The Jack-o-Lantern Box

by Karen Joan Kohoutek

After school, they hung out with Troy and Scott and Corey. They sat hanging listlessly on the merry-go-round, not trying to push it, although it wobbled slightly on its axis, turning them occasionally, very slowly. Karma hung her legs down over the side, scuffing the sand with her feet. All around the merry-go-round ran a circle of foot track.

  Jessy sat further back, tucked inside the bars like she was on the tilt-o-wheel, or trying to steer it with the forked metal. Troy stood up in the middle, and every once in a while he would push his weight to one side, trying to turn them faster, but Karma’s feet kept slowing them down again.

  “We need to go to the cemetery sometime,” Jessy said. “I need to do some research.”

  “Research for what?” Corey asked.

  “Jessy writes a Halloween story every year,” Karma said. Jessy wished she wouldn’t say anything about that; it kind of embarrassed her.

  “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “Like a spooky story?” Troy asked.

  Jessy shrugged.

  “That story you wrote in Reading last year was really good,” he said. “About the horse.”

  “I wouldn’t go to the cemetery,” Corey said.

  Their gazes all turned in its direction. They could see it from there, in the distance, over the low hollow of the football field. All those dead people, waiting quietly for them.

  “Why not?” Jessy said. “I go there all the time.” She and Karma had made up plenty of stories about the people whose old, faded names were chiseled into the grey, mossy stones.

  “Because.” She sounded stubborn, like it was totally self-evident that nobody would want to go there. “Because it’s the cemetery.”

  They just kind of looked at her.

  “People are buried there.”

  “Sure,” Troy said. “If they weren’t, they’d just be all over the place.”

  “Oh, gross,” Corey said. Then, “You shouldn’t go anywhere where people are buried. It’s just … you don’t know what’ll happen if you do.”

  “You know,” Troy said. “My big brother and some of his friends snuck in there one night to drink beer, and something really weird happened to them.”

  “Like what?” Jessy asked.

  “Well, they found a place deep inside the cemetery, where they thought nobody could see them from the road. There were some trees sheltering them. And they were hanging out, just BS-ing, you know, having a few beers, talking about football.” Troy’s brother was a big deal on the football team. “Then suddenly, one of them noticed that there was a blue light in the cemetery with them, a little bit away. And they could see it sort of -- floating toward them.”

  “Get out of here,” Karma said.

  “Seriously. So one of the guys says, it’s the cops. And they all start running. But it wasn’t on the road.” The cemetery was crisscrossed with paved pathways, wide enough for a single car. “So it can’t be a cop car, or it would be running into the tombstones. And my brother realized that it was floating above the ground. He said he was running, and he stopped, because it was coming right at him. And it came closer to him, and then it just disappeared.”

  “It did not,” Jessy said.

  “I’m not making it up. He was really freaked out. They think it was a UFO.”

  Scott immediately perked up. There was a book on Project Blue Book at the library, and over the summer, Jessy and Karma had made UFO watching notebooks, with pages ready to record their findings, if they ever saw a UFO. One night they’d gone over and sat around in Scott's backyard, watching for UFOs, and he’d copied their format to make his own notebook. He'd already asked for a telescope for Christmas.

  “It could have been a UFO,” he said. “But that’s totally different from a ghost.”

  “The highway is right on the other side of the cemetery,” Karma said. “It could have been headlights, reflecting on something.”

   “And if they were drinking beer,” Jessy said. “Maybe they didn’t -- I don’t know -- have their wits about them.”

  “I’ve seen him drunk a million times,” Troy said. He pushed his weight as a little brush of wind started them moving slowly. “I’m sure they saw something.”

  “See,” Corey said. “That’s exactly why.”

  “It wasn’t anything to do with dead people,” Karma said, reasonably.

  “No, but something strange can happen when you go in there.”

  “Lots of people go to cemeteries, and it’s perfectly normal,” Karma went on. “There’s someone who mows the grass. And what about when there’s a funeral?”

  “If you’re going to a funeral, or when you’re going to put flowers on a grave, that’s one thing. But you have to have a reason.”

  That made sense to everybody.

  But how would the spirits, or whoever, know whether you had a reason or not?

  “Maybe they saw a will-o-the-wisp,” Jessy suggested.

  “A what?”

  “I’ve read about them. They’re mysterious lights that appear in the swamp. Some people think it’s some kind of gas that causes the lights, but some people think it’s like a tricky ghost.”

  “Tricky?”

  “They flicker in the night, like a candle. And if people are lost, they sometimes follow the light, and when they do, they get lured deeper in the swamp, and then they drown.”

  “That’s just like, fireflies or something,” Scott said.

  “Maybe the ghost wants company,” Karma said.

  “If you’re going to the cemetery, I’m not going to play with you this weekend,” Corey said.

  When the other kids left, Jessy and Karma teeter-tottered for a while. They had a few normal up and downs, and then, when her seat hit the ground, Jessy settled all her weight down and planted her feet on the sand, freezing the motion.

  “Farmer, farmer, let me down,” Karma said.

  “What will you give me if I let you down?”

  “I’ll give you … a new bike.”

  Jessy thought about it for a minute.

  “A ten-speed. With a basket,” Karma elaborated.

  Jessy lifted her weight. They had a few more seesaws, and then Karma trapped her up in the air, her feet dangling at her sides.

  “Farmer, farmer, let me down.”

  “What will you give me if I let you down?”

  “I’ll give you … a pony.”

  “A pony?” Karma scoffed.

  “A horse,” Jessy went on. Karma appeared to ponder deeply on the subject. Jessy kept going, “An Arabian stallion, just like the one in King of the Wind. With a jet black mane and tail.”

  “Okay, deal.”

  They could go on like this all day. A movie theater, stocked with all the new movies. and someone to make popcorn all day, for Jessy. A professional basketball court for Karma. All the candy they could eat. When it started to get late, usually someone would end up with “all the money in the world.” Nobody could top that, and that was the end of the game.

  They started on a route back from the playground.

  “We'll go past the Murder House,” Jessy said.

  “I'm not scared.”

  “I know you're not scared.”

  The house was across the street, the way they were walking, and set in, so it seemed a little out of the way.

  There were a lot of bushes and trees around, brambling all over it. One large clump of pine trees near the sidewalk was almost as tall as the house, with giant branches that fanned down to make a secluded spot underneath. Kids didn't go too close to the house, but they did sneak under the branches to drink beer and peppermint schnapps. Younger kids scooted under them, too, collecting the empty bottles and swishing them around, to see if there was anything worth trying to drink.

  On the other side of the house, there were lilac bushes next to the sidewalk, and in the spring, when Jessy and Karma tore off bunches of blossoms, Twyla called them ghost lilacs, and said they were going to be haunted by their spirits.

  “Flowers don’t
have ghosts,” Karma would insist.

  “How do you know?” Twyla would ask. “They’re living things, just like you and me.”

  They looked up at the house, standing so majestic and set-apart, on that huge lawn, with the long walk-way leading up to the door.

  “We're definitely going to ring the doorbell this year,” Jessy said.

  “That's what we said last year.”

  “We just didn't get around to it.”

  They knew that nobody lived there, but that didn't matter. It was trick or treating.

  Over the years, they'd had some intense discussions on the subject. Some older houses had metal plaques by the doorbells that said “No Peddlers,” engraved in old-fashioned-looking letters. Jessy had thought peddlers were characters out of fairy tales and picture books, but Twyla told her it was just a way to say you shouldn't come to their door selling anything.

  “It’s like No Soliciting,” Twyla said, which they also saw on a few doors.

  That was another intriguingly big word, just to say “Don’t ask us for money.”

  But was trick or treating the same as soliciting? When they came across one of the signs, Karma thought they shouldn’t try it, because the people who lived there were going to be grumpy, and not give them candy.

  “My mom always says there are some old people who don’t believe in trick or treating. They think it’s the same as begging, and they’ll get mad.”

  That was like the cranky people who were always so worried about their lawns.

  “So they get mad,” Twyla said. “What are they going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they’ll call the police.”

  “It’s not against the law to trick or treat.”

  “Maybe they’ll say that we’re trespassing. We’re in their yard, on their steps.”

  Their parents had threatened them about trespassing the time they caught Jessy and Karma playing in an empty house. The doors had been taken off, so nothing but plastic sheets covered the empty spaces, to keep rain out, and those hadn’t even been tied down.

  There wasn't anything inside they could hurt themselves with; they’d just run around in the empty rooms. But their parents agreed that they could get in trouble for something like that, because it was trespassing.

  Of course, they ran around all the time, playing in other people’s yards, and their garages, and never thought anything of it. Sometimes it was hard to predict what was going to get you in trouble.

  “It’s Halloween,” Twyla said. “That’s when you get to try things. You get to go places and do things you don’t normally get to do.”

  With the Murder House, though, Jessy was secretly afraid that, after all this time, all that emptiness, no sign of life at all, the door might suddenly open. What would happen then?

  Well, they’d scream and run.

  There were worse things than screaming and running.

  But what if a hand reached out from the creaking door, and they were frozen in place, and skeletal fingers grabbed at them, and dragged them inside?

  ****