Mister October

by Christopher Golden

  Crow could not bear to watch. He needed not to see this. A scream tried to break from him, and he wanted it to break. A scream could break chains. A scream could push the boogeyman away. A scream could shatter this mirror.

  But Crow could not scream.

  Instead he watched as those white, trembling fingers curled around the handle of the gun and pulled it slowly from the holster.

  He still could not turn…but his hands could move. A little and with a terrible sluggishness, but they moved. His own fingers crawled along his thigh, felt for his pocket, wormed their way inside.

  The click of the hammer being pulled back was impossibly loud.

  Crow’s fingers curled around the stone. It was cold and hard and so…real.

  He watched the cylinder of the pistol rotate as the cop’s thumb pulled the hammer all the way back.

  Tears burned like acid in Crow’s eyes and he summoned every ounce of will to pull the stone from his pocket. It came so slowly. It took a thousand years.

  But it came out.

  The cop lifted the barrel of the pistol and put it under his chin. His eyes were squeezed shut.

  Crow raised his fist, and the harder he squeezed the stone the more power he had in his arm.

  “I’m sorry…,” Crow said, mumbling the two words through lips bubbling with spit.

  The cop’s finger slipped inside the curled trigger guard.

  “I’m so sorry….”

  Crow threw the stone at the same moment the cop pulled the trigger.

  The stone struck the mirror a microsecond before the firing pin punched a hole in the world.

  There was a sound. It wasn’t the smash of mirror glass and it wasn’t the bang of a pistol. It was something vast and black and impossible, and it was the loudest sound Crow would ever hear. It was so monstrously loud that it broke the world.

  Shards of mirror glass razored through the air around Crow, slashing him, digging deep into his flesh, gouging burning wounds in his mind. As each one cut him, the world shifted around Crow, buffeting him into different places, into different lives.

  He saw Terry. The adult Terry, but now he was even older than the one who had been laughing with Val. It was crazy weird, but somehow Crow knew that this was as real as anything in his world.

  Terry’s face was lined with pain, his body crisscrossed with tiny cuts. Pieces of a broken mirror lay scattered around him. Each separate piece reflected Terry, but none of them were the Terry who stood in the midst of the debris. Each reflection was a distortion, a funhouse twist of Terry’s face. Some were laughing—harsh and loud and fractured. Some were weeping. Some were glazed and catatonic. And one, a single large piece, showed a face that was more monster than man. Lupine and snarling and so completely wrong. The Terry who stood above the broken pieces screamed, and if there was any sanity left in his mind it did not shine out through his blue eyes. Crow saw a version of his best friend who was completely and irretrievably lost.

  Terry screamed and screamed, and then he spun around, ran straight across the room and threw himself headfirst out of the window. Crow fell with him. Together they screamed all the way down to the garden flagstones.

  The impact shoved Crow into another place.

  He was there with Val. They were in the cornfields behind Val’s house. A black rain hammered down, the sky veined with red lightning. Val was older…maybe forty years old. She ran through the corn, skidding, slipping in the mud. Running toward a figure that lay sprawled on the ground.

  “Dad!” screamed Val.

  Mr. Guthrie lay on his stomach, his face pressed into the muck. In the brightness of the lightning, Crow could see a neat round bullet hole between his shoulder blades, the cloth washed clean of blood by the downpour.

  “NO!” shrieked Val. She dropped to her knees and clawed her father into her arms. His big old body resisted her, fighting her with limpness and weight and sopping clothes, but eventually Val found the strength to turn him onto his back.

  “Daddy...Daddy...?”

  His face was totally slack, streaked with mud that clumped on his mustache and caught in his bushy eyebrows.

  Val wiped the mud off his face and shook him very gently.

  “Daddy...please....”

  The lightning never stopped, and the thunder bellowed insanely. A freak eddy of wind brought sounds from the highway. The high, lonely wail of a police siren, but Crow knew that the cops would be too late. They were already too late.

  Crow spun out of that moment and into another moment. There were police sirens here, too, and the flashing red and blue lights, but no rain. This was a different place, a different moment. A different horror.

  He was there.

  He was a cop.

  He was sober. Was he younger or older? He prayed that this was him as an older man, just as Val and Terry had been older.

  Older. Sober.

  Alive.

  However the moment was not offering any mercies.

  Stick was there. He was on his knees, and Crow was bent over him, forcing handcuffs onto his friend’s wrists. They were both speaking, saying the same things over and over again.

  “What did you do? Christ, Stick, what did you do?”

  “I’m sorry,” Stick said. “I’m sorry.”

  On the porch of the house a female cop and an EMT were supporting a ten-year-old girl toward a waiting ambulance. The girl looked a lot like Janie and Kim, Stick’s sisters, but Crow knew that she wasn’t. He knew that this girl was Stick’s daughter. Her face was bruised. Her clothes were torn. There was blood on her thighs.

  “What did you do, Stick, what did you do?”

  “I’m sorry,” wept Stick. His mouth bled from where Crow had punched him. “I’m sorry.”

  Crow saw other images.

  People he did not know. Some dressed in clothes from long ago, some dressed like everyone else. He stepped into sick rooms and cells, he crawled through the shattered windows of wrecked cars and staggered coughing through the smoke of burning houses.

  Crow squeezed his eyes shut and clapped his hands over his ears. He screamed and screamed.

  The house exhaled its liquor stink of breath at him.

  -8-

  Crow heard Val yell. Not the woman, but the girl.

  He opened his eyes and saw the Morgan silver dollar leave her outstretched hand. It flew past him and he turned to see it strike the mirror. The same mirror he’d shattered with his lucky stone.

  For just a moment he caught that same image of her kneeling in the rain, but then the glass detonated.

  Then he was running.

  He wasn’t conscious of when he was able to run. When he was allowed to run.

  But he was running.

  They were all running.

  As Crow scrambled for the door he cast a single desperate look back to see that the mirror was undamaged by either stone or coin. All of the restraints that had earlier held his limbs were gone, as if the house, glutted on his pain, ejected the table scraps.

  And so they ran.

  Terry shoved Stick so hard that it knocked his ball-cap off of his head. No one stooped to pick it up. They crowded into the vestibule and burst out onto the porch and ran for their bikes. They were all screaming.

  They screamed as they ran and they screamed as they got on their bikes.

  Their screams dwindled as the house faded behind its screen of withered trees.

  The four of them tore down the dirt road and burst onto the access road and turned toward town, pumping as hard as they could. They raced as hard and as fast as they could.

  Only when they reached the edge of the pumpkin patch on the far side of the Guthrie farm did they slow and finally stop.

  Panting, bathed in sweat, trembling, they huddled over their bikes, looking down at the frames, at their sneakered feet, at the dirt.

  Not at each other.

  Crow did not know if the others had seen the same things he’d seen. Or, just their own horrors.

 
Beside him, Terry seemed to be the first to recover. He reached into his pocket for his comb, but it wasn’t there. He took a deep breath and let it out, then dragged trembling fingers through his hair.

  “It must be dinner time,” he said, and he turned his bike toward town and pedaled off. Terry did not look back.

  Stick dragged his forearm across his face and looked at the smear, just as he had done before. Was he looking for tears? Or for the blood that had leaked from the corners of his mouth when the older Crow had punched him? A single sob broke in his chest, and he shook his head. Crow thought he saw Stick mouth those same two terrible words. I’m sorry.

  Stick rode away.

  That was the last time he went anywhere with Crow, Val or Terry. During the rest of that summer and well into the fall, Stick went deep inside of himself. Eight years later, Crow read in the papers that George Stickler had swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills. Stick was not yet as old as he had been in the vision. Crow was heartbroken but he was not surprised, and he wondered what the line was between the cowardice of suicide and an act of bravery.

  For five long minutes Crow and Val sat on their bikes, one foot each braced on the ground. Val looked at the cornfields in the distance and Crow looked at her. Then, without saying a word, Val got off her bike and walked it down the lane toward home. Crow sat there for almost half an hour before he could work up the courage to go home.

  None of them ever spoke about that day. They never mentioned the Croft house. They never asked what the others had seen.

  Not once.

  The only thing that ever came up was the Morgan silver dollar. One evening Crow and Terry looked it up in a coin collector’s book. In mint condition it was valued at forty-eight thousand dollars. In poor condition it was still worth twenty thousand.

  That coin probably still lay on the living room floor.

  Crow and Terry looked at each other for a long time. Crow knew that they were both thinking about that coin. Twenty thousand dollars, just lying there. Right there.

  It might as well have been on the dark side of the moon.

  Terry closed his coin book and set it aside. As far as Crow knew, Terry never collected coins after that summer. He also knew that neither of them would ever go back for that coin. Not for ten thousand dollars. Not for ten million. Like everything else they’d seen there–the wallet, the pill bottle, the diaper, all of it—the coin belonged to the house. Like Terry’s pocket comb. Like Stick’s ball-cap. And Crow’s lucky stone.

  And what belonged to the house would stay there.

  The house kept its trophies.

  Crow went to the library and looked through the back issues of newspapers, through obituaries, but try as he might he found no records at all of anyone ever having died there.

  Somehow it didn’t surprise him.

  There weren’t ghosts in the Croft house. It wasn’t that kind of thing.

  He remembered what he’d thought when he first saw the house.

  The house is hungry.

  -9-

  Later, after Crow came home from Terry’s house, he sat in his room long into the night, watching the moon and stars rise from behind the trees and carve their scars across the sky. He sat with his window open, arms wrapped around his shins, shivering despite a hot breeze.

  It was ten days since they’d gone running from the house.

  Ten days and ten nights. Crow was exhausted. He’d barely slept, and when he did there were nightmares. Never—not once in any of those dreams—was there a monster or a ghoul chasing him. They weren’t those kinds of dreams. Instead he saw the image that he’d seen in the mirror. The older him.

  The drunk.

  The fool.

  Crow wept for that man.

  For the man he knew that he was going to become.

  He wept and he did not sleep. He tried, but even though his eyes burned with fatigue, sleep simply would not come. Crow knew that it wouldn’t come. Not tonight, and maybe not any night. Not as long as he could remember that house.

  And he knew he could never forget the house.

  Around three in the morning, when his father’s snores banged off the walls and rattled his bedroom door, Crow got up and, silent as a ghost, went into the hall and downstairs. Down to the kitchen, to the cupboard. The bottles stood in a row. Canadian Club. Mogen-David 20-20. Thunderbird. And a bottle of vodka without a label. Cheap stuff, but a lot of it.

  Crow stood staring at the bottles for a long time. Maybe half an hour.

  “No,” he told himself.

  No, agreed his inner voice.

  No, screamed the drunken man in his memory.

  No.

  Crow reached up and took down the vodka bottle. He poured some into a Dixie cup.

  “No,” he said.

  And drank it.

  PLAYING THE HUDDYS

  By John M. McIlveen

  The young man loped up to the chain-link fence, retrieved the softball, and deftly rifled it from left field to second base. Bib overalls, and little if nothing else from the look of it, hung loosely on his sharp shoulders from frayed denim straps. Dark grime caked the visible edges of his bare feet like dried mustard. His toenails were cracked and had a similar tint of yellow. His unruly, yet matted hair clearly hadn’t crossed paths with shampoo in ages.

  He watched idly as his throw single-hopped to the second baseman, who barehanded it. The batter slid into second beneath the extended hand, raising a plume of dry defiance to an empty blue sky.

  “Daif!” yelled the outfielder. He turned dull eyes our way, pinning us where we stood outside the leftfield fence. “Him daif,” he repeated, clearly seeking an affirmation.

  “Nice toss, Champ,” I said. “Almost nailed him.”

  An epic smile split his face revealing horsey, gapped teeth. Semi-dried mucus and filth caked his meager moustache, which had me initially believing it was much fuller.

  “Nee gud na duhmbel,” he said to us and galloped back into position.

  “What the fuck he say?” Rich Berlander asked.

  Rich’s voice always reminded me of two bricks rubbing together, dry and ragged; a perfect companion to his surly, deeply grooved face. Despite the rasp, Rich enunciated rattlesnake words that gave the impression that he was eternally pissed off. He had me convinced.

  “Got me,” Marcus Spracher offered. “Something about a dumbbell,”

  “He said he got a double,” I offered.

  “You speak his language?” Rich asked me, an eyebrow cocked dubiously.

  I ignored the remark. I’d known Berlander for nearly eight years. A battle of words with him was like trying to climb a waterfall.

  We, the sixteen members of Prime Circuit Technology’s softball team, watched the men on the field with a mixture of amusement, irritation, and disgust.

  “What are they doing here?” Rich asked me. “I thought you reserved the field.”

  “They appear to be playing ball,” I answered, somewhat piqued by Rich’s apparent assumption that being the coach empowered me to answer such questions. “And I did reserve the field. Do they look like they live by any schedule or rules?”

  We redirected our attention to the spectacle on the ball field almost in unison. The third baseman, a tall blonde fellow, was shirtless and shoeless, as were most of the ballplayers on the field. He wore filthy, thick-ribbed corduroy pants that were probably last in fashion before he was born, and rocked incessantly from foot to foot. He jammed an index finger forcefully into his left nostril and drilled as if he were trying to tunnel to his eardrums, occasionally removing it to tuck the findings into his mouth.

  Another male of undetermined age stood on deck, wearing a self-absorbed smile that displayed an absence of teeth. He held a wooden bat in one grubby hand while the other writhed down the front of his khaki shorts. He was either scratching himself with the passion of a flea-ridden rabbit, or, the other likelihood I preferred not to ponder.

  A loud crack heralded a solidly hit ball
. Our friend in left field backpedaled, crouched low as if awaiting a good moment to flee, and at the last moment, stabbed his gloved hand up and plucked the ball out of the air. He peered into the glove to assure that the prize was indeed his and barked a laugh that sounded like it preferred to stay inside of him. Gnaa-hunh!

  He granted us that childish grin and said, “Him out!”

  Rich Berlander huffed. “That was almost coherent,” he said.

  The players all watched their outfielder as if awaiting the words of a great oracle. He raised his arm proudly and they swarmed off of and onto the field, changing sides.

  They, more specifically, were the Huddys. Hedging on legendary, the Huddy family had earned an extraordinary level of notoriety for being unabashedly incestuous. Three generations of their highly-concentrated blue-blooded cocktail had stranded the majority of them on the lower rungs of the intellectual ladder, yet a few inexplicably had managed to persevere and exhibit an almost respectable level of astuteness. Sadly, even for them, the incestuous calling was just too strong.

  Numerous tales floated about Taylor Falls, and a fair share of neighboring towns, about the Huddys and the peculiar occurrences that involved them. Whether true or not was anyone’s call, but a few moments of observation would convince anyone that with the Huddys, anything was not only possible, but more likely probable.

  Years earlier the town of Taylor’s Falls, through charities and certain agencies, managed to fund a new home for the Huddys, hoping that it would instill some pride, honor, and maybe even some decency in the family and initiate a miraculous turn-around. It also gave license to tear down the horrid plywood structure that served as the Huddy’s home, standing for years on the border to the town dump. Though the donated home was pleasant and worthy of any middle-class community, those involved had the wisdom and enough wherewithal to set it off in a remote corner of town. I never knew or cared where.

  Regardless, within a year the house was said to be worthy of condemning.

  It was also said that so many Huddys lived in the house that the flow of bodies churned through the doors and windows like a waterwheel, day and night. Stories of dogs, cats, goats, chickens, and occasional pigs, that ranged freely both inside and outside the home, scattering waste wherever they went, like walking gumball machines. I had heard of a family dog that lay dead under the kitchen table for two weeks before the authorities, Department of Health or whoever, removed it. Hard to envision, but who knows?