****
That was Johnny’s first stop. A little florist shop downtown.
The truck door creaked open and Johnny stepped out. It was almost midnight now. Pretty deserted on the streets. He walked across the parking lot, black rubber hand swinging at his side, heart pounding so hard he couldn’t hear his own footsteps. Giddy as a little kid. Because the whole deal was getting too close now, playing out in Johnny’s head like quick-cut scenes in those late night creepshows he’d been watching all week. But these scenes weren’t creepshows at all. Uh-uh. No way.
These scenes were sweet. Johnny saw his beater of a pickup truck, that rusty bed heaped with more roses than anyone could imagine. The perfume washed over him, almost smothered him as he drove up the little dirt road that led to Elena’s place, and he imagined her expression when she caught sight of him with all those roses—
At the florist shop door, his reflection waited on the glass.
He raised his hand, put black rubber knuckle to its twin.
And he waited some more.
Turned out, he waited a long damn time.
****
The door didn’t open. Johnny just stood there, staring at his magic hand, wondering what had gone wrong. And then it came to him. What had he been thinking? The florist shop had been closed since five o’clock that afternoon. There wasn’t anyone inside. So it didn’t matter that Johnny had himself a black fist that could work wonders. If there wasn’t anyone behind the door to hear his knock, that five-fingered hunk of painted rubber was useless. Even a mojo hand couldn’t command an empty building.
It took him awhile to get a hold of that idea. But once he got hold of it, he decided it didn’t much matter. He’d lived in the real world for a long long time, and there were other tools at his disposal besides the mojo hand.
He went back to the truck and got two of them.
One was a .38, which he slipped behind him, under his belt, barrel along his spine.
The other was a cinder block.
****
Now, a lot of people in town didn’t want anything to do with Johnny when he came marching home from the war. Ray Barnes was one of those.
Sheriff Ray Barnes, to be correct. Small-town cop going nowhere fast. Guy like that, of course he’s going to have a hard-on for a war hero with a drawer full of medals. But Barnes wasn’t prejudiced. He didn’t much like anyone, and that made Halloween his favorite night of the year. People did stupid things, and Barnes made sure he was around when they did them. That’s why the trunk of his cruiser was heavy with several cases of confiscated beer, courtesy of the town’s teenage population. Up front, the sheriff had a bag of candy he’d snatched from some little window-soaper over at the church, even had the sawed-off runt’s monster mask. Later tonight, Barnes figured he’d spook the little sweetheart over at dispatch with that mask. Make her jump right out of her skin.
But right now Barnes was chewing on one of the window-soaper’s Hershey’s bars and cruising the streets. That’s the kind of guy he was. And that’s why he got damn excited when a burglar alarm call directed him to a parking lot over on West Seventh. Because there was the war hero himself, Johnny Meyers, coming through the busted plate-glass door of the florist shop with an armful of roses, just as sweet as sweet could be.
Barnes grew a smile that was about half a yard wide. Everyone in town knew that Meyers was crackers, but the sheriff was the only one who was waiting to grind the soldier boy under his heel. Barnes hit the brakes. Ditched that Hershey’s bar. Had his hand on his sidearm before he even released his seatbelt, which was a bitch to undo, but he did it.
His free hand found the door.
He was just about to open it when black rubber knuckles rapped the glass.
Hard. None of that gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door Eddie Poe stuff. This rap was loud enough to make Barnes’ spine snap purely vertical. Then his head swiveled like a ventriloquist dummy’s, and he saw Meyers standing right there at his side window, and the synapses in his miserable excuse for a brain fired off one serious barrage.
Barnes opened that car door double-quick.
Meyers didn’t budge.
He held out an open hand. The one that wasn’t rubber.
“Trick or treat, Sheriff,” was all he said.
Goddamned if he knew why, but Barnes just couldn’t help himself.
He put down his pistol.
He picked up a Snickers bar, and he placed it in Johnny Meyers’ hand.
****
Johnny ate that Snickers as Barnes drove across town. He wasn’t sure why he took the cop with him, but he did. The guy really was Johnny’s to command. Barnes was as docile as a puppy. And with the burglar alarm going off back there, and Johnny’s truck sitting smack dab in the middle of the parking lot—well, Johnny figured it wouldn’t hurt to have the sheriff at his disposal should any other law come sniffing around.
Johnny thought things over as they drove. At least his mojo hand really worked. That was the good news, and Barnes proved it. But the bad news was that Johnny wasn’t sure how many times he’d used his hand. He’d knocked on Barnes’ squad car door, and that one surely counted. But he didn’t know about the florist shop. He’d knocked there, too—only no one had answered. He had no way of knowing if that knock counted or not.
So maybe he’d used one knock, and maybe he’d used two. He’d planned to use that second knock over at the jewelry store, where he wanted to pick out a diamond ring for Elena. But that was going to have to wait. For one thing, he’d already set off one burglar alarm in town. For another, if there was only one knock left in that magic hand he had to save it for Elena’s door…and for the man who answered it.
Familiar road now. Familiar moonlight, too. And through the cracked window, the familiar scent of the river and that dirt road still wet with rain that cut through farmland. And then that other smell—that crisp, tart apple smell that reminded Johnny of Elena’s father.
It sliced straight through him like a knife. Johnny rolled up the window. Now all he could smell were the roses—the bouquet of white ones he’d managed to grab at the florist shop before Barnes showed up. He tried to settle in on it, but he had a hard time.
Johnny couldn’t finish the Snickers bar. He tossed it back in the bag Barnes had stolen from a kid. Then he noticed something else in there. A monster mask, some kind of rattlesnake man with great big fangs. Johnny pulled it out and looked it over. Ran his hand over those scales. Rattlers were cold-blooded; they’d sleep through a night like this. They’d sleep through a whole damn winter. Johnny wished he could be that way, but he was sweating something fierce.
Barnes turned onto the little dirt road that led to Elena’s house, and Johnny’s heart started thundering. He was thinking about Elena’s father, thinking how things would play out once the old man answered that door.
Barnes pulled to a stop.
Johnny swallowed hard.
He crumpled up that monster mask, shoved it into his coat pocket like a snakeskin charm.
He grabbed the white roses in his good hand.
He got out of the car and walked to the door.
He knocked.
It took a while before the door opened, but it did. And there stood Elena’s father, his eyes tired, his heart heavy. Johnny told him what he wanted. But somehow, Johnny’s words didn’t seem to matter to the old man any more than Johnny’s mojo hand mattered. Because Elena’s father didn’t have any more left in his heart or his house than he did in his words, and though he spoke them under the sway of Johnny’s magic hand, they were words that did not rise above a whisper, and they were the same words that had knocked hard on Johnny’s heart when he’d come home from the war three months before.
****
Johnny had denied those words entrance then, but he couldn’t deny them now. Not as the three of them drove to the cemetery across the road from the apple orchard gone wild. The crisp, tart scent sawed at Johnny as he got out of the cruiser, and he remem
bered the things Elena’s father had told him that day three months ago, and he recalled the details of a death that had come quietly while he was half a world away.
And now he remembered about the cemetery. And the smell of apples. And the scent of roses, too, for there were roses on Elena’s grave. White roses…just like the ones he’d stolen from the florist shop. And suddenly Johnny felt like he was coming apart, felt like a busted puppet ready to topple among the tombstones.
He reached into his coat pocket. He squeezed that rattlesnake face in his good hand. Then he took the mask out of his pocket and put it on. He knew what he had to do.
Of course, a one-handed man couldn’t use a shovel. Johnny didn’t have time for that, anyway. So he started up the backhoe the gravediggers used and he set to work, digging like a combat knife in a tin of rations. Elena’s father watched without a word. Ray Barnes watched too, chewing on a Snickers bar while he sat on a tombstone. And while Johnny worked the backhoe’s gears, his stump of a wrist sweated inside the sleeve of his magic prosthetic hand, and his tears lined the inner skin of that rattlesnake mask.
But none of it mattered anymore. Not the mojo hand, not the white roses chewed under the teeth of the backhoe’s bucket. Not what Johnny remembered, and not what he’d forgotten. That’s what he thought as he emptied out that hole, and that’s what he thought as he climbed down onto the lid of Elena’s coffin with a dozen crushed roses and a rubber hand that had started off the evening swollen with the promise of three magic knocks.
One or none—how many magic knocks were left in that hand didn’t matter at all. Johnny knew that deep inside, even as he held that rubber hand poised above the metal casket, even as he cried inside that rattlesnake mask.
Even as he brought his fist down on that lid.
****
And here’s your kicker, folks—Johnny was right.
Because it doesn’t really matter what happened next, any more than it matters why Johnny’s hand was charged up with those three magic knocks in the first place. That’s not what this story’s about, because knocking on his dead love’s coffin wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to Johnny Meyers. Not by a longshot.
The worst thing that ever happened to Johnny was ending up down in that hole at all.
The worst thing that happened was falling that deep, and that hard.
So…that’s where Johnny is.
That’s how he got there.
And that’s where we’ll leave him…tonight.
THE JACK
O’ LANTERN:
A DARK HARVEST TALE
Cornstalks crackle as the October Boy shoulders into a small clearing. Moonlight fills that scooped hunk of the world, where stalks are rat-gnawed nubs trampled by a larger predator…a predator the Boy scents.
The scent is immediate. It hangs heavy as a shroud. The cool north wind combing the fields this Halloween night cannot banish it. The Boy’s viney fingers twine tightly around the hilt of the butcher knife that fills his hand, as if he’ll have to cut himself free of the stink before he can move so much as an inch.
But hesitation—real or imagined—is not a quality contained within the growing armature of the October Boy’s body. He steps forward, his carved pumpkin head twisting on its braided-vine neck, beams of orange light spilling from his triangular eyes as he examines the shorn clearing.
There’s a thing on the ground in the center of the circle. Another carved head, but one not like his own. Lanternlike, it burns. Flickering in the darkness, tongues of fire licking moisture within its hollowed confines. Casting a grinning shadowface that stretches across trampled stalks to the the Boy’s severed-root feet. Spilling those predatory scents in this territory marked as his own, a stench that is nothing like the wild October scents of cool fall nights and cinnamon-laced gunpowder that have marked his birth and will mark his death.
The candy heart trapped in the Boy’s woven chest beats faster as he travels the grinning map cast at his feet. He closes on the thing in the center of the circle. The shadowface gleams, its reflection contained on the polished surface of his blade as the Boy bends low. Yes, fire lives inside this carved head. Yes, the hollowed mouth spits moist crackles. Yes, a rabid grin spreads wider than any mouth can stretch, and its eyes are wells roiling with flame, and it is both exhibit and proof of a madman’s art. But this strange Jack o’ Lantern is nothing like a brother to the pumpkin-headed creature that holds the knife. This face—what remains of it—is not a carved product of the dark earth. It is a construct of flesh and bone. A human head, cored and hollowed—a half-dozen candles flickering within scraped red confines. Grinning a lipless grin over purple gums, a grin with bloodstained teeth rooted in a mouth that laughs no more.
But somewhere out there in the darkness, the October Boy hears laughter.
It lingers until it is eclipsed by another sound.
The sound of gunfire.
****
The Boy whirls away from the flickering Jack o’ Lantern, but there’s nothing out there to see but night, and stars, and the dull glow of the town waiting beyond.
He is alone in this clearing. The predator who lurked in this place is gone. Only the killer’s trophy remains. In the end, this matters little to the October Boy, for tonight he too is a trophy. One that travels on two legs, destined to be slain if he makes a single misstep. One that knows this clearing is but a brief stop on a run that is a dead heat, with odds that never fall in his favor.
Another booming blast beckons him. And another. The October Boy cannot linger here, not if he wants a chance at staying alive. He is built for movement. This is what he must do to survive the human gauntlet that waits ahead in the night.
So the Boy turns his back, following his shadow away from the light cast by the mangled skull.
The black road waits.
A whisper through the corn, and he is on it.
****
Officer Dan Kehoe’s scattergun barks, and lead shot clips the branches of an old cemetery oak. Barbed twigs and splinters rain down on a dozen boys fighting among the tombstones. They freeze, and Kehoe closes on them. They’re bloody, rolling around among the granite slabs. Scratches and bruises and cuts on their faces. Ballbats and hammers and switchblades in their hands. Locked up and starved for five days. Mad with hunger. Free at last to hunt the October Boy, a scarecrow monster that hasn’t even crossed the town limits yet.
In absence of that target, the boys turn on the only prey handy: each other. Kehoe understands that. Once, a long time ago, he was in their place—just another kid with dreams of winning the Run and escaping this nowhere town by killing a two-legged nightmare. Once, a long time ago, Kehoe’s heart was a cage for the same fury that drives every young man between the ages of sixteen and nineteen this night.
Kill Sawtooth Jack and be the one guy to get out of here this year, or stay in this nowhere burg ’til your life rusts away to nothing. He remembers that promise as well as he understands it, and that is good. For even though every one of the kids in front of him is in twice the shape he is, and every one of them is a hundred times hungrier for a sweet piece of a life they can barely imagine, it’s his job to direct their fury until the October Boy is brought down.
So Kehoe starts where the danger is, pile-driving the biggest kid into a tombstone. The boy is a straw-haired wideload armed with a pitchfork, and the dead man’s marker catches him behind the knees and topples him like a dropped casket. The pitchfork flies out of the kid’s hands as he falls. Quickly, Dan steps around the tombstone. His Winchester drives down as the boy tries to rise, butt plate digging into Wideload’s thick muscled belly hard enough to jolt the kid’s spine.
Guts, nerves, and muscle react. Wideload pukes up a bellyful of nothing on the cemetery lawn. But Kehoe isn’t finished. A second later, the smoking shotgun barrel jams against the kid’s cheek. Kehoe grabs Wideload’s blond hair, jerking flushed skin tight against that hot steel so it’s sure to leave a brand.
The boy whimpe
rs, but Dan doesn’t let go.
He’s sending a message now.
He frosts the other boys with quick glances, one by one.
They stare at him, a man with close-cropped hair gone to gray. All those boys standing there, brains notching the distance between the reality they’ve just witnessed, the possible reactions it can trigger, and the likely price of those reactions. And then comes that one second. The only one Kehoe fears. The one where the boys might realize the odds aren’t quite stacked in his favor. When they realized that Dan Kehoe is just one guy—an old guy, at that. And, sure, he wears a badge and he’s armed with a shotgun, but there are a lot more of them than there are of him.
Dan studies their eyes, searching for a glimmer of that realization or the slightest twitch of muscle once it sparks. He sees neither. He’s got them now, and he knows it. So he releases Wideload, chambering another shell before the kid moves so much as an inch.
Down on the ground, Wideload reaches for the scalded circle on his cheek. He swears under his breath, but he doesn’t look Kehoe in the eye. Instead, he looks down, as if he’s found a particularly interesting blade of grass planted between his knees.
That means one thing: it’s over now. Kehoe knows it. He picks up the pitchfork, nudges it into the Wideload’s hands. Then he points the shotgun at the cemetery gates.
“The Run’s out there,” Dan says. “So is the October Boy. Go get him, or I’ll get you.”
One blink, and the boys start moving.
Another, and they’re already gone.
****
And that’s when Dan Kehoe hears it. The squawk of the police radio, over in the prowl car parked by the cemetery gates. It’s the chief. “Sounds like thunder out there,” Steve Marlowe says. “That you, Dan?”
“Yeah. My shotgun, anyway. I just broke up a rumble in the cemetery. A bunch of kids trying to take each other apart instead of the Boy. Only one way to get those youngbloods on track.”
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