It was worse than trouble. Zach was breathless.
Kevin thought hard for a moment then shrugged. “Okay.”
“We were going to head over to the old pumpkin patch on Harbor to raise some dead people. You can come if you want,” suggested Alice as she proudly held up her new spell book for all to see.
Mr. Hall waved goodbye and wished them a safe journey. And just like that Zach found himself walking down the street with one zombie and one witch. Life was cruel to Zach, especially on Halloween.
Chapter Three
To Wish Upon a Jack-O’-Lantern
Pumpkins lined the dirt path, twisting and curling into more of a maze than a road. Each pumpkin was more deformed and misshapen than the one just before it, they seemed to be begging to be chosen, to be gutted, and carved a smile, their shriveled vines slithering over the trail in a desperate attempt to snare any unwary traveler. Zach, Alice, and Kevin walked past with alert eyes and carefully placed steps.
Alice studied the landscape, already planning her escape if needed once she raised a few corpses. She hoped the undead would be slow and lumbering, like in the old black and white movies, and not like those modern running dead. Those weren’t very sporting. Having a pet zombie had been her dream since as far back as she could remember. Once tamed and properly restrained with dog collar and leash, she would take her undead on walks and on Sundays to the park where she would ride him piggyback and terrorize the ducks and health-conscious morning joggers. Alice didn’t have issues, only evil plans.
A scarecrow hung at the end of the pumpkin patch
maze—his arms and legs nothing more than shriveled up husks of brown and black tree limbs, his ancient jacket a faded plaid soaked with mud and the oiliest of pond scum, his pants torn to strips of string and yarn, his face replaced by a pumpkin with a hand carved heckled grin. Though his eyes seemed sad for a jack-o’-lantern, almost as if he was lonely on that T-shaped wooden crucifix.
Zach looked on, more annoyed than moved. “Okay, so we’re here. Now what?”
“Mr. Jerkins buries his victims in this very spot,” Alice replied, pointing to a patch of dirt before her feet.
Zach raised an eyebrow. “Victims?”
“His ex-wives and their lovers he caught them with,” noted Kevin.
“And you know this how?” asked Zach.
“Suzie told me that Jeff told her that Alex told him that she overheard her mother mention…” Alice stopped to count her fingers, making sure she got every detail right.
“Just read the spell so we can get out of here.” Zach massaged his newly acquired migraine.
Alice opened her spell book to the page with a zombie illustration hand-sketched in blackish purple beetle ink; it smelt of the faint odor of lilac and old turtle shells. She glided her fingers across the image, feeling the bumps and grooves of the ink sketching. The passage underneath was more chicken scratch than any decipherable known language, in fact it had been etched in by a severed chicken’s foot centuries before by its original owner.
She tried her best to make the scribbles audible, her tongue twisting and twirling on every syllable. “Newt, loot, root, flute,” she shouted, “monkey-toast, honey-toad!”
Lightning struck, the ground splitting under the violent force of an earthquake, and hellish fire shot out the moment the words fell from her lips—or so Alice had imagined. None of those things happened. In fact, nothing happened at all. She was as disappointed as a kid with nothing to open on Christmas morning.
“Maybe I said it wrong,” she said with a sigh.
“You just said honey-toad. It’s a high possibility,” Zach said sarcastically.
“Maybe it takes time,” said Kevin.
“Yeah, and maybe a full moon, or some chicken’s blood, or lightning, or maybe—just maybe—there’s no such thing as spells and zombies,” said Zach. “Pretending never makes things real.”
Those were the same words Zach’s mother uttered the day she left on that plane. “Pretending never makes things real.” The answer Zach got when he asked why things couldn’t go back to the way they were before. Before her marriage with his father, Mr. Hall, went sour, before she fell for another man named Andrew, before she decided to leave the country and her family for him. Zach didn’t hear from her now except in postcards she sent now and then, always photos with fake smiles. Lately it had been only phone calls on holidays. Zach stopped answering those. In truth, some part of him wanted magic to be true, for her to be wrong. But truth—reality—is never quite what we so desperately need it to be.
Zach turned his back on the scarecrow and headed up the trail. Alice and Kevin followed pace. And things might’ve ended right there. But unbeknownst to Zach that scarecrow with the sad carved eyes had a name. A name that once uttered carried with it special obligations things of pure magic must fulfill—and Mr. Jack Honeytoad was no exception to that rule.
Those shriveled up husks of limbs filled with water and expanded like an old sponge to form flesh and bone. That jacket of ancient origin sprung up with a twirl, flinging the mud from its pores like a dog that loathes baths. His tattered jean pants knitted themselves together faster than any gnome or elf could manage. And when he became complete, the scarecrow gave out a howl of a yawn like a rooster in the morning light. He rubbed his pumpkin eyes, wiping away the sadness like dust on glass. He hopped down from his wooden post and stretched out his arms as long as he could, glanced over to Zach, Alice, and Kevin and said, “Boo.”
Kevin shrieked before diving between a cluster of pumpkins.
Alice just smiled and said, “Cool.”
“Very funny, dude,” said Zach, unfazed by this lame attempt at a scare.
“No dude here, just Jack,” said the scarecrow. “Though you kids get points for guessing my real name. Well, a point, anyway.”
He pulled off his pumpkin head to show his human smile. Mr. Honeytoad or Jack, as he normally went by—no point in giving out your real, full name to those who might and probably will abuse it—looked (on the outside) no different from your average snot-nosed seventeen-year-old. On the inside was an entirely different story altogether.
“Alright—let’s get things started—who said my name?” asked Jack, scanning over the trio. He brushed aside his long, shaggy blond hair from his green eyes, smiled his pearly whites, and wiggled his pointy ears.
“No one said Jack, jackass,” replied Zach.
Jack just ignored him. “Come on, don’t be shy, I don’t bite… children.”
Jack’s words were met with an awkward silence.
“Whoever said it gets a wish,” said Jack, his smile twisting into a devilish grin.
“I did,” yelled Kevin and Alice at the same time, followed by a mean stare between siblings.
“What?” hollered Alice, her hands clenching into fists. “I said the spell.”
“I would’ve said it, if I knew there was a wish involved,” protested Kevin. “It’s not fair.”
“Stop it, you two,” said Zach. “This kid’s just messing around with us. There’s no such thing as magic wishes.”
Alice and Kevin shrunk with disappointment.
Jack smirked over at Zach. “And you would be the expert on these things, kid?”
“As a matter of fact, I am,” said Zach. “You see, I come from a little town called reality and they have things there like science books and common sense.”
Jack held up the pumpkin. “Alright, Mister Expert, place your hand on top of the jack-o’-lantern, make your wish, and see for yourself if there’s no such thing as magic.”
“If it gets you to shut up—sure—I’m game.”
Zach stepped forward and plopped his hand on the carved pumpkin head, then paused for a moment to think of some clever wish to put this fool in his place. I should wish for his hair to fall out, he thought, or maybe for his butt to inflate to the size of a water buffalo. No wait, better to turn him into a donkey, like the jackass he is. No way he could fake that. Either way, I win.
“Oh, I should mention, before you wish me into some melancholy mule—the wish is only good for one night,” said Jack. “So, enjoy it while it lasts.”
He caught Zach off guard with those words. How could he have known his wish? He did just call him a jackass though. Lucky guess—must have been. But that cocky smirk of his was more than Zach could bear. Jack’s grin was the grin of Halloween itself and Zach had already grown past tired of manufactured grins and grimaces of a holiday that represented everything he hated most. So, he made up his mind.
“Great,” said Zach. “Then for one night, I wish that people were who they claimed to be, that just for one night people stopped pretending, and the truth showed on their faces instead of the other way around.”
In all the thousands of years of his existence, and of all those who uttered his name and made a wish, none had wished for anything close to this. Most had wished for selfish things: gold, power, ill will toward others, even wishes made in the name of love were rooted in selfish desires. No one ever wished for more honesty. What a strange boy, Jack thought, what a strange and interesting boy.
In that instance, Zach swore his eyes were playing tricks on him. Because for a brief moment, like the flash and flicker of a flame of a candle the second before its last breath, that jack-o’-lantern smiled back at him, its carved grin lighting up with sinister delight.
“Done,” said Jack.
And with that the hollowed pumpkin crumbled and fell to tiny bits and pieces between Jack’s hands.
Zach stepped back, the sudden decomposition catching him off bala
nce and stealing the voice from his throat. And, for the second time this morning, he had been stricken breathless. He let the dried pumpkin guts and seeds slide between the cracks of his fingers and hit the dirt.
“Then, just for tonight, what you see is what you get. Now if you’ll excuse me…” Jack closed his eyes, wiggled his fingers, and clapped his hands.
And poof, he exploded in a puff of orange smoke and fireflies.
The fireflies darted past Kevin and Alice and into the breeze. Alice, being one never to miss an opportunity to capitalize on a little magic, jumped with all the spring in her feet and clasped her hands together just in time to ensnare a straggler. But when she spread her fingers apart to peek inside, there was nothing but sparkling dust between the cracks of her palms.
Zach’s mouth and eyes widened as he watched the fireflies fade into the sky. Magic was real. Jack was telling the truth. Which meant… His amazed expression melted into a frown as the dread sunk in. He knew trouble when he saw it and tonight was going to be a very long night.
(YOU CAN FIND THE REST OF THE BOOK ON A*M*A*Z*O*N!)
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