by Mark Parker
“Something’s wrong, Jed.”
“He’s probably just messing with us.”
“But what if he tripped or fell down the stairs? It’s so dark in there…”
“He’s the tough guy that wanted to go in by himself. He’ll find his way out.” Jed shrugged. “Or, he won’t.”
Todd bit his lip and turned back to look at the school, where something was changing. There was a vast internal movement now, as if the dark itself was shifting en masse from room to room. Jed was looking at the school too now, the wolf mask hanging slack off the side of his head.
“See?” Todd said, “Someone’s in there!”
“It’s just bats,” Jed said, without taking his eyes off the place. Sounds accompanied the movement, a clatter like hundreds of footfalls eagerly racing along the blind halls as if it were the last day of school before summer break. But it wasn’t a sultry afternoon in late May. It was the middle of the night on the last day of October. And there were no kids, of course, unless—
“It’s just rats,” Jed said again, his voice barely audible.
A charcoal grey cloud slid away from the moon, and by its light they saw a small figure standing under the school’s arched main entrance, wearing Spencer’s goblin mask. Todd knew right away that this was not his brother. The figure was too short, too slouch-shouldered. It beckoned to them in a voice sifted through ash—a cindery reed—its cracked and blackened arms extended. Other lights began to appear behind it, a hundred pairs burning moonlight-bright.
Todd didn’t remember fleeing, nor could he recall screaming his throat raw, though he did have a vague recollection of kicking and clawing and biting Jed’s face, as his cousin carried him out of the woods. He guessed that he must have passed out; either that or Jed had knocked him out, as his left temple was sore to the touch for a week after.
The next thing Todd knew, they were back on Jed’s street, and there were red and blue flashing lights out front of his aunt’s house, and his father’s car was there parked behind the cruisers. A throng crowded around them; his mother and father were asking about Spencer. Where’s Spencer, Todd? Where’s your brother?
Todd, drool running from his mouth down his battered Halloween outfit, could only stammer about white eyes in the dark as he pressed the button on Spencer’s watch, sending out that green signal over and over and over again.
But Spencer never came.
***
Twenty years passed.
Todd, a senior financial consultant and acquisitions assessor for Resurrection Foundations Development Corporation, found himself back in the old neighborhood for the first time since his brother’s disappearance. He was on assignment to evaluate a parcel of foreclosed properties his company had recently snatched up.
At first he’d declined the task, having no interest in revisiting what was buried under two decades of scar tissue. But his intractable project supervisor insisted that, ostensibly, Todd was the only team member who possessed the proper credentials. He’d told himself on the drive up that he would do his job and go home. But after inspecting the derelict plots and ramshackle houses, most of which would feel the wrecking ball’s kiss, he found himself driving down that pitted road where he’d last trick-or-treated.
He spotted his aunt’s house, pulled up in front of it and put the car in park. The place was a shambles—roof sagging, gutters hanging like rusticles on a long-sunken ship, the grass so tall a lion could hide utterly unseen amid its blades. This was no surprise, of course. Aunt Jennet had died (cervical cancer) the year Todd got his driver’s license and Jed began serving his first prison sentence. They hadn’t gone to the funeral. Neither Todd nor his mother and father ever spoke to his aunt or cousin again, after that fateful Halloween. Todd’s father had blamed Aunt Jennet for Spencer’s disappearance—so brother and sister had never reconciled. Todd had always felt some degree of guilt for this. It was, after all, Jed’s and Spencer’s, and even his own fault, for not doing as they were told. But adults, he’d learned after his own failed marriage, had a predilection for blaming each other for life’s inexorable incidents.
He wanted to go in, should go in, he thought, if for no other reason than to make sure there were no personal family relics left behind to be claimed by squatters or vandals.
Todd opened the car door, got out and was just about to shut it behind him when he noticed the man sitting in a rusting patio chair beneath the drooping porch roof. He was fat, bald, and shirtless, clutching a dented tallboy beer can between his flabby tits. He rose with surprising speed though, and made his way toward the stoop, flexing and unflexing a fist as he scowled at Todd’s luxury sport sedan. Todd only recognized Jed by the half-crescent bite scar on his cousin’s right cheek. Whether or not Jed recognized him he couldn’t be sure, though if Jed’s gimlet stare was any indication, this was decidedly not the occasion for a family reunion.
“Sorry…wrong house,” Todd said. He got back in his car, put it in drive, and didn’t look back as he punched the pedal.
He turned left at the next road and followed it down a hill toward another cluster of houses, these newer, with hay still strewn in the front lawns where sprinklers waved lazy arcs under the late afternoon sun. It gradually began to dawn on him where he was. The Disadvantaged, as his mother had so saccharinely referred to them as, had become the Displaced as companies like his snatched up the derelict properties en bloc and immediately hiked up the rents. This was no surprise to Todd. It was what he did, and good riddance, too. Once the undesirables were cleared out and the dilapidated bungalows had been razed, they would be replaced with modern renditions and anomalous geometrical shaped townhouses which could then be sold at ten times the value of the latter.
The street had been freshly paved. No chicken bones or shattered glass crunched beneath his tires as he retraced that inauspicious route, steering left again when he reached the corner and again five blocks down where the dead end and that wall of woods stood beyond.
He parked along the curb and stared into the trees while fingering the buttons of Spencer’s watch, worn now with the notch finder furthest from the timepiece.
He took out his phone and searched for a satellite map of the area. Locating the woods, he zoomed in. He saw the path right away—a slender line snaking through the forest and forking near the center. Todd could see now how they’d gone awry that night. The right tine led back up to higher ground, toward Jed’s neighborhood and safety, while the left, the one they’d taken that night, led to a solid black square hedged in on all sides by leafy treetops. Todd squinted at this, frowning. Why would the search engine blot out the area? He zoomed in further, scanning for detail, but it was as if his screen had burned out in that spot, the edges hazy and indistinct.
For a solid month after Spencer’s disappearance police had scanned the vicinity, in addition to the school, inch by inch for any sign of him. Todd had heard they’d come up with nothing, not even a single piece of candy. Was the school still there? If so, there was the chance, however small, of finding some spec relating to his brother—something, anything, which might suggest Spencer hadn’t simply walked into its black maw and vanished without a trace.
There was only one way to find out. Todd popped the trunk, grabbed his boots and put them on in place of his imported leather shoes. He found himself replaying the events of that night as he started off into the woods. Details he hadn’t thought about in years disconcertingly overlapped with the present. The tombstone clouds…the way his cheap plastic mask had pinched his face…the slimy surface of the deadfall they’d squatted behind while hiding from the rabble of kids. When he reached the fork in the path, he kept left, pushing through the encroaching brush, until he reached the school fifteen minutes later.
He’d half expected to see phantoms, ghouls, great billows of black smoke pouring from its empty orifices, but there was only the silence of an un-thought of place; intentionally forgotten perhaps. A place where tragedy was seared into the walls. Nevertheless,
there was an unforeseen tranquility to the slowly crumbling ruin, an immemorial peace suggested by the sun dappled masonry and the birds traipsing along the scorched window frames. Yet for Todd, it was a false semblance of peace, and as he gazed upon it bitterly, the idea began to take shape in his brain.
He would pull some strings, confer with the CFO—who owed him one—and his company would buy the school, and then Todd would spearhead its demolition. They would level the fucking dump, clear the land and put up some sylvan oasis in the form of high priced condos in its place, and Todd himself would be the one to light the fucking dynamite.
The thought made him smile, despite his tears, as he made his way toward the arched entrance through which his brother had gone all those years ago, and had never come out. The smile soon wilted, and tightened into a grimace, when he saw what was waiting for him just over the threshold.
The goblin mask…
Heart beating triple time, he crouched and picked it up, turning it over and over in his hands, noting the black stains on the inside. From the corner of his eye he saw something shift in the shadows.
“Spencer?” his own voice sounded thin and whiney, as if his nine year old self had spoken the name. Todd rose and walked down the central corridor, and as he did, the dark followed him, receding from the walls and the debris-littered floors, the black scorch stains creeping like hordes of bats or rats or…
Little figures with moonlight for eyes.
He stopped, threw a look over his shoulder. The passageway was gone, replaced by an impervious wall of blackness. The dark was condensing all around him in this perpetual dominion of night, arching over his head like the ceiling of a cave. There was movement and sound on all sides, yet he could see nothing substantial, no shapes in the thickening gloom. There was only stillness and a nervous, loaded silence.
Todd looked down at the mask, pulled it on, and lined up his eyes with the holes at its front. Then he looked up. The blackened figures stood all around him, sculpted from soot and ash and charred matter. They jutted from the walls like flying buttresses, hung upside down from the scorched ceiling, gazed up at him like effigies from the floor, their white eyes blazing.
Shuddering, Todd held up his wrist and pressed the watch button. The green light emanated like a spectral beacon.
“Spencer...” he said dryly. “Come and find me.”
At the end of the hall, the vast curtain of shadows parted, and there emerged a figure cast from early morning Halloween moonlight. It moved toward Todd determinedly, implacably, and with it came ashen figures, their blackened arms outstretched, groping for the trespasser.
THE MINCH LAKE TRAGEDY
A.P. Sessler
The October breeze chased the children into the long, empty hall while Miss Mowry held the playground door. Fallen leaves nipped at their ankles, along with all the unseen things that arise when a child's back is turned.
“Let's keep moving, single file. That's it,” Miss Mowry droned, her eyes off somewhere else.
Giggling girls and boys poured inside, fleeing from playtime fantasies to the quiet classroom ahead, where they would find shelter from the irrational and imagined. Without looking, Miss Mowry halfheartedly counted the heads breezing past.
“And don't let go of your leaves. We didn't just spend a half hour outside to drop them on the floor,” she said.
She let the door close slowly when she was sure the last student had entered the hall.
“Miss Mowwee, wait for me,” the tiny voice came from outside.
With an exasperated sigh she pushed the door back open and waited for Landon, who came bounding up the sandy path from the playground.
“Hurry, Landon. You should have been in here already,” she whined.
Landon passed by at the same carefree pace. “Wook at my weaf, Miss Mowwee,” he said, holding the crisp oak leaf up for her to see.
“Yes, I see your weaf wooks wiwwy wow,” she mocked his speech impediment.
The observant boy stopped in his tracks and turned to offer a scowl, to which Miss Mowry replied with an unconvincing smile.
He turned and hurried to the classroom, looking back once more with the same scowl.
***
“Alright class, does everyone have their leaves? If not, raise your hand,” said Miss Mowry.
She stood with ankles crossed, half-seated on the front of her desk, scanning the room through glasses that hung on the tip of her nose. The children clutched their plucked or freshly fallen leaves, anxiously waiting at activity tables with construction paper, paint and brush.
“No one was a butter-finger, very good,” she said. “Now you've all been assigned a partner, so make sure you help each other out. If you absolutely cannot figure out how to make your leaf print then raise your hand and I'll help if I absolutely have to.
“Now when you've finished your leaf print, use our Leaf Identification Chart next to the chalkboard to identify which leaf you've chosen,” she said and motioned toward the green chalkboard. “When you're finished with your painting, write the name of the leaf next to your name. And everyone who collects the same kind of leaf you chose today on our approaching field trip will each receive a special prize.”
The class bubbled with enthusiasm.
“Alright. Everyone get started.”
She immediately returned to her chair and found the place she had left off in her book. The dust jacket cover of the yellow-paged tome read Center of the Circle: The Magick Radius.
Landon and William sat in front of the large window to Miss Mowry's right, their backs growing warm in the morning sun. Landon covered his oak leaf in a coat of green and pressed it on the sheet of gray construction paper.
“What are you making?” asked William, seated to his right.
“Miss Mowwee,” he said with a laugh. He pressed the painted leaf to the page repeatedly until a mass of jagged edges surrounded the negative shape of a faceless head. “That's her hair.”
“Why's it green?”
“'Cause you have the gway.”
“Here. You can use it,” William said and slid the small can of silver paint over.
“It would wook wong on my paper.”
William noticed the color. “You're right,” he said, and after looking at the green-haired likeness he whispered, “She's ugly.”
“Not wike Mawwowee.”
“You mean Mallory?”
Landon scowled at his partner. “That's what I said.”
William held his peace and continued with his silver-leaf airplane on sky-blue construction paper.
“I need some wed,” said Landon.
“Go see if Mallory has some,” William egged his friend on.
Landon accepted the challenge. “Okay.”
He stood and walked to the next activity table, where Mallory sat with partner Samantha. “Mawwowee?” he asked with all the confidence a nine-year-old boy could possess, until he noticed how the sun turned her blond hair into a golden halo of angelic beauty. Now he was afraid to look in her eyes.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Do you have any wed I can bowwow?”
She placed her leaf down. “Here,” she said, handing him the can of paint. “Don't spill it, and bring it right back.”
“Thank you,” he said and returned to his table.
He covered the oak leaf in a layer of red and nearly pressed it to the page when he stopped. “This is too big. Can you use your weaf?”
William looked over. “You're only supposed to use yours,” he said.
“It's just for her wips,” said Landon.
William laughed. “Okay,” he said and dipped his narrow, elm leaf in the red paint. He pressed it down, horizontally, leaving a red mark near the bottom of Miss Mowry's “face.”
The two laughed.
“I wiww be wight back,” said Landon and took the can of red paint to Mallory's table.
“Here you go, Mawwowee,” he said, placing the can in front of her. “I didn't spiw any and
I bwought it wight back.”
“Thank you, Landon,” she said and smiled at him.
When the sun sparkled in her green eyes he couldn't help himself. He didn't even bother to see if Miss Mowry was watching. He simply stooped over and kissed Mallory on the cheek, then turned as fast as he could and jumped in his chair.
“Miss Mowry!” she called out.
The teacher placed her book down. “What is it, Mallory?” she asked.
“Landon kissed me.”
Miss Mowry stood from her desk. “Landon what?”
“He kissed me. On the face.”
Miss Mowry marched to Landon's table and towered over the cowering boy. “Landon Larson!” she barked.
“I'm sowwy, Miss Mowwee,” he said, afraid to look up.
“Don't apologize to me. It's Mallory you owe an apology to.”
“I'm sowwy, Mawwowee,” he said, still facing his painting.
“Don't look down when you're apologizing to her. Stand up and look her in the eye and tell her that you're sorry.”
“Miss Mowwee,” he whimpered for mercy.
“Don't `Miss Mowwee' me. Do as I say.”
He looked at her with his familiar scowl, only now his eyes were red with tears.
“You better wipe that look off your face and do as I say,” she said.
He turned to William for some sign of support, solidarity, sympathy, anything. He looked to all his classmates for the same, but found only unblinking surprise on every face. His angry scowl melted into a frown. He stood, his bottom lip quivering when he turned to the golden angel whose divinity he dared defile.
“I'm sorry, Mawwowee,” he cried and began to take a seat.
“Not so fast. Sorry for what, Landon?” said Miss Mowry.
He sobbed and looked to his fallen angel again. “For kissing you,” he said.
“Now take your chair and sit in the corner of the class,” ordered Miss Mowry.
Landon half-dragged the chair to the far left corner of the class, where he sat with his back turned in shame.
Miss Mowry approached the embarrassed girl, who began to cry. The teacher embraced the child in her arms. “There, there. It wasn't your fault,” she whispered.