The Halloween Girl

by O'Brien, Jeff

  But the number one piece of evidence I could present to my argumentative internal monologue as proof he was really there, was the red light shining on my face. His eyes. I felt those eyes. I had to blink at their brightness.

  I needed to go try to spy on Cassie just to see whether or not this dark man was feeding me bullshit or not.

  I knew my mother would be at work and I could hear my father’s chainsaw-like snores in the living room all the way upstairs in my bedroom. So as usual, I had free reign to do whatever I wanted.

  I put on my snow boots and ventured down the front stairs. The world was a complete white out. It was still snowing, and a good six inches must have been added to the near eighteen I estimated were there when I looked out my bedroom window less than two hours ago.

  I felt that this would be beneficial to my mission.

  I trudged labouredly through the thickly packed, heavy snow that was well above my knees.

  Slowly I made it to the front stairs of the house Cassie lived in. I cursed myself silently for being a lard-ass, as I was already out of breath only about ten feet from my front stairs. And still I had to make it up Cassie’s front stairs which were completely hidden under a drift of heavy snow.

  I grabbed tightly onto the steel railing and used it to keep my balance as my feet found the surface of the bottom step under the snow. Awkwardly, I maneuvered myself up the front stairs, step by step. When I finally reached the top of the stoop, I saw that Cassie’s front door was ajar.

  I felt as if someone were watching me. I didn’t believe it was Cassie, because I just somehow knew that she was gone. But somehow I just felt I wasn’t alone.

  I immediately wanted to turn around and trudge right back home, and if the street wasn’t a complete white out, I just might have done that. I had struggled to get this far, I might as well just go through with it.

  “I’m only ten,” I said to myself. So maybe I’d get a slap on the wrist for trespassing. No big deal.

  I pushed Cassie’s front door open. The apartment was silent. A few lights were on, but I still knew she was somewhere far, far away from here. I just needed to search the whole place through for closure, I supposed.

  I skulked through her front hallway and into the kitchen. An ashtray full of butts was on the table, as was a half empty bottle of vodka.

  I took a quick peak around the rest of the place. The bathroom, pantry and living room all contained Cassie’s belongings. I saw posters on her walls of bands I had yet to hear, like Bauhaus and The Damned. I saw books about demons on her coffee table. I saw a row of her shoes lined up against a wall.

  This was without a doubt exactly what I always envisioned my dream girl’s apartment to look like. But sadly, she just wasn’t in it.

  Just the bedroom was left for me to search. I felt a hint of apprehension about going in. A person’s bedroom is their most private sanctuary. Even though I knew she was not there, I just felt like I was violating a certain level of privacy. But I made myself go in anyways. And what I found in there erased any worry of being an unwanted intruder.

  The first thing I noticed upon entry caused me a great deal of alarm. One section of her bedroom wall, the section facing the street, had been nearly demolished. As if someone had taken a hammer to the wall and pounded it a thousand times, there were dents and cracks that all formed one much larger indentation, nearly the size of a large human body. And worse, there was blood all over every crack and hole. I worried that the blood had been Cassie’s, but for some reason I just knew it couldn’t have been. There was definitely a mystery playing out before me here, but that big messy hole in the wall was not made by her. I just knew it.

  I did my best to forget about it and continued scanning the room.

  It was then that I found out that every strange feeling I had toward Cassie, and there being a strange connection between us, was completely genuine.

  She knew I was coming.

  Aside from an unmade bed, the room looked neat and completely undisturbed.

  Her clothes were hung neatly in the closet. Her bedside table had a lamp on top of it, an alarm clock and a paperback copy of The Stand by Stephen King. (the original one that took place in the late 70’s that is awfully hard to find these days. Should have nabbed it while I was there.)

  And of course, the very thing that made me realize Cassie and I were bonded somehow. A black candle that smelled like the spicy clove cigarettes she smoked was still burning. Next to the candle was a note.

  Always look into the shadows, Tommy.

  I’ll be there.

  -Cassie

  ***

  Dumbfounded.

  That’s the only word I can think of that describes my state of being at that moment.

  Mystified is a close runner up, but dumbfounded takes the gold medal.

  I don’t know how long it was that I stood there staring at the note on the nightstand. It had to have been hours.

  I know now that supernatural matters were at work, but at the time, it just seemed that I was so overwhelmed that I fell into a trance or just a really long day dream that I completely forgot when I snapped back to reality.

  The point at which I came to my senses was when the candle on the nightstand burned out and vanished. When I say vanished, I don’t mean it evaporated into thin air. But it vanished, all right.

  When I entered Cassie’s bedroom, the candle was burning as if it had just been lit. Only a small circle of melted wax surrounded the wick which hadn’t yet turned entirely black from the flame. At the time I didn’t think twice about this fact. Perhaps I was simply behind on the science of candles. But now, at the age of thirty-four, I understand that the candle had to have been lit only a minute or two before I entered the room.

  The candle itself was slightly larger in length and width than the average soda can. For it to have melted completely before my very eyes, I had to have been standing there for hours.

  The short, brass stand that held the candle began melting along with it, as the hot wax dripped and bubbled. An intoxicating and calming smell emanated from the melting wax and brass. A soothing, spicy aroma hit my nostrils and eased my nervousness about being somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.

  I felt myself slipping back into the trance that had held me there in the bedroom for so long.

  The blue tendrils of smoke coming from the melting mass on the table surrounded me. I likened it to the feeling I got from the painkillers I had been given after my hernia operation when I was seven.

  Though the feeling of pure bliss had an almost unbreakable hold on me, I snapped out of it instantly as the note from Cassie caught fire from the candle’s flame.

  My hand darted for the burning little piece of paper as fast as I could throw it, completely unconcerned with suffering a burn.

  Once the note was in the safety of my hand, I furiously blew the flames out.

  Luckily, the writing from Cassie had not been lost and only a small corner of the paper was missing, with a slight brown staining on its burnt edge.

  The fright of losing this precious piece of paper sharpened up my senses a little bit and I felt I should get moving. I stuffed the note into the pocket of my coat and took one last look around Cassie’s bedroom.

  Though I was determined to find her someday as an adult, or at least find out what this connection between us was, I feared that being in this room right now was the last I’d ever see of her essence. I feared a day when I might forget about this woman and the strange spell I always fell under when I saw her or even thought of her.

  I examined her posters closely and made a mental note of the bands that were on them. Bauhaus. The Damned. Danzig. The Cure. Samhain. I would not forget these names and I would buy as many cassettes and eventually CDs of theirs as possible.

  I took one last glance in her closet and admired her clothing. I pulled out one particular dress that looked absolutely gorgeous to me. It was all black and had a tight corset top with a long, flowing and ruffled botto
m. I knew right then and there that anytime I saw a girl decked out in this type of garb, I would think of immediately Cassie. I figured that when I got old enough, I’d probably never date a girl who didn’t dress and look like Cassie.

  And lastly, I walked back over to her bed and inhaled. Now I know this sounds creepy, or just plain wrong, but I couldn’t tear myself away from it. The scent of her hair and her perfume or body wash or whatever it was that came from her pillow and her sheets. I savored it. I wanted to steal the blankets and take them home.

  So, I breathed in one final breath of her angelic essence and I felt something magical. It was as if that one final whiff of her got stored somewhere in my olfactory system and would be there for me forever, to remind me that the search for Cassie and for answers would not be in vain.

  Finally, I left her bedroom.

  There was some sort of elusive power in that room, and it was trying with all its might to keep me there. Prying myself away from it took all the power in me.

  As I made it to the kitchen, I was about to burst out into tears. I felt like I was being forced to tear an arm off my own body by leaving that bedroom.

  Just as the first tear jumped out from under my eyelid, the waterworks were shut off instantly as a startling noise suddenly brought back my panic and set it into overdrive.

  Sirens.

  Shit. Police.

  Who had seen me come in? Who could have seen anything in that whiteout outside?

  I crouched down below the kitchen window to see what I could before I would make a mad scramble for the backdoor and try to hop the fence over to my backyard where I could say that I had just been playing in the snow all day. This was a perfectly solid alibi in the mind of a ten-year-old.

  But what I saw out the window cleared me of any worry with the law. It did however, paint a whole new picture that meant something far, far worse was probably wrong.

  The sirens hadn’t been the police. They were from an ambulance and a fire truck. And the E.M.T.’s were running into my house.

  ***

  I stayed true to my idea about escaping Cassie’s apartment through the backdoor. Although no police were after me, I thought my “playing in the snow” idea was still a necessary cover for my whereabouts that day. I had committed an act of breaking and entering, after all.

  So after pretty much jumping off of Cassie’s back porch and tumbling into the cushion of two feet of snow, I trudged across the backyard of her apartment house. Slowly and carefully I climbed the fence, which proved no easy task in snow-covered boots. Without any major injury and only a minor rip in my jeans, I made it to the safety of my own backyard after several minutes on the wobbly old fence.

  Once there, I frantically started making a snowman, hoping to make it look like I had been out there a while. After the two bottom layers were complete, I went around to the front of my house to see what was going on.

  The ambulance and fire truck’s lights were still flashing under the snow that covered them, and just about every neighbor was standing on their front porch, trying to see through the thick white snow that filled the air.

  I realized that the small sedan in front of the house, buried in snow, was my mother’s car.

  My mother didn’t get home from work until around three-thirty in the afternoon. If she came home early because of the snow, then I’d guess I probably wasn’t stuck in a trance over in Cassie’s bedroom for very long. And maybe that candle really had just burned very quickly. But had she gotten home at her regular time, then some really messed up shit had gone down here.

  Slowly and gingerly I stepped in through the front door that was wide open. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, furiously smoking away at a cigarette and crying her eyes out. Two police officers stood in front of her, just staring down at her as she sobbed and tried to speak through puffs of her cigarette.

  Before they noticed me, I looked at the grandfather clock in the hallway.

  4:30.

  Shit. That meant I had been next door for over six hours. Six hours?

  “Where have you been all day!?” she screamed when she noticed me, instantly snapping me out of my confusion about my six hour long trance.

  A man in a suit walked out of the living room and looked down at me. He was large and intimidating, but made an effort not to look the part.

  “You can answer that question later, Tommy. You have to come with me,” he said, trying to smile and sound friendly.

  “No!” screamed my mother frantically, waving her cigarette around. I realized then that her other hand was in a steel handcuff, the other end around the leg of the kitchen table.

  “Let’s go up to your room and get some of your things, Tommy,” the seemingly friendly man in the suit said. “We have to go now. I’ll tell you everything once we get…” he thought for a moment.

  “Don’t take him away from me! You can’t!” screamed my mother even more frantically.

  “What the hell is going on?” I was finally able to ask when there was a moment’s break in the chaos, fearing my mother’s wrath for saying what she considered to be a bad word.

  “I promise you that everything will be fine, Tommy,” said the man. “Come on now. Let’s get upstairs and get the things you’ll need.”

  He took me by the hand and led me up the stairs to my bedroom. Having my hand held by this man felt awkward. Was he trying to comfort me, or did he think a ten-year-old needed to have their hand held?

  The rest of the day is pretty much a complete blank as far as my memory goes.

  I never saw the house I grew up in ever again.

  I also never saw the house next door to me as it burned to the ground only hours after the man in the suit put me in his car with a suitcase full of my clothes and some books I’d packed.

  My last memory of that day, and of living in that house on that street for the first ten years of my life, was what I heard one of the policemen say to my mother as the man in the suit was taking me upstairs to my bedroom.

  “Mrs. Sullivan, you’re under arrest for the murder of your husband, Ronald Sullivan. You have the right to remain silent…”

  And then, when I did get to my bedroom, the man in the suit made some dumb-ass, obvious comment about the weather. I looked out the window, like I didn’t know there was a blizzard going on out there.

  However, I did see something I didn’t know was out there. On the front stairs of Cassie’s house stood the dark man, those bright red eyes gazing right at me.

  Look into the shadows, Tommy, he said inside my head.

  And then he was gone.

  That time, I did see him vanish into thin air.

  THREE

  Tom’s fear of darkness and silence nearly crippled him, but he didn’t even make it all the way into the shadows behind the Dunkin Donuts before Brent stood out and grunted at him. Somehow the specter’s emergence was a relief. The dead man was dressed in the same ripped stone-wash jeans and denim jacket adorned with studs and patches that Tom remembered last seeing him in. The rest of Brent’s appearance was that of death, the only way Tom would have wanted to see him.

  “I don’t believe this,” Tom said, his voice squeaking with anxiety.

  “Believe it, kid,” growled Brent, whose voice came out every bit as sallow and lifeless as his appearance. His eyes were ghostly white and lacking pupils. Bits of his face looked ripe with blood and scraped flesh, and the top left side of his head looked to have been caved in with a baseball bat. “Guess I can’t call you kid, though. You’re all grown up now.”

  “You’re dead. They found your body in a ditch five years ago. But you were dead long before that.”

  “No shit. Any more grand revelations for me?”

  Tom had never heard much of Brent’s voice when the man was alive aside from shouts, but he knew that it couldn’t have been as deep and guttural as the tones that were coming from the mouth of this undead thing before him.

  “I’ve seen enough in my life to know that t
his is really happening,” Tom said, trying not to sound half as scared and overrun with emotions as he was. “I know there are supernatural forces at play here. But why you? Why are you the thing haunting the shadows that have been calling me for the last twenty four years?”

  “You’re cute,” grunted the undead Brent. “Because, Tommy, this is your darkness. These are your shadows we’re standing in. And I’m almost the darkest memory in that messed up little noggin of yours. Who the fuck else would be here? Wait…don’t tell me. You didn’t think…no way. Don’t tell me you thought you’d find Cassie back here!”

  I kind of hoped that, yeah, Tom thought, but focused on his anger instead of his false hopes.

  Brent laughed wildly while Tom flared his nostrils and clenched his fists.

  “I wouldn’t ball those fists up too tight, now, Tommy-boy. Hitting me ain’t gonna do you any good. Though, I know you’d like to. I was a real bastard back in my living days. I’m sure you wanna’ clock me now just as bad as you did back when I was laying beatings down on your beloved little Cassie.”

  “Don’t you dare fucking speak her name again,” Tom growled.

  “Oh listen to you, Mister Do-Good. Be honest, you little shit. The beatings aren’t even why you hate me.”

  Tom’s eyes opened wide and his jaw clenched.

  “Why else would I hate you?”

  “Because you’re a jealous little shit. That’s why.”

  Tom said nothing.

  “I might be dead, Tommy. But I’m still no fool. You’re jealous. Why? Because I got closer to your little dream girl than you ever did. I had her in ways and positions that you probably spanked yourself silly dreaming about up in that bedroom of yours. I bet half the time you were touching your little pee-pee, I was right next door laying the pipe down good on your little Cassie.”