The Halloween Children

by Brian James Freeman

  As with my building, leaves littered the lobby tile and the stairway. Some broken branches here, as well, and a few stones. A rubber snake lay half buried among the leaves, and the movement of my candlelight made its body slither as I passed.

  The door to the Durkinses’ ground-floor apartment was open, so I knocked on the doorframe as I crossed the threshold and called out for Marie or Todd.

  “Sorry the power’s gone out,” I said. “Are you here?”

  And damned if that freaking bird didn’t squawk in answer. Louder than ever but the same distinctive and annoying cry.

  Harris, it seemed to say. Harris, I know you’re there.

  In their living room, the Durkinses kept a gold-plated stand the height of a hat-rack, curved at the top and holding a suspended birdcage. A black cloth lay over the cage.

  I crossed the living room, my way illuminated by various scented candles on the coffee table and on the mantel. The cloth hung loose on the dome-shaped cage, and I reached for a low flap to pull it away.

  Fix this, Harris. Fix this!

  The voice startled me, and I drew back my hand.

  Stupid ugly fucker. Smelly bastard.

  Those last phrases were some of the gems I’d whispered to the door when the Durkinses weren’t home. The prank didn’t seem so funny now, my crude phrases echoed back in a loud, robotic squawk. Whenever I’d attempted this trick, I’d been laughing outside their door. Any semblance of laughter was lost in the malicious threat of this new voice.

  Go to hell, prick!

  And then the bird did laugh, or at least mimic the sound as best it could. A poor simulation, empty of soul or feeling. The most sinister sound I’d ever heard.

  I wasn’t sure what animal had actually cooked in our family’s stove, but I wanted this creature to share its fate. I tugged at the cloth and it fell away.

  An enormous raw turkey filled the cage. It had been pressed in so tightly that the pink-and-white plucked skin bulged between the metal bars. The bone of a drumstick pressed against the small wire door, as if attempting to open it.

  The cage rattled and I nearly convinced myself the thing inside was alive, trying to escape. It was awful and pink like a belly shaking with laughter. That sinister robotic laugh sounded again, so loud it filled the entire room. I held my candle still, suspecting the shake of my hand had caused an illusion of movement, but the cage continued to sway and rattle.

  Then a section of pink, raw breast began to swell outward. A chittering and gnawing accompanied the motion, and then something wet and brown broke through from beneath the skin. Small yellow teeth appeared, and a stray wire or whisker or antenna waved through the opening.

  In revulsion, I kicked the base of the cage stand, knocking the whole thing to the floor. I heard the squeak of tiny hinges and more of the chittering and gnawing before I raced out the door.

  Or, in my metaphor from earlier, before the railcar of my carnival ride started up again, to deliver me to the next attraction.

  —

  I ran up the stairs, my feet crunching over dead leaves, until I reached apartment 6C, where the college girl lived. Her name was Jessica something or other and I didn’t really know her, although I had worked on her apartment a few times. She was another new resident, having just moved in before the current semester started.

  The door to her apartment was open a crack and I pushed it the rest of the way. I had a vague memory of what she looked like, but I wouldn’t have recognized her the way I found her.

  The smell hit me first, even before my eyes focused on the horror before me. The stomach-turning stench reminded me of the time as a kid when my father forgot about a chicken breast he was grilling and we came back to find it burning to a crisp on the grate over the jumping flames. Only this wasn’t a burned chicken.

  Strung up from the ceiling fan was a body that I presumed had to be the college student. There were no real identifying features left. The corpse was charred black, almost as if this thing wasn’t even human to begin with. Yet somehow the outfit that had been placed onto the burned body horrified me even more.

  Her killer had dressed her in a sexy pirate costume, something she might have worn to a frat party for Halloween. There was an eyepatch over one of the charred eye sockets, a colorful striped dress, a headscarf, and a vest that resembled a corset. A bright plastic parrot perched on one shoulder.

  As additional ornaments, dozens of blank CDs were pinned to the corpse and a typing keyboard was hanging from her neck.

  There was also a handmade cardboard sign pinned to her body. Written on it in marker was:

  Internet Piracy is NOT a Victimless Crime! Para-tweet!

  I turned and ran before the vomit reached the top of my throat.

  —

  Another fright greeted me on the stairs. On the section between the second and third floors, a dead man lay along the slanted path. The body had been chopped to pieces, and all the pieces were connected with twine, allowing the man to stretch the full length of the staircase: his head lay sideways on the landing, the torso began a few steps down; the upper arms, then the forearms, then the hands below the middle step. The clothes had been cut, too, each portion of business suit matching the appropriate body part. Below the pelvis and leg segments, severed feet were laced into a pair of black Rockports.

  The dead man’s tongue bulged out of his mouth, and one of the eyes had been poked through. He had short, straight hair and a Vandyke beard peppered with gray. The private detective. This was the dead man I’d discovered previously in the empty apartment.

  He looked twelve feet tall, simultaneously monstrous and ridiculous, like a marionette that had been drawn and quartered. Or like a child’s disproportionate drawing during a game of hangman, the body parts overly distinguished to mark each incorrectly guessed letter.

  To make my way up the stairs, I had to step around the body parts, careful not to catch my foot on the connecting twine.

  I didn’t bother going into the private detective’s former surveillance office. Instead, I went to Joanne Huff’s unit. Her door was closed and I waited for a moment outside, expecting her to sense my presence, as she often did.

  Harris, I told you things would get worse. I insist you turn that power back on right away. I know you’re there, now hurry up.

  “Joanne? Mrs. Huff? I’m coming in.” The knob turned easily and I opened the door and stepped inside.

  Candles illuminated the living room, as had been the case with the other prepared apartment, the other decorated “stops” on this haunted attraction ride. Plain white candles lined the control panel for a bulky exercise treadmill. Two other candles sat like horns atop a football, a jack-o’-lantern face drawn onto the pigskin. Similarly decorated sports equipment littered the floor: volleyballs and basketballs and shuttlecocks, tennis racquets and balls, a jump rope, a pogo stick, and a pair of stilts. An exercise bike was positioned near the window, with a Ping-Pong table where Joanne’s television used to sit. Completing the tableau: a full set of free weights, lined up according to size.

  All of these items, no doubt retrieved from our activity closet in building two, seemed to crowd in an expectant circle around Joanne’s mustard-colored lounge chair. They tempted her, called to her to rise and push her body to its limits, to play, to set goals, to enjoy the pleasures of an active life.

  Her chair was turned away toward the window now instead of the false window of the television. On her end table, a manila envelope lay open, and several upturned pill bottles. The pills themselves were nowhere in sight.

  I had a sudden urge to kick the basketball at my feet. Its upturned pumpkin face seemed especially crude and smug, and I imagined the ball sailing through the air, the candle flames spinning.

  Instead, I stepped over the ball, set my own candle on the Ping-Pong table as I reached for the back of Joanne’s chair.

  She had to be in that chair. She couldn’t possibly be anywhere else.

  “You called me about a smell.�
�� My hand touched the puffed top of the chair back and I could almost feel taut muscle beneath the vinyl skin. “The smell of death. It’s getting worse, you said.”

  I couldn’t stop myself, despite how much I dreaded what I might find. I pulled and the chair began to swivel to face me. From behind, I saw the terrycloth cap she wore to cover unwashed hair. The chair turned, I saw stray tufts of hair, but the wing of the chair covered her face. Stop turning, I thought, Please, but the motion was under way, too late to stop, and an odor wafted up.

  It smelled like illness. Like her.

  The chair turned, but Joanne’s legs didn’t dangle from the seat. Instead, two molasses smears trailed over the cushions and to the floor. The sludge poured out the bottom cuffs of her flower-print pajamas.

  A television remote sat on one arm of the chair. Atop the remote lay five slug shapes—a gelatinous hand, too weary to adjust the controls. Attached to the hand, more thick sludge led to a sleeve of her cardigan. Pressed into the syrup, I noticed small flecks of hair similar to those I’d previously seen on Joanne’s arm.

  Her face. God, how I dreaded looking where her face should be.

  It was stuck to the chair, a congealed bas-relief above the open neck of her sweater, with bristle-wisps of hair and her terry-cloth cap on top. A hint of facial features remained in the sludge: eyebrows like caterpillars; the bulge of her nose and a button of mole on her cheek; two plump lines suggesting the fullness of her lips.

  Her eyes were closed, as if asleep. In the flicker of candlelight, her features appeared to move—a slight raise of her brow, a sudden pucker of the mouth.

  As I backed away in revulsion, my heel crushed something rubbery. A tennis ball, I think, but it felt like I’d stepped on an ingredient fallen from the soup in the chair: a piece of lung or stomach or kidney. I swung my arms for balance, but instead of falling backward I overcorrected and fell forward.

  Toward the chair.

  As my feet slipped from under me, I made the mistake of opening my mouth to cry out.

  I turned my head but not soon enough. I landed against the sludge face. Gelatin lips smeared across my mouth and onto my cheek, and a thick sickly odor forced its way up my nostrils. As I pulled away, part of her face clung to my own. I tasted her illness, and it was cancer and scurvy and rot; it was spite and selfishness and cruelty, seasoned into the sludge of inactivity. Most vile of all, a hint of sweetness flavored the syrup, like the insult of peppermint deodorizer in the ward of the dying.

  Wiping my lips with the back of my hand, spitting the diseased taste from my mouth, I raced out of the room.

  I’d forgotten my candle, but enough others had been placed in the hallway to light my way. On the stairway, I slowed through the obstacle course of the detective’s stretched body. One misstep and I’d have pulled the tangle of twine and limbs along with me.

  All I wanted to do now was wash my face and hands. I’d almost forgotten about my missing wife and children. I felt unworthy of them, my face coated with a layer of someone else’s hatred and illness.

  The rooms I’d already entered were off-limits. I’d already experienced those horrors, and the carnival ride would not let me retrace my path. On the second floor, I went into the unit across the hall from the college girl’s apartment.

  A sink with running water. That’s all I wanted. Plus some gristled soap and a scouring pad to scratch at my face and hands. Bleach, if necessary.

  I decided to head straight to the kitchen, avoiding any spook-house scares in the living room. Whatever was positioned there, however the body was propped up or mutilated or transformed, I wouldn’t look.

  I wouldn’t…

  But curiosity got the best of me.

  And maybe in the back of my mind, I’d convinced myself things couldn’t get any worse.

  This one. This one was so bad, I can’t bring myself to describe all of it. I’ve described some pretty bizarre stuff already—so if I stop short here, that tells you something, doesn’t it?

  The apartment belonged to the Tammisimo family. Their kid, Andrew, was kind of the ringleader of a group of teenagers in our community. “Gang” might be the better word, if they had any sense of organization or purpose. But really, all they did was hang out, maybe make snide comments as you passed but quick to back down if you challenged them. Oh, we didn’t say nothing, Naylor. Just chillin’. All talk, with no muscle to back it up: of the four of them, two were spindly thin, one was stocky and short, and the other was a slightly plump girl who followed them more out of inertia than interest. Tyler was the short one, and he’d basically latched on to the three rare people he thought he could boss around.

  I always suspected they were the ones who bent back the fence to make a shortcut off our property. If supplies went missing, if a window got broken or if spray paint appeared on a brick wall, any one of them might be the culprit.

  But I’d never once thought to blame them for what was happening now. Not enough imagination among the four of them combined. No sense of purpose, like I said. Even if one of them came up with an idea, they’d be collectively too lazy to follow through.

  The Tammisimo apartment proved my instincts correct. The main room was heavily vandalized—smashed furniture, broken glass. Torn wallpaper and harsh black letters written on the walls.

  The four teenagers were piled in the middle of the floor, and their bodies had been vandalized, too. That’s the part I can’t bring myself to describe. Even in the dim candlelight, I saw too much. Not just how their bodies had been broken, but how they’d been reassembled. How they’d been cut open, and what was put inside them.

  And those words on the wall. Not words, exactly, but the shape of words and sentences, in some alphabet I couldn’t recognize.

  Commands.

  A demon alphabet of spirals and hideous angles, lines crossing torn wallpaper and battered drywall, a breeze contorting the letters, candle flames making them dance. If I stared long enough, they’d twist into familiar shapes. I’d be able to translate the phrases, understand what they asked me to do.

  —

  My hypothetical coffin-shaped rail car continued to guide me, and I prayed I was nearing the end of the ride. I longed for the moment when my car would burst through a swinging set of wooden doors into the bright outdoors. I would laugh, the way people always laughed after a funhouse ride, and that would prove I’d never really been scared, that every room was filled with mannequins and mechanical effects, the atmosphere supplied by painted backdrops and strobe lights and tape-recorded screams.

  Downstairs seemed the logical ending to the ride. I followed the leaf-strewn steps to the basement floor, with the supply room and laundry facility, and with the community meeting space that hosted all our major events, including the previous years’ Halloween parties.

  And this year’s party, too—back on the schedule, if the hand-altered flyer could be believed.

  Outside the locked storage room, strategically placed candles revealed my toolkit on the floor where I’d left it. Someone had replaced the tools with Halloween treats—Red Hots, chocolate kisses, candy corn, and colorful gumballs—all loose from their wrappers, as if to assist the poisoner’s efforts. Plastic goblin fingers reached from beneath the pile, poised to close around the wrists of greedy children. A glint of metal flashed here and there: razor blades or straight pins.

  No sign of my heavy-duty Maglite, but a dollar-store replacement lay beside the toolkit. This plastic flashlight was orange with a pumpkin-shaped dome on the end. When I picked it up and pushed the switch, the jack-o’-lantern face lit up and a focused beam shone out the hollow top of the pumpkin’s head.

  Better than nothing. At the time, I was grateful for the improved visibility.

  With what came next, I’d rather have been blind.

  —

  The doors to the activity room were both shut. A full-sized effigy of a hanged witch dangled in front of the entrance. The rope was tied to the door handle, threaded up to a pulley in t
he ceiling, and the noose was looped over the dummy’s neck.

  An interesting historical fact, Mattie. They didn’t actually burn witches at the stake in Salem. They hanged them. And then I’d added as a joke: Though a fire is nice sometimes, right?

  Black frizzy hair fell wild beneath the pointed witch’s cap. Her rubber skin was green and wide eyes were painted on her face. A large wart balanced at the end of her crooked nose.

  The body was draped by a full black robe with wadded newspapers or straw holding the shape beneath. A piece of paper was fastened to the front of the robe, but I couldn’t quite distinguish the writing on it. I aimed the flashlight at the note and walked closer.

  My face and hands were still sticky, and a rotten taste had settled in the back of my throat. I felt a gust of damp basement air and watched how the body swung in the breeze.

  It didn’t sway like a robe stuffed with paper or straw. There was more heft to the body, maybe like a plaster store mannequin beneath the clothing. Not a real body. Surely not a real body.

  Because the shape in the robe seemed suddenly familiar.

  It bore an unsettling resemblance to how my wife might look if she floated above the floor, a rubber mask over her head and the life strangled out of her.

  As I reached forward, I hoped for a crinkle of newspaper or straw when I touched the robe, rather than the soft give of a woman’s torso. My hand hovered over the attached note, which I was now close enough to read.

  Large bold letters, like the message a killer tapes to a body for the police to find: SHE CANCELED HALLOWEEN.

  I lay my palm against the front of the black, flowing costume, then pushed.

  And God help me, the body felt heavy. And the way it moved…

  I knew it had to be Lynn. Hadn’t my wife said those same words, about canceling Halloween? I wanted to hug her, untie the rope, then get her down, lift the mask and breathe life back into her. My wife and I had some problems lately, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed. I loved her. Our children needed her.