“They have some extra shit they bought in an estate sale and customed. I could give him a call,” Jill said. “Maybe they’ll lead foot it over here and lend us something in time for the parade.”
“Just let ’em know we only need the instruments, not the flaming goat heads on pikes, or pig-blood-filled Super Soakers,” Dennis said—dead serious.
“We’d have to uptune everything,” Pedro noted.
“No crap, Kolchak,” agreed Jill.
“Now we’re talking.” Dennis took a hard curve at seventy, but seemed for all the world like he was on Sunday drive. “Jill, you call your cuz from the hospital. See if they’ll throw us a bone.”
“Sure. Only they’re gonna want something in return, ya know?”
“No doubt.”
Pedro chuckled. “Like what? Our souls?”
A moan escaped Albert, making Norman cry out in response.
“Hang on, little bud!” Dennis called, accelerating. “Only a coupla more miles.”
* * * *
Ruth hummed along to an old scratchy-sounding hymn playing on the radio. “So wonderful, Jesus! I am blessed to be doing your holy work!”
She checked the mirror and the road ahead, then turned the wheel, taking Charlie’s car off the road and onto a weed-clogged roadbed, unused since the last time Ruth and Nico, thoroughly cranked on speed, had trysted there just a few days before his arrest.
Under this heavy canopy of virgin forest, even the moonlight hardly penetrated.
Deeper into viney darkness by inches, Ruth drove the car under a low thicket of laurel bushes and exited.
She ripped a flashlight out of its plastic package and clicked it on. “There we are. The light of truth shining my way!”
She turned to consider Charlie’s car. “I’ll deal with you later, Charlie. The least you deserve is a Christian burial.”
She trekked back to the road, the uppers singing in her veins.
Chapter 22
A tentacled monster the size of an RV writhed toward a voluptuous bathing-suited girl cowering on a beach towel, its beak-like mouth clicking, all displayed in glorious black and white on the number-three screen of Main Street’s The Grand Illusion Cinemas, soon to host a performance by The Chalk Outlines.
DeShaun and Stuart took turns dipping into a massive bucket of popcorn, their eyes glued to the screen.
DeShaun spotted something in the row ahead of them, several seats over. With a sly grin, he nudged Stuart and pointed at a young couple making out.
DeShaun and Stuart shared a look that was at once disgusted, curious, confounded, and mischievous.
Stuart held up a piece of popcorn and squinted to aim, setting up his shot like a free throw.
The popcorn arced and landed amid the young couple’s faces.
The girl pulled away with confusion.
The boy turned toward Stuart and Deshaun and found them focused on the screen, their faces as stony as those of royal palace guards.
From behind, a hand clapped onto DeShaun’s shoulder. “I didn’t do it!” DeShaun shouted.
He stopped on seeing it was just the usher, an older boy from their school named Shuley. “Jeez, pop a Ritalin already,” said Shuley. “I just came to tell Stuart his mom called.”
“Huh?”
“She said you gotta come home right away. One o’ your school chums had some kinda accident or something.”
* * * *
Standing outside the emergency room, Dennis smoked the one cigarette he allowed himself every few weeks, doubting he would finish it, even before Pedro emerged through the automatic double doors. “Damn it! Come on, brother!” rebuked the bass player. “Those damn things are as good as bullets!”
Pedro snatched the cig from Dennis’s mouth, dropped it, and crushed it with his black boot.
Dennis knocked another from the pack and lit it. “What’s the scoop?”
Pedro grimaced. “Stumpy’s gonna pull through. They’re even saying they can reattach. I’m the same blood type so I ponied up a pint.”
“Swell. Now he’s part meathead Mexican. How’s the other kid?”
“Doc’s clueless. ’Cept he’s showing the same signs as a coupla other patients from earlier today, just like your neighbor.”
“Weird.” Dennis blew a plume and squinted at the sky. “Hudson’s doing the Kojak bit.”
“What’d you find out about Stuart?” Pedro asked.
“Ma said he was on his way home from the movies.”
The doors whirred again, and it was Jill. She walked past a couple of townie squares sitting on a bench. They gawped at her strange beauty with no degree of subtlety.
“Please say you’ve got good news!” Pedro demanded.
“They’re flooring it right after their gig. Should have all the gear here in a coupla hours.”
“Phew! That’s goodbye to one headache.”
“Yeah, but we can also say goodbye to getting any shut-eye tonight,” lamented Pedro.
A battered station wagon arrived, easing to a stop at the curb beside them. Kerwin emerged from the backseat, where a massive red Chow dog sat wagging its tail and panting. “What’s new, kiddies?”
“Oh, swell!” Pedro gushed. “Our hero has arrived! I can feel complete now!”
“Ha-ha.” Kerwin waved away his ride. “You’re a paragon of subtle irony, Petey.” He drew a lint roller from his interior pocket, ripped away the top layer, and rubbed the dog hair from his suit. “So all is copacetic, right? I called the sheriff, probably saved the kid’s life?”
“Yeah, you’re a regular Clark Kent,” Jill said with a smirk.
“If I was, I’d spin Earth backward and save all our gear,” Kerwin quipped.
“And the kids too. Right?” Pedro said.
“Oh, yeah! Goes without saying!” Kerwin said.
“Jill got the instruments covered,” Dennis said. “Got stuff coming from her cousin.”
Kerwin’s big grin appeared. “Bombastic! So I don’t have to cancel the record company suit!”
“You cancel the suit, I cancel your face,” Pedro answered.
“All right, no need to be so violent all the time. You kids need anything? Den, you sure this, maybe, wouldn’t be a good time for an exception to the rule?”
Dennis dead-eyed Kerwin. “What are you asking, Kerwin?”
“I mean, just this once. A little”—Kerwin made a drinking motion—“glug-glug, you know?”
Jill grabbed Kerwin’s lapel and raised her fingernails to his face. “You asking for a quick and painful body mod?”
“Easy.” Dennis pulled her away from him. “Everybody’s under a lot of pressure. I got an errand so let’s just take a powder and meet up in a coupla hours to set up, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. That’s a good idea,” Kerwin agreed. “Sheesh. My poor suit has had it today.”
Jill and Pedro gave him the evil eyes as they walked away.
Kerwin, fuming to himself, continued to brush at his coat lapels. “Just wait’ll I bleed you freaks dry,” he mumbled.
* * * *
Out in the house a door creaked, stirring Candace from a dense, dreamless sleep.
The candles had burned out, leaving her in darkness save for a sliver of space between the bedroom door and frame.
She rubbed her eyes, blinked away sleep, and focused on the bedroom door. It seemed to twist. Then she remembered the things that writhed to sinister life when she was walking home. Logic told her they must have been part of a dream. Fear told her it was far worse than that.
From out in the house came sounds of movement. A light clicked on, brightening the sliver and throwing a dim luminescence across the bedroom’s angles.
Candace looked over at the chair beside the bed, where she last saw her father sitting.
In
the jagged spill of light, she saw not the beatific smiling figure from earlier but a bloodstained corpse with a stapled-on neon-paper smile.
Candace convulsed, as if she’d just touched a naked wire.
Aloysius’s eyelids snapped open—but there were no eyes behind, only twin glowing crayon smiles, smaller versions of Everett’s artwork.
She felt her stomach churn. Then she heard Everett’s distinctive snicker out in the kitchen. Heart hammering, she turned to get down from the bed. Her gaze fell upon Mamalee.
She was crucified onto the wall behind the bed, two sheets hung behind her to form wings, a halo of orange construction paper nailed into her skull. Mamalee was no longer the ethereal angel who had welcomed her before but a cruel mockery.
Mamalee’s mouth creaked open, ejecting a swarm of huge flies, their machine-like buzzing surely loud enough to draw Everett.
Candace felt tears streaming down her face. She covered her mouth and blasted a muted scream into her palm.
Footsteps in the hall—Everett was coming.
She skulked to the closet, slipping on a piece of debris from the ruined ceiling before ducking inside and easing the door shut, leaving a tiny crack.
Everett entered the room, dragging his bulging pillowcase of tricks, treats, and terrors. He placed a new candle in the little votive and lit it, but only after wasting five matches.
The quivering glow made the corpses ghastlier.
Everett smiled up at his mother and waved, then at his father, before taking a Halloween book from his pillowcase and going to sit on Aloysius’s lap. “So happy,” he whispered.
One of the flies from within Mamalee flitted through the cracked closet door. Candace saw that it had a tiny version of Everett’s face, smiling with the incomprehending dementia.
The real Everett held the book up to Aloysius’s unseeing eyes, then put it in his stiff hands. Everett sat still for a while, as if he could hear his father reading.
Candace kept her hand pressed to her mouth, breathing only in short shudders as she tried to shake away the distortions, the undulating shadows, the Everett-fly that could not, must not ever be real.
She grasped that she had been drugged, that these visions and inconceivable beings were illusion. Yet the insistence of these phantasms was stronger than her will, draining her of vitality and courage.
Everett stood from his father’s lap, stretched his arms, and put the book back in his treat bag. He stood on the bed and hugged his mother’s waist before reaching up to caress her cheek. He took bloody jewelry from his pockets, a necklace, which he clasped around her neck, and a too-small ring, which he shoved onto the first knuckle of her outstretched left hand.
The flies buzzed around his head, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Everett took the earring from his ear and skewered it through Mamalee’s earlobe.
He examined Mamalee’s stomach, then put his ear against the dead woman’s belly, listening. “Canniss?”
He drew a carpet cutter from his back pocket and ripped into Mamalee’s stomach, reaching in, probing the dead woman’s guts. Flies descended to cover the viscera, and Candace strained every muscle in her body to keep from vomiting. The little Everett-fly lapped up these sweet tears, easily evading Candace’s efforts to swat him.
“Hell…” Everett stuttered. “O? Can-niss?”
He shoved his face into Mamalee’s stomach, his voice muffled when he called out, “Can-niss?”
Candace swooned and slumped to her side on the closet floor, just in time to miss seeing Everett hop off the bed and go to his treat bag to take out one of Helga’s arms.
Chapter 23
A Tragedy in Triptych
I
Children stood at the door in the kind of costumes that came in big plastic bags. The glum Aloysius stared at them.
Mamalee had badgered him to buy a big pumpkin she could carve, but Aloysius had “forgotten” or been “too busy.” Yet the children had come.
Everett, only a toddler, watched wide-eyed from his high chair, his eyes dancing when the children cried, “Trick or treat!”
“I’m sorry,” Aloysius intoned. “We have no candy.”
“Wait, wait!” Mamalee came running into the room, a jar of homemade cookies in her hands. “We do have treats!”
Aloysius said nothing.
Everett beheld the children with delight, trying to form these magic new words. “Tw…twid…”
Aloysius turned to the boy, while Mamalee grinned at the visitors. “Please just say it again! I hardly heard you from the kitchen!”
The kids cried in near-unison, “Trick or treat!”
Mamalee giggled like a schoolgirl as she placed individual cookies in plastic baggies and lowered them into the bags, commenting on each costume.
“Tw…tw…twid o tweed!” Everett stuttered.
Mamalee spun with purest pride. “Oh, his first words!”
Aloysius’s frown grew deeper, even when Everett smiled up at his papa with a giggle. “Twid o tweed!”
The children said their muffled thanks and disappeared into the autumn night, leaving Mamalee to go to Everett and pinch his cheeks. “Yes, baby! Trick or treat!”
“Twid o tweed!” the baby repeated, then and very often after.
Cooing, little Everett colored an arch-backed black cat in a coloring book while a record player behind him played Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash,” which Mamalee had found for him after combing all thrift stores in a thirty-mile radius.
“Everett was some kind of prodigy,” Candace would later tell Stuart and DeShaun as they hid in the dank recess of a café’s rear staircase. “After that Halloween, his learning skyrocketed. But he only seemed to think about Halloween. Drawing, coloring, finger paints. Always Halloween.”
Many nights, Mamalee lay in bed with the boy, reading from Everett’s favorite Halloween story book: “Then the little ghost poked his head through the wall and said, ‘Boo!’”
“Boo!” Everett would repeat, and when he did, Mamalee gave a laugh that was very natural and happy.
* * * *
On a hot summer day, four-year-old Everett, wearing a rubber witch mask not unlike one he’d seen among the first trick-or-treaters of his life, ran around in circles with a little broom between his legs while Aloysius clipped hedges nearby.
Mamalee, pregnant and happy, watched her boy from a rocker on the porch
Everett ran past his father, swiping his hand toward the hedges. “Chop! Chop! Chop off their heads!”
Aloysius clouded.
“I am afraid something is wrong with him,” Aloysius told his wife, when he stopped to come up on the porch and drink some of her lemonade.
“Oh, Aloy,” Mamalee disagreed. “Boys like monsters! They always have.”
“No,” Aloysius grumbled. “It’s something more. This…obsession with Halloween. It was a time of sacrificing children, you know. Witches’ rites.”
Mamalee rubbed his arm and shoulder. “Not to him, Aloy. It’s how he’s learning. And he’s so smart and talented! Can’t you see?”
Aloy watched the boy ride the broom through make-believe moonlit clouds. “Do you pray for him?” he asked his wife.
Mamalee considered her answer. “I always pray for everyone.” She put Aloy’s hand on her swollen belly, and he seemed placated.
Chapter 24
Reverend McGlazer trudged to his office and sat with a heavy plop. Before realizing it, he opened the bottom drawer for the bottle he once kept there. This was an artifact from his seminary days, then his first tenure, at an Episcopal church in Buncombe County, near the Tennessee border. Catching himself, he closed the drawer without looking in it, a minor victory.
In those days, a bottle (or sometimes, ahem, a Mason jar, filled up in the hills from the still of a congregant) could often
be found awaiting his attention. When these bottles began to have shorter shelf lives and more frequent trips outside the drawer, McGlazer was ousted from the position. He realized he had only gravitated toward Anglicanism for the relaxed attitudes its adherents held toward spirits.
Clicking on his desk lamp, McGlazer rubbed his eyes, recalling the incident of the flying candy. He dialed the sheriff’s department to ask for Hudson and was told he was at the hospital. The desk officer explained about Albert and Norman. “Maybe I should go there, see if I can help.” McGlazer felt stress scratching at his throat, making him thirsty for something amber and strong and smooth. He and the officer said their goodbyes, and McGlazer considered, as he did every October, having just a shot or so. Just as he did every October, he cleared his throat and shook his head, sending a physical signal to his brain that it was out of the question.
A muffled piano note sounded out in the sanctuary.
The old building was rarely silent, especially as autumn’s temperature changes worked at its joints and foundations and corners. But music?
His flesh rose and tingled. The helpless terror of his close call with the flying candy rushed back, almost making him cough. He crept to the office door and eased his head out to see nothing out of the ordinary in the hall.
The note sounded again, a D on the piano—once and then sustained, then silent.
“Hello?” He asked himself what would a ghost encounter mean to his faith? To his sobriety?
The D note dinged, again and again, with increasing frequency.
If he checked the sanctuary, would he find a Halloween prankster, or the key playing itself?
Before he could stop himself, he went to the door and grabbed the handle. The notes repeated as McGlazer entered the corridor, and then the adjacent keys joined in as well. It became a banging, an attack on the instrument.
He opened the door trying to see into the darkened sanctuary. The sustain pedal remained active, vibrating dissonance throughout the rafters and walls, tinging like sleet off the stained-glass windows.
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