Dark Hallows II: Tales from the Witching Hour

by Mark Parker

  Frank looked at the tidy house at 237 Tupelo. The porch light was on, but all the windows were dark. Rose bushes lined the front of the house and a birdbath stood in the middle of the lawn. “Doesn’t look like a witch lives here to me.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” I said, getting out of the car.

  “Bet you twenty bucks it was a heart attack.”

  “No bet.”

  “Chicken.”

  I laughed. “Let’s just wait on the tox report. Remember those kids that spiked their teacher’s coffee a few years back and he ended up dead? That happened on Halloween, too, you know.”

  “I hate Halloween,” Frank muttered and slammed the car door.

  ***

  She surprised us by answering the door after the first knock.

  Frank and I introduced ourselves and showed her our badges, and she surprised us again by inviting us inside before we could even explain what we were doing there.

  We followed her into a candle-lit living room and she motioned for us to take a seat. Frank and I sat side by side on a leather sofa. She settled across from us in a high-backed antique chair. Some kind of incense was burning in the room. It smelled exotic and welcoming. I could almost taste it on my tongue.

  Ramona Torres was a big woman, at least two hundred pounds, and she was beautiful. Skin the color of creamy chocolate. Dark lush hair that sparkled in the candlelight and reached halfway down her back. Dark, mysterious eyes that made you want to disappear inside them. She was dressed in a flowing black robe etched with gold border that did nothing to hide her glorious cleavage. I noticed Frank staring and hoped I was being more discreet.

  Before either of us could begin to explain our late night appearance at her home, she surprised us a third time. “I’ve been expecting you.”

  That woke us both up. I felt Frank shift on the sofa next to me. “And why is that, Mrs. Torre?” he asked.

  “You’ve come to tell me that my ex-husband is dead, have you not?”

  I nodded. “Unfortunately, yes, we have.”

  “There is nothing unfortunate about it. The man was a pig.”

  She smiled when she said this, and I felt the temperature in the room drop and icy fingers caress the back of my neck. I shivered. Jesus, this witch business was getting to me.

  I glanced at Frank, sensing he was feeling the same thing. He sat up on the sofa and leaned forward. “Do you think we could turn on some lights in here, Mrs. Torre?”

  “Why not?” She clapped her hands, twice, and an overhead chandelier blinked on, chasing away the shadows in the corners of the room.

  “That’s better,” Frank said, looking around. “Thank you.”

  I glanced around the room and felt myself relax a little. Mrs. Torre’s living room looked exactly like a hundred other living rooms I had sat in before on the job. Shelves lined with books and knick-knacks and framed photographs. A widescreen television attached to the wall above a fancy gas fireplace. A piano in the corner by the window. Big potted plants everywhere.

  “So you and Mr. Torre were obviously not on good terms?” Frank asked.

  Mrs. Torre laughed. “You could say that. I despised the man.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said. “When and why did you get divorced?”

  “I filed for divorce ten months ago. About ten years too late.” She crossed her legs, and I noticed that she was wearing sandals. Her toenails were painted bright red. “As for why…like I said, Harry was a pig. He lied to me. He cheated on me. He abused me.”

  “Did you ever report him for abuse, Mrs. Torre?” Frank asked.

  “I did not. He never raised a hand to me, detective. The only scars he left were inside my soul.”

  “But you were happy for a time?” I asked. “In the earlier years of the marriage?”

  “Harry was a con man, detective. He made me believe in a marriage, in a life, that wasn’t real. It never existed. It took me awhile to figure that out, but still I remained with him. No, I was never really happy. At best, I guess you could say I was…grateful.”

  “Grateful?” Frank asked, and I could hear him scribbling in his notebook.

  “That’s right.” Mrs. Torre thought for a moment. “I was always different, detective. I never really fit in anywhere or with anyone. Even when I was young, growing up back in Mexico, because of my family, people often whispered about me. Many were even afraid of me.”

  “What about your family?” Frank asked before I could.

  She uncrossed her legs. “We were very poor when I was a young girl, but my mother was a very powerful woman. Known many villages away as a healer, among other things. There were always stories about my mother and her sisters. As long as I could remember.”

  “What kind of stories?” I asked, clearly captivated with the beautiful woman sitting across from me. She met my gaze with a direct stare of her own, and the room suddenly felt too bright and too warm. I felt drowsy, almost as if I had been drugged, and I struggled to remember if Mrs. Torre had offered us something to drink upon our arrival.

  I looked at Frank and he was staring back at me, and I could tell he was experiencing the same sensation.

  “…and of course there were those villagers who accused my mother and her sisters of being Brujas Negra’s…”

  I looked back at Mrs. Torre and she was smiling at me again, a tired, sad smile, and then I wasn’t looking at her at all…I was no longer in her living room…I was somehow…

  …inside a dusty village in a jungle clearing made up of grass and mud huts and there were chickens running wild and ancient women washing clothes in a filthy creek and a dirty little girl with dark, sweaty skin and wide, beautiful eyes holding the hand of an equally beautiful older woman, standing amidst a crowd of others in front of what looked like a stone altar at the jungle’s edge and there was an old man bound to the altar with heavy ropes and the man was naked and bleeding and sobbing, his toothless mouth gasping for air, and there was another beautiful woman towering above him, arms outstretched to the sky, both hands clutching a roughly-carved stone dagger dripping with blood and plunging it downward…

  “…so, yes, you could say I was grateful, detective. Grateful to be accepted by someone from your world. Someone who appeared to be kind and successful and…normal. It was all I ever wanted when I was a little girl growing up in the jungle. It was my fairy tale.” Her voice grew harsh. “But it all turned out to be a lie.”

  I blinked and I was back in Mrs. Torre’s candlelit living room. I no longer felt sleepy or drugged. On the contrary, I felt wide awake and alert. I glanced up at the ceiling, looking for the chandelier, but couldn’t make it out in the flickering darkness. I listened as Frank’s scribbling reached a frenzied pace, and then it abruptly stopped and the room was silent.

  After a moment, Mrs. Torre spoke again: “Aren’t either of you going to ask if I killed my ex-husband, detectives?”

  I felt a single, icy finger trace a path across my neck and down between my shoulder blades, and then it was gone.

  Frank got to his feet first, and I was right behind him. I wasn’t scared exactly, but I wanted out of that room, out of that house, and far away from that beautiful, mysterious woman.

  “Mrs. Torre,” Frank said, his voice much softer than I was accustomed to hearing. “Even if you admitted it, I’m pretty damn sure we could never prove it. Not in any crime lab and not in any court of law…”

  ***

  “You think she’s a witch?”

  “No such thing,” I said, merging back onto the interstate. We had been inside Ramona Torre’s house for just over a half-hour, but the entire visit was a blur. Exhaustion was to blame; too many cases, too many late nights.

  “Something was off about her. You see what she was wearing?”

  “She was…different, that’s for sure.”

  “You liked her, didn’t you?”

  I looked at Frank. “You were the one staring at her boobs.”

  “Kinda har
d not to,” he said, grinning. “Be honest, Ben. What did you think of her?”

  I thought about it for a moment before I answered. “I think she’s a very beautiful, very sad, very lonely woman.”

  An SUV suddenly blasted past us in the fast lane, blaring its horn, startling both of us. The driver was laughing and wearing a rubber skeleton mask and his passenger was wearing a Donald Trump mask, complete with fuzzy orange hair. The Donald leaned out the window and flipped us the bird before disappearing down the highway.

  “Dumbass kids,” I said. “Lucky I don’t hit the lights and pull em over.”

  Frank grunted and stared out the car window at the dark countryside. “God, I hate Halloween.”

  ONE BAD APPLE

  J.D. Horn

  “Will McIntosh was a liar and a thief,” Gordon said, breaking the silence that had fallen over them. Jonathan shifted his gaze from his smartphone to the man, a boyhood friend to whom time hadn’t been kind. Gordon sat, spotted and toad-like, by the hearth, hunched over in a hideous barley twist cane chair, the golden light of the fire making his bulbous, spider-veined nose appear all the more grotesque. His bloodshot and watery blue eyes rested on those same unflattering flames, but his unfocused gaze seemed to be peering beyond it, all the way into their shared past.

  “And a dullard, too,” added Max, another living relic of Jonathan’s childhood. Jonathan turned his attention to Max, recumbent on the claw-foot piece of Victoriana that passed for a sofa in this potpourri hell where Stanley had reserved them four rooms, four days before he blew out his brains.

  Dour Timothy completed their quartet. He lurked, silent in a shadowy corner of the room, untouched by the fire’s glow, though saved from utter darkness by an anachronistic compact fluorescent bulb shining through a brass table lamp’s cranberry glass shade.

  The four of them hadn’t been together, in the same room, since their high school graduation, each of them having taken to the wind shortly thereafter. Of their group of childhood friends, Stanley, alone, had returned to Maine.

  “I swear the boy could only think in stick figures,” Max said, chuckling at his own joke. “That’s why he was fourteen and still in our class.”

  “Left behind twice,” Gordon said, shaking his head with an air of sorrowed disapproval.

  Even though Stanley hadn’t given them a choice, they had come for his funeral, not Will’s. It chafed Jonathan that they didn’t seem capable of coming up with a single warm remembrance of Stanley to share. Maybe it was this void that caused Max and Gordon to ruminate about Will. Still, it seemed wrong to pass the time denigrating a boy, dead and gone for going on…was it six decades now?

  A decorous knock at the door announced the arrival of one of the bed and breakfast’s two proprietresses, the unprepossessing Mrs. Dempsey. There was no Mr. Dempsey, as far as Jonathan could ascertain. Perhaps there never had been. Though youngish in comparison to Jonathan and his fellows, she might have graduated to the honorific through age without ever having picked up a husband. An odd thing to do in this day, but she seemed a creature of a different age, more Jonathan’s mother’s contemporary than his own junior. He felt certain the woman would cringe if addressed as “Ms.” She bore a non-descript bottle of whiskey, and her expression was one of utmost sympathy. It would not have surprised Jonathan to learn she’d spent the afternoon, which they’d whiled away at the sparsely attended viewing of Stanley’s closed, matte-silver casket, preparing a speech for their comfort and perhaps edification. She seemed on the verge of addressing them, but at the last moment appeared to read the mood of the room and kept mum.

  Their host cast a quick disappointed glance at the remains of the nearly untouched afternoon tea she’d made the common mistake of referring to as “high tea.” An electric stainless steel samovar full of Orange Pekoe loomed over a three-quarters full silver plate coffee pot. Between them sat a ceramic tray lined with wax paper and burdened with tiny finger sandwiches, perfect rectangles of crustless white bread either stuffed with cheese and pickle or some abominable-smelling potted meat. One ruffled-edged plate held an undisturbed mound of fancy jam-filled sugar cookies, the golden preserves peeking out through tiny, five-pointed star cutouts. A second identical plate was filled with small seeded scones, one of which Jonathan had tried with a dollop of clotted cream and a preserve made of the same golden jam used in the cookies. The flavor of the jam reminded him somewhat of passion fruit or perhaps papaya, but didn’t really taste like either. Still, it was delicious, though the seeds lent the scones an odd, disagreeable tang.

  “Mr. Alexander,” she said, for some reason choosing to address herself to Timothy, perhaps because he seemed the most distant, the most in need of being welcomed back into the fold. “You and your friends should have a bit to eat. You’ll need your strength for tomorrow.”

  Jonathan made a show of scooping up a couple of the cookies and biting into one, disappointed to find that they, too, had been impregnated with the disagreeable seeds. He forced a grateful smile to his lips. “Delicious,” he said, though he felt an uncomfortable rumbling in his stomach.

  “Thank you,” she said, opening the bottle of whiskey she carried with her and measuring a stingy splash of the alcohol into Gordon’s tumbler. Jonathan took advantage of her distraction to pocket the second cookie. “An old family recipe.” She did no more than dampen the bottom of Max’s glass with the whiskey before returning the stopper to the bottle. She turned toward the door.

  “Leave the bottle,” Max moaned, one hand over his eyes. The gesture revealed a faded tattoo of an eagle clutching an anchor, without a doubt a souvenir of Max’s Navy career, on his forearm.

  Jonathan’s gaze passed from Max’s time-tonsured pate to the face of Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott, who peered down at them with evident apprehension from over the bow of her boat. She could hardly be blamed—a gilt frame was all that separated her from an unforgiving sea of purple flocked wallpaper.

  The bed and breakfast’s communal sitting room, where Jonathan and his three surviving boyhood friends had gathered after the closed casket visitation, offered little by way of comfort. His own room, which he’d visited only briefly, had impressed him by achieving the rare feat of feeling both drafty and close at the same time.

  As far as Jonathan could, at first, ascertain, their lodging’s salient attraction was its two-block proximity to the funeral home where Stanley’s corpse now lay awaiting internment. But now, after they’d spent three-quarters of an hour cataloging the innkeepers’ cut-rate, if earnest, attempts to resurrect the gilded age, more than enough time for the darkness of the occasion to seep into their souls, Jonathan felt certain neither comfort nor proximity had played any part in the choice of accommodations. No, the bed and breakfast where Stanley had sentenced them to pass the night had been chosen for effect.

  Stanley had once been head of the local college’s drama department, and he was directing them, even now, through the arrangements he had made for them. This parlor was reminiscent of the cheap set of every tired whodunit ever staged. Timing his exit so they’d arrive on All Hallows’ Eve was Stanley’s ham-handed coup de grace.

  “The bottle,” Max said again, this time the words sounding more a plea than a demand.

  Mrs. Dempsey stopped in the doorway, clutching the bottle by its neck. She hesitated, casting an eye over each of them, performing, no doubt, a complex bit of calculus that took into account their age—advanced—and current level of inebriation. While Jonathan was stone-cold sober, Max was pissing drunk, and Gordon and Timothy were sliding down the scale toward Max with each touch of glass to lip.

  Her lips pursed, and her head had already begun to shake when Gordon spoke up. “It’s a wake for God’s sake, woman, show some mercy on four tattered old fools.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on them,” Jonathan said, doing his best with a single glance to assure her the evening wouldn’t end with a claim filed against her insurance policy. After forty-five years of working in contract law, he
realized he’d just assumed liability for the others’ behavior, but it was better than listening to Max and Gordon’s complaining. He crossed the room and clutched the bottle by its heel.

  Though she did not exactly hand the bottle to him, she allowed him to tug it from her grasp. “See that you do,” she said, her tone maternal, as if she weren’t at least thirty years their junior. She ran her now free hand down the front of her olive cardigan. Her expression softened. “Listen. We try to put on a good show each year for the kids coming around to trick-or-treat. Scary noises. Fog machine. Strobe lights. You know, the works. Vera and I like to go all out.” Though they hadn’t yet been introduced, Jonathan surmised this Vera was Mrs. Dempsey’s elusive partner in running the B&B—and perhaps her partner in other areas of life, as well. “It starts out pretty tame for the young children, but as the evening progresses—” She hesitated. “I just mean, don’t be alarmed by anything you might hear. The community has come to expect a bit of a production from us. We’re always the last stop. The best stop,” she added, pride evident in her tone. “Vera is just putting on the final touches now. The first wave of barbarians should hit any time, but it’ll all be over by eight.” She cast an eye toward the window, apparently estimating the time left before the first little goblins’ arrival by the bruising of the sky. She turned her focus back to Jonathan, looking at him as if he were the only other adult in the room. “I’ll pop in to check on you afterward.”

  “Could you bring some of the candy, too?” Max said, his voice turned oddly childlike and plaintive, reinforcing, Jonathan felt sure, the woman’s impression of them as puerile, if long past innocent, “if there’s any left over, that is.”

  “Jesus, Max,” Timothy spoke up for the first time since returning from the funeral home, “Are you five? Stick to your booze, and leave the sweets to the kids.”

  “No, no. It’s all right,” Mrs. Dempsey said, a trace of a smile returning to her lips, if not to her eyes. “I’m sure there will be plenty. We always buy too much.” The smile faded, and a line formed between her brows. “I know our festivities may seem frivolous to you,” she said, seemingly in response to Timothy’s ill humor, “in light of your loss…”