The Jack-o-Lantern Box

by Karen Joan Kohoutek

“Did you hear about Halloween?” Kim said, the next day at school. She looked kind of bright and excited.

  Jessy just stared at her.

  “There are Moonies in town.” Kim spoke the word with exaggerated dread.

  “What are you talking about?” Karma asked.

  “Moonies,” she repeated, like the phrase told them everything. “You know what Moonies are.”

  “Of course we do.”

  They had a vague idea. Moonies were some kind of hippies, who belonged to a weird church group. They’d read about them in magazines.

  “They’re going around town, knocking on people’s doors,” Kim went on. “They’re supposed to be selling flowers, but they have pamphlets and stuff.”

  “Were they dressed up weird?” Jessy asked. She had a picture in her mind of people with bald heads, dressed in robes, like monks. Hippie monks. Sometimes they had drawings of people like that in MAD magazine.

  “No, I guess they were just dressed in normal clothes. They were acting like they were from a real church.” Her face looked grim with disapproval. “But my mom says they’re not a church, they’re a cult. They’re Moonies.”

  Already, Jessy was hoping that they’d come and knock on her door, so she could see for herself what they looked like, how they acted. She’d never seen anybody in a cult.

  “Some people’s parents don’t want them to go out on Halloween,” a boy was saying. “They’re afraid that the Moonies are here to kidnap kids.”

  “That’s how they get people into their cult.”

  “I thought they were going to do a sacrifice,” another kid put in. That turned everybody silent.

  “They’re going to grab a kid who’s out trick or treating, and they’re going to sacrifice them. To the devil!”

  “There’s going to be cops all over, making sure nobody gets kidnapped.”

  Jessy thought about it for a minute.

  “I never heard about the Moonies doing anything like that,” she said.

  “What do you know about it?” Kim's friend challenged.

  “They have stories about them, in magazines and stuff. If they were going around killing little kids, wouldn’t there be a story about it? If they were like…” She trailed off. Not like Jack the Ripper. “If they were like the Manson Family.”

  A hush fell over all the kids. She had accidentally freaked them out worse by invoking the name.

  “If someone knew they were going to kill a little kid, they’d just arrest them,” Karma said.

  “Well, the Manson Family had to do it for the first time,” Kim said. “They didn’t get arrested before they started killing people.”

  After school, Jessy and Karma played basketball with Allison and Corey. Each of them pretended to be one of the girls who'd gone to the state basketball tournament last winter. Jessy picked one of the stars that Twyla went to parties with, because she felt like she knew her.

  Then they went over to Corey's. She lived right next to the playground, just on the other side of a dense wall of flowerless lilac bushes. The air was cooling off, and they slipped their hands inside the sleeves of their jackets, but it still felt good to be outside.

  They climbed up into the backyard treehouse.

  “You don't think Kim knows what she's talking about, do you?” Corey asked.

  “No,” Jessy said, instinctively.

  They were all a little quieter than usual.

  “Do you know that girl who lives next door to Julie Anderson?” Allison asked suddenly. “She’s older than us.”

  “Yeah, her name’s Debbie,” Jessy said. “She was in the Girl Scouts with Twyla.”

  “Did you ever hear about how she found a dead body?”

  “No,” the other girls said together, the syllable denying that she’d told them and also not believing it ever happened.

  “You’re making this up,” Corey said.

  “No, really. My mom knows her mom. There was an old man who lived in the house next door, on the other side. He’d lived there forever, so he knew their whole family. Well, Debbie’s mom had baked a bunch of Christmas cookies, and she asked Debbie to take them over.”

  When Allison paused, it was totally silent. Just the faintest rattle of wind in the dry distant leaves.

  “She knocked on the door, but he didn’t answer. So she looked in the window, and she could see him, sitting in front of the TV. Football was on, and she figured he’d fallen asleep watching the game.”

  “Just like my dad always does,” Karma said.

  “She knocked some more, but he didn’t wake up. Since Debbie knew him so well, she thought he wouldn’t mind if she just went in and left the cookies for him. So she went right in and set them on the kitchen table. She didn’t want to embarrass the old guy, so she was going to just tip-toe out again. But when she got back to the front door, she turned to look at him, and suddenly, she thought something might be wrong.”

  The wind picked up the tiniest bit, and then died down again.

  “It was almost like she had a premonition. She stood in the entryway for a minute, listening to the football game blaring. Then she decided to go wake him up, make sure he was okay. So she walked quietly into the living room, around to the front of his chair.”

  She stopped, waited.

  “And he was sitting there, dead.”

  “That is so a lie,” Corey said.

  “No, I swear, it’s totally true. You can ask my mom.”

  Jessy thought about Debbie. She was a cheerful, sensible girl, maybe, in Twyla’s opinion, kind of a goody-goody. It was hard to imagine anything strange or scary ever happening to her.

  “I think I remember that guy,” Jessy added, thinking. “Didn’t he always used to dress up for Halloween?”

  “Yeah,” Allison said. “That’s the guy exactly.”

  “He used to have his porch light on, and a jack-o-lantern on the step, so you’d know to stop there. But when you knocked on the door, it would open, really slowly.” She dragged out the phrase “really slowly,” so it was really slow.

  “Inside, the entryway would be pitch black. Then he’d come out of the darkness, wearing this Dracula costume, with his arm in front of his face.”

  “That’s right,” Karma said. “Little kids would scream and run away. But if you held your ground, even if you were scared, and you said ‘Trick or Treat,’ he’d give you the best candy.”

  “Did you actually go to his house?” Corey asked.

  “Yeah,” Jessy said. That was one time Twyla had taken them. “When the door opens,” she said, “Stand still. If you run away, that’s when he’ll get you.” Jessy hadn’t even known who “he” was, and for all she knew, he was a real vampire.

  “When did this happen?” she asked.

  “It was just last Christmas.”

  “So this will be the first Halloween that he’s, you know. A ghost,” Karma said.

  “We’ve got to go trick or treat at his house,” Jessy said.

  Corey looked shocked. “You can’t trick or treat at a house where someone died.”

  “For all you know, someone could have died anywhere.”

  “Just think,” Jessy said. “What if you went to his house, and the door opened up like that, just like it used to, and the house was all black inside …”

  “Stop it,” Corey said. Then she looked off into the distance, in the direction of the cemetery, visible just past the baseball diamonds. It was getting dark, but light still stuck to the sides of a few tall crosses, so you couldn’t forget what it was.

  “Do you think he’s buried over there?” Karma asked. They all gazed into the darkness, toward the silent tombs.

  “Probably,” Allison said. “Like I said, he’s lived here forever.”

  Corey got up and shoved herself into an open space closer to Jessy, so her back was to the cemetery.

  “You’re not scared,” Karma said.

  “No. I just don’t want to look at the cemetery anymore.”

 
; “It's still there,” Jessy said.

  Just thinking about the cemetery made them all feel solemn.

  “My Aunt Shannon saw a ghost,” Corey said.

  “She did not,” they scoffed.

  “It was in the afternoon, just bright and sunny and normal, and she went into a room, and her sister, my Aunt Sally, was standing there. She wasn't supposed to be there or anything; she lived in another town. Just as my aunt was starting to ask what she was doing there, Aunt Sally just disappeared. She says it was just like watching a candle blow out.”

  Suddenly the quiet residential street around the playground didn’t look any less creepy than the graveyard had seemed while they were talking about it.

  “Later that day, they found out she'd been in a car accident, right at that exact moment. She was killed instantly.”

  “I've heard of that,” Karma said. “It happens all the time.”

  “Co-o-o-o-o-o-o-rey,” a spectral voice came piercing through the evening air. They all jumped a little, but pretended they hadn’t. It was Corey’s mom, hollering at them to come in.

  The girls were disappointed, even though they were maybe starting to freak each other out a little too much. The creepiness felt good in Jessy’s bones. It was weird, though, because it wasn’t like someone telling the story of a scary movie they’d seen, which they did all the time. These were real people who had died, and someone she knew had known them.

  But people died all the time. It shouldn’t make so much difference, the fact that she had this faint line of connection to them. Especially since she didn’t even know the dead people, anyway. But it made the whole idea seem realer. All those tombstones she loved, and under them, there were actual people. Just like someday, she’d be dead herself.

  As they walked the short distance to the house, everybody laughing now over their own spooky moods, Jessy felt thoughtful. She never thought about it much, but suddenly, she was aware that she was alive.

  ****