by Mark Parker
***
El Rey could let his subjects roam free at this one moment in the year, when holes in the invisible veils converged, but he had never been able to leave his realm himself. Not without a body to occupy, and nobody had ever made an offer like Tom’s before.
He was shoved to the back of the brainpan when el Rey crammed into his skull and took over. He felt like an afterthought in his own head, dwarfed by the vast god-consciousness that pried into every secret chamber of his psyche. Even the things he did without doing and knew without knowing came under divine control. The rhythm of the heart, the flow of the hormones, and the replication of cells became conscious acts subordinate to will, like blinking an eye or making a fist. A delighted el Rey chose first to grow, adding two feet of height and many layers of dense muscle, depleting every physiological resource Tom’s body had with the effort. Hunger crashed in on them like a breaking wave, but hunger was a feeling the old god knew.
“¡Muertos!” Mictlantecuhtli raised Tom’s voice to shout, and his skeletal subjects crowded up behind Dulcé’s bones at the door between the worlds. “I grant you license this night. Those bearing grievances or grudges, bring me the hearts of your enemies and the children of your enemies, that I may eat and add their strength to mine. Bring me the heads of your enemies and the children of your enemies, that I may rack up their skulls in the name of Mictlan. Do this now, by the command of your King!”
The unquiet dead of Los Angeles responded to this proposition with enthusiasm. A horde of bent and broken bones shoved past Dulcé to follow when el Rey dropped from the Hole in the Sky, and ant-like streams of skeletons scrambled down the Tree’s gnarled branches after him.
They spread out across the starlit landscape, marching toward the dim city-glow in the east.
***
The people who named Mictlantecuhtli had sometimes buried their dead with jade beads to offer el Rey when they reached his realm and he demanded their hearts. Dulcé didn’t know if this amounted to bribery or deception, but she did know the stories.
She and others of los muertos used the door el Rey left open to visit the dreams of their descendants, reminding them of those old myths, so that they were ready when the angry dead arrived to harvest hearts or heads. She had a feeling Mictlantecuhtli would interpret Tom’s directive to ‘kill them all’ in the broadest possible terms.
The army of the vengeful dead called at every house in the city and extracted sacrifices from everyone they found. Los vivos thought they were in a nightmare, but many had been warned. Some gave over gems or silver dollars, and several clever souls evaded death by substituting ticking pocket watches for their own beating hearts.
But sugar skulls saved a great many more. The molded candy death’s heads were traditional ofrendas, offerings, placed on graves and altars to represent the recently deceased. Confectioners had made more than usual that year, somehow anticipating unprecedented demand, and people who meant to buy just one or two ended up taking home a dozen if not more, to give away to neighbors and acquaintances, without really knowing why. So people had them in their homes, on their countertops and shelves, ready to hand over when those who hadn’t deserved their deaths came back on la Noche de los Muertos, demanding recompense.
***
Not that everybody was so fortunate. Initiates of the Order of the Golden Chain were a notable exception. No kindly spirits visited their dreams, and their neighbors tended not to like them, so none of them had sugar skulls to offer in place of the real thing. Mictlantecuhtli ate the wicked hearts his subjects claimed, enlarging himself with every bite. The embodied god stood more than eight feet tall by the time he personally hauled Jacobus Vreke out of bed and dragged him from his mansion high on Bunker Hill, to be hounded through the streets by mobs of jeering skeletons.
They herded him down Wilshire, to the forecourt of his silly temple. A tall brass sundial sat at its center and the Aztec god threw Vreke down upon it, skewering him through the kidney. He howled like a gut-shot animal, but stopped when Mictlantecuhtli opened his solar plexus with a hand-chipped obsidian blade and reached up into his chest to rip loose his fibrillating heart.
The skeletons had all fallen silent. They raised the calaveras they’d collected when their red-handed King held his prize aloft, completing Tom’s revenge. Some of los vivos, the living who thought they were dreaming, had come out to join them in the streets, and they held up more sugar skulls to bear witness with their ancestors.
Every candy skull had the same name written on its brow. By tradition, the offerings always bore the names of the beloved dead, inscribed in sugar icing.
That year, no matter what name the decorators intended, their hands would only write one word—and that was Dulcé.
***
Tom awoke on the floor of the First Chamber, with morning sun streaming in through the Hole in the Sky.
He sat up, then stood up without difficulty. The old iron ache in his hip was gone. He was only himself again, but his body’s temporary occupant had left it healed.
His arms were still sleeved in flaking blood, though.
“I found myself… overwhelmed, by my experience,” el Rey said, and Tom turned to see the King standing framed in the door between worlds. He didn’t look like a skeleton now, but rather a tall man with black hair and sharp eyes, dressed in royal Aztec regalia. Reliving the glory days, Tom supposed. The only way he knew for sure this was el Rey was that the god had kept his favorite necklace of gory eyeballs.
“Glad you had fun.”
“I would make our arrangement permanent. This will be possible when our worlds align again next year. Will you consider it?”
“Can I be with her? In Mictlan?”
El Rey shrugged. “You will serve until you have replaced yourself.”
In other words, no. “Then I want more time. To find a new acolyte.”
“Will ‘ten years’ be enough?”
El Rey had little understanding of time, and why should he? Ten years, ten seconds, and ten centuries were all the same to him. “Should be,” Tom said. A decade to figure out a better way to appease the King. Hopefully he wouldn’t need as much as that.
“Then it is done,” el Rey said. “In ten years’ time you will return to my Chambers and we will trade body for soul. What will you do until then?”
“Thought I might travel. I never have, you know.”
“As you wish it, Tomás Delgado. I know you won’t forget your promises.”
Tom gasped when el Rey raised a hand and the old familiar pain bit back into his hip. It buckled under him and he fell, hitting the stone floor hard. The King had rescinded his repairs. He saw his cane lying on the floor some feet away, right at eye level.
“Remember that greater torments await those who disappoint me,” el Rey said, and then he was gone, leaving Tom to make a slow, careful climb back down the Tree.
***
Late the next afternoon he was on board a train when it departed from Toluca Station.
He set his cane across the empty seat beside him and watched the sun-drenched chaparral landscape roll past his window for a while. It was probably a good idea to leave town after instigating dozens of grisly killings, so he was going to see the world, even though Dulcé couldn’t show it to him now.
She’d deceived him, without a doubt. He’d checked her pocketbook before he buried her, and discovered that she’d cashed out her savings and reserved passage to the east coast the morning before she died.
But, whatever other lies she might’ve told, at least she bought two tickets.
THE WITCH
Richard Chizmar
“I hate Halloween.”
“You hate everything,” I said.
“That’s not true.”
“Name three things you don’t—”
“Pizza.”
“That’s one.”
“Fishing.”
“Two.”
Frank Logan, bald head, double chin, and wrinkled suit, star
ed out the passenger window of our unmarked patrol car.
“Stuck at two, aren’t you?”
“Well, I was gonna say you’re the third thing I don’t hate, but that was before you started with this shit.”
I laughed and swung a right onto Pulaski Highway. “So what do you have against Halloween anyway?”
He glanced over at me and I recognized the look immediately: it was his ‘Should I really waste my breath explaining this to you?’ look.
After a moment, he decided I was worth the effort and went on. “It’s become too damn commercial. I read in the paper last week that Halloween is second only to Christmas when it comes to holiday sales revenue. Christmas, for Chrissake!”
I smiled and changed lanes. Another classic Frank Logan rant coming up.
“When I was a kid, the only thing anyone spent money on was candy, that’s it! We made the decorations for our yards and houses. We made our costumes. I was a hobo the first time I went trick or treating. A clown the next year. A baseball player the year after that. All homemade. Didn’t spend a penny.”
“I can’t see you as a clown.”
“I was five, Ben. What was your first costume?”
I hesitated. “Umm, I don’t remember.”
“Sure you do. Everyone remembers their first Halloween costume. It’s like a rule, like remembering your first piece of ass.”
“I really don’t remember.”
“Sure you do.”
I sighed. “I was Casper, Frank. Good enough?”
“Casper the friendly ghost?”
“No, Casper the angry squirrel.”
He arched his eyebrows. “Store bought?”
I turned onto a residential street. Jack-O’-Lanterns grinned their jagged, orange grins at us from front porches. Tombstones poked out of manicured lawns, piles of fallen leaves heaped in front of them in the shapes of corpses. Ghosts and goblins hung from trees. I saw a cluster of police lights in the distance. It was after ten, so the sidewalks were empty of trick-or-treaters, but I could see a good-sized crowd gathered in the middle of the road ahead.
“Store bought?” Frank asked again. Once he got his teeth into something, he didn’t let go. It was what made him such a fine detective.
“Yes, Frank, it was store bought. A cheap plastic mask with eyeholes cut out of it, and one of those elastic bands in the back that pinched your ears and neck. I apologize for violating the spirit of Halloween and promise to make up for it next October. Happy?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Just a question. No need to get touchy.”
I pulled to the curb and parked behind a Sheriff’s cruiser, opened the driver’s door and got out.
“Westerns,” Frank said.
I looked at him over the top of our sedan. “What?”
“I don’t hate Westerns. You know, movies.”
I closed my car door and started toward the scene.
“That’s three, Ben,” from behind me. “I win.”
***
“Whatdya got, Lenny?”
Sheriff Deputy Leonard Perkins looked up from the small notebook he was scribbling in and shook his head. “It’s a weird one, fellas.”
“That’s what we hear,” Frank said.
Lenny closed his notebook and looked around at the bystanders, a mix of excited children—many still dressed in costume (all of them store bought, I noticed), masks pushed up off their sweaty faces—and worried, tired adults. “Guess it makes sense. Being Halloween and all.”
“Don’t get him started on Halloween,” I said.
Lenny looked at Frank and back to me again, waiting. When neither of us said anything else, he went on. “Deceased is Harold Torre. Forty-six year old male. Divorced. No kids. Been in the residence for almost fifteen years. Neighbors say he’s quiet and polite. Keeps to himself mostly. Doesn’t show up at the block parties or cookouts but is friendly enough if you pass him on the street or see him working out on his lawn. Doesn’t have many visitors.”
“Occupation?” I asked.
“Owns an insurance company right here in town.”
Lenny gestured for us to follow and started across the lawn to the front porch of a well-kept rancher. It looked like every light in the house was on.
“This is how one of the neighborhood kids found him.”
Mr. Torre was a man of average height and build. I would guess 5’10 and 165 pounds, although it was difficult to accurately gauge since he was presently sprawled face-down on his front porch, one leg tucked beneath the other. He had dark curly hair and wore eyeglasses. The glasses—old fashioned and metal-framed—were lying on the concrete porch amidst a scattering of Halloween candy and an empty dark blue Tupperware bowl.
“No one saw him go down?” Frank asked.
Lenny shook his head. “No one we’ve talked to.” He gestured to a blonde woman and a little boy waiting in the side yard with another police officer. “Kid walked up on him when he was trick-or-treating, found him like that and ran back to his mom crying. She called 911 from her cell.”
Frank grunted. “Kid got his trick, I guess.”
“Really Frank?” I said.
Lenny ignored us. “Had to be quick, though. Lotta trick-or-treaters in this neighborhood. Can’t imagine much of a break between em.”
I nodded, remembering my own childhood Halloween nights. “You talk to the mother yet?”
“Emerson did,” Lenny said. “And we figured you guys would want to.”
“Frank can handle that,” I said and held up a hand in Frank’s direction to stop what I knew was coming.
“No visible wounds,” Lenny continued. “The M.E. had us roll him on his side, but only for a few seconds. Didn’t find anything.”
“Heart attack?” Frank asked.
“Guess it’s possible,” Lenny said. “But when you take the note into account, it’s…doubtful.”
“What note?” I asked.
Lenny looked surprised. “I thought you knew. We found a handwritten note magneted to the refrigerator door.”
“A note saying what?” Frank interrupted.
“We bagged it and tagged it. It’s in the van right now.” He nodded his head in the direction of the crime lab van parked across the street.
“Just give us the short version,” Frank said, glancing at me, all business now.
“Note claims that if anything happened to him, his ex-wife was to blame,” Lenny said. “Evidently they’d been arguing a lot lately. It’s dated a week ago yesterday and signed Harold Torre.”
“Interesting,” Frank said, a split second before I could mutter the exact same response. I read an article once that claimed police detectives who worked together for long periods of time became almost like twin siblings, reading each other’s thoughts and completing each other’s sentences. I looked at Frank and really hoped it wasn’t true.
Lenny flipped open his notebook and read from it: “Ex-wife is Ramona Ann Torre. Age thirty-nine. Maiden name Ramirez. Residence 237 Tupelo. Over in Aberdeen.”
“All that was in the note?” I asked.
“Negative. Just her first name. I dug up the rest waiting on you guys.”
Frank slapped him on the shoulder. “That’s good work, Deputy.”
I backed off the porch and looked at Frank. “You go talk to Mom and I’ll track down the M.E. Meet you at the van when we’re finished.”
Frank gave a nod and started for the side yard.
“There’s one more thing, detectives.”
Frank and I stopped and looked up at Lenny, who was still standing on the front porch with Mr. Torre’s body. The deputy loomed over us, an imposing dark shadow silhouetted in the bright house lights shining behind him.
“What’s that?” Frank asked, squinting, impatient now.
“Mr. Torre…in the note…” Lenny lowered his voice to make sure no one else could overhear. “He claims his ex-wife is a witch.”
“A witch?” I repeated, unsure I had heard him correctly.
I looked at Frank. He looked back at me, eyebrows arched. “Happy Halloween, partner,” he muttered and walked away to talk to the Mom and little boy waiting in the side yard.
***
“Jesus, please tell me that’s not the house,” Frank said, staring out the car window at the spilt-level house on the right side of the road.
“That’s not the house, Frank.”
The home in question was decorated from yard to rooftop like a haunted house from some Grade B horror film. Gargoyles with glowing red eyes stood watch from the second-story roof. Hideously lifelike zombies lurched amongst the grave markers scattered across the front lawn. Fake spider webs drooped from porch railings and tree branches and roof gutters. A blood-splattered corpse, swollen tongue protruding, dangled from a noose hanging from a leaning oak tree. Both sides of the driveway were lined with what had to be at least twenty fat pumpkins, orange flames winking secrets in the cool October breeze and forming a welcoming path for trick-or-treaters earlier in the night. A pair of fog machines hidden behind the shrubbery churned out a hazy backdrop and, even with the car windows closed, we could hear the familiar manic beats of the Halloween movie soundtrack.
“Look at that,” he scowled as we cruised past. “Must’ve cost them a thousand bucks. At least!”
“Two-thirty-seven is up here on the left,” I said, spotting an unmarked sedan parked at the curb. They had arrived a half-hour earlier, to confirm that Ramona Torres was at home and, in case she was indeed guilty, to make sure she didn’t decide to make a run for it before we could get there. The two officers would also serve as back-up in the unlikely event we needed it.
“All that money and for what?” Frank went on. “One stupid night. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I figure it makes plenty of sense to them, Frank, or why else would they do it?”
He grunted and shook his head in disgust.
I flipped a wave to the undercover officers parked across the street and pulled over to the curb and shut off the engine. “Ready?”
“To go witch hunting?”
I tried not to smile. “That’s what the man said.”