Saturday, November 1
In the morning, fat clumps of wet white fuzz stuck in the grass. The pumpkins wore small white hats, just covering the bald spots on the tops of their heads.
“I don’t know what time she got in,” her mom was saying. “And I don’t know how much more we can ground her.”
“Good morning, girls,” her dad broke in cheerily, when he saw her and Karma in the doorway.
They ate pancakes and drank cocoa, and eventually Jessy’s mom demanded that she go upstairs and get her sister out of bed right this minute. Jessy knocked on the door a couple of times, and then pushed it open.
Twyla moaned lightly when she turned to look at her, but her voice sounded pretty normal.
“Good haul?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Jessy said. “And we went to the cemetery.”
Twyla sat up, making room for Jessy to sit on the bed.
“Did you see any lights?”
“No. The police came by, though. So I think it was a police car that those kids saw. If they saw anything at all.”
“Did you run into any Moonies?” To anyone else, Twyla would have sounded completely straight-faced, but Jessy could hear the tiny echo of teasing.
“No, we didn't,” she said, trying to keep equally serious.
“I heard that they were skulking around, looking for kids to kidnap.”
Twyla would definitely get in more trouble than she did, if she ever sounded that obvious to their Mom. Jessy knew, and Twyla knew that she knew, and she knew that she knew that she knew. So Twyla threw her covers off, and climbed off the foot of the bed to dig in the pile of heaped-up jackets. She pulled out a stick, with a foil curve of crescent moon glued onto it.
“It wasn't hard to talk anybody into scaring little kids,” she said. “We had a lot of fun with it. I was just afraid you weren't going to show up. There was a keg out at Johnson's Farm, so we couldn't stay out all night.”
The stairs creaked with someone coming upstairs, and in a minute, their Mom appeared in the doorway.
“I’m really sick,” Twyla said. The moon hidden; her voice instantly raspy. “My throat really hurts. I must have gotten a chill last night.”
Their mom made a slight “hmph” noise. Jessy went downstairs with her, and when they passed the flaming skull decoration at the bottom of the stairs, her mom said “All this stuff is coming down on Monday.”
Jessy had already hidden the pop-up cat in her closet, to protect it from going into the Jack-o-Lantern Box.
After breakfast they took the piñata to Karma’s, and tied it to the clothesline where their pretend Johnny had claimed his first victim. The patches of snow had completely faded away. They found a couple of old brooms in the garage, and checked their weight, smacking the sides into their palms, like billy clubs. Then they took turns bashing him.
Several hits, and the paper-mache started to bend, like an egg at the moment of cracking. Johnny's side gashed open. Karma gave it one last strong whack, and he was completely crushed -- nothing left but the skin of paper-mache and a pulp of orange tissue paper.
“Johnny’s really dead, now,” Karma said.
“Until next Halloween,” Jessy added. “When his ghost will walk again.”
When she got home, she caught her dad out by the garbage cans, throwing away a bundle of the Indian corn from his workshop. It had clearly been gnawed on.
“Don't tell your mom about this,” he said.
That night, Jessy got her notebook out, and wrote the word “Hobgoblin” partway down the first page, in pen, like it was the title page of a real book. She had an idea for a story about a Hobgoblin Party. Someone would find the Orange and Black Book, and follow the instructions, and doing that would wake up the ghosts who had read the book years ago. Maybe it would cause whatever happened in the past to happen again, to new people.
She thought about what Karma had said, about ghosts who kept reliving their lives. Then she thought, if you were a ghost, walking in and out of the same place for decades, wouldn’t you notice that the rooms had changed?
Maybe every time was still taking place, like yesterday was still going on somewhere, and tomorrow was happening. If you were a ghost, maybe you could travel between them. Maybe you wouldn't even notice.
It might be just like playing make-believe. That wasn’t hard.
The problem was: how did you know when you were a ghost, and when the world was real? Right now, her room was stable, inside the old house's firm wooden walls, but for all she knew, it could dissolve into mist at any moment.
It wasn't always even death that made things change. She and Karma talked about going to college and getting an apartment, and some of their friends had already planned their weddings -- what kind of gowns, how many bridesmaids. Even if Twyla didn't run away to become a rock star, she was going to graduate in another year. They weren't all going to live in this house forever.
Part of Jessy didn't even want to think about it, but maybe she could turn it into a story.
It was already dark outside: November. Halloween was over. Before long, it was going to be Thanksgiving, and then Christmas.
The pumpkins would shrivel up, around their eyes and mouths first, and then the lids would start to shrink. Stacks of leaves would drift up, scatter and then pile up again, until the whole earth was covered over, if they didn't rake them.
She and Twyla and Karma and everybody she knew were eventually going to blow off the trees, blow away down the street. They were ghosts and cobwebs. All the wet leaves crumbled back down into the earth, and they were beautiful.
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About the Author
I grew up in Wadena, Minnesota, and now live in Fargo, North Dakota, where I'm known for my annual library program, Ghost Stories for Grown-Ups. In ten years, the themes have included “Dark Carnival,” “When the Hearse Goes By,” and “Thesaurus of Horror.” I've also appeared different times in the Fargo Forum as a local expert on ghost stories and horror movies. This is my first published book, not counting the crazy poetry chapbooks I made in grad schools.
My blog: octoberzine.blogspot.com
Email: [email protected]
If you want to keep an eye out for my next book, it will be a more "grown-up" novel than The Jack-o-Lantern Box, but it IS about ghosts. Some things you never grow out of!
The Jack-o-Lantern Box Page 34
