The Halloween Girl

by O'Brien, Jeff

  Two glowing orbs hung in the air about six feet off the ground.

  “No,” Cassie whispered.

  Perhaps it was merely a trick of light, but there was none to be found in her apartment aside from those red, glowing eyes.

  Desperate to prove her fear wrong, she reached for the light switch. As the lights came on and a semblance of life filled her bedroom, the red eyes vanished.

  With great caution she stepped out of her lit up bedroom and scanned the living room. In the darkness she saw no more signs of Red Eyes, and made her way toward the kitchen where the light switches for the rest of her small apartment were located. Once her living space was safely visible, she hurried over to the shower. The time on her cable box read 6:42.

  She would probably be late for work again.

  She cranked the hot water in the shower nearly to the point of scalding; something about the burning rejuvenated her. A little shock to the system just seemed like a great way to toughen her up for any challenges that the day might throw her way.

  She thought again about being late for work, but something from the dreams that lingered in her conscience eased her anxiety about such a trivial matter.

  ***

  Cassie poured some fresh coffee into the cup of a very unappreciative older man.

  “That doesn’t look fresh,” the man said, then looked across the booth to his wife to get her opinion.

  “Not fresh at all,” she agreed.

  “I’m sorry,” Cassie muttered with an undeniable tone of defeat. “I can go have another pot brewed for you if you like.”

  “Well how long is that going to take, young lady?” the man huffed. “The least I could expect from you is to have some fresh coffee and not have to wait for it.”

  The steaming pot that Cassie held in her hand had only been brewed mere minutes ago. She couldn’t give him fresher coffee unless she grabbed him by the back of the head and held his mouth open under the machine as it dripped the coffee out.

  “It’ll only take a few minutes,” Cassie assured them. “I’ll go get on it right now.”

  “Thank you,” the man said, not sounding even remotely genuine in his gratefulness.

  The thought of throwing the pot right at the man’s face and laughing as his flesh burned off crossed her mind, but instead she hurried away from the table and to the kitchen to throw on another pot. As she got further away from the table, she heard the older couple whispering to each other about her black hair and tattoos and how she looked like some kind of Satan-worshipping witch.

  She had to laugh at the part about Satan.

  At least I can laugh about it, she thought. And at least he called me young lady.

  For five years she had been waiting tables here at this little diner in Providence, Rhode Island, and for five years she had been miserable. But having a job and an apartment was pretty good for someone like Cassie, who wanted nothing more than to leave her past behind.

  Luckily, she had never been questioned by authorities on the death of her ex-boyfriend Brent or any other ghosts from her past. Doing something like burning some asshole’s face off with a scalding pot of coffee probably wouldn’t help her case very much.

  Focusing as much as she could on the positive, she threw an empty pot onto the coffee maker, dropped the basket in the top compartment and pressed the brew button.

  Walking back out into the dining area minutes later, she saw a young girl with shiny black hair, no older than eighteen, sitting alone at a booth.

  I fucking hate when they seat themselves.

  “Can I help you?” she asked the girl as she approached the booth.

  The girl said nothing at first and only looked up at her and smiled.

  Cassie realized right away that she didn’t want to be mad at this girl, as she reminded her in many ways of her younger self. Even though such memories came with very dark images that she tried desperately to keep in the darkness where they hid, she couldn’t help but smile back at the girl.

  “I’ll have a coffee,” the girl said. “Black, please.”

  “Sure thing,” Cassie said. “Would you like a menu?”

  “I don’t suppose cloves are on the menu?” the girl asked. “Doesn’t it just suck how we can’t smoke in these places anymore?”

  Cassie couldn’t believe it. This girl really was every bit just like her.

  “Amen to that,” Cassie said with a laugh. “You can’t be old enough to remember those days, though.”

  “I wouldn’t think you could either… Cassandra,” the girl said after inspecting Cassie’s 1950’s style waitress uniform for a nametag. “But gals like us, we’re just full of surprises, aren’t we?”

  “I suppose so,” Cassie said with a laugh. “We’ve actually got a fresh pot brewing right now, so I’ll be back in just a couple minutes.”

  “Splendid,” said the girl as Cassie turned away toward the kitchen.

  Cassie didn’t really ever feel so at ease with a customer here at the diner. Most folks she just wanted to charm enough to get a good tip and hopefully never see them again. Something about this girl made Cassie want to sit down and have some coffee with her, even smoke a few cloves despite indoor smoking being against the law in the state of Rhode Island.

  The girl was thin and somewhat frail, much like Cassie had always been. Her hair was jet black with the front sections bleached bright white. She wore a black Helloween t-shirt, which Cassie loved.

  As Cassie waited in the kitchen for the last bit of the pot to finish brewing, she started to get a weird feeling about the girl. Sure she was friendly, but something about her body language and her ‘gals like us’ comment gave her a bit of unease. It almost seemed like the girl knew something more about her and perhaps her friendliness was a mask for some ulterior motive.

  “Stop being paranoid, Cass,” she said, and then looked around to make sure nobody could hear her talking to herself. “God forbid someone actually be nice to you.”

  Coming back out from the kitchen with the new fresh pot, she first went over to the table of the older couple.

  “It’s been over five minutes,” the old man groaned, tapping his thick index finger on the surface of the table.

  “I’m sorry,” Cassie lied as she poured the new coffee into his mug.

  “This one doesn’t look any fresher than the last one,” the man’s wife said. “Did you even brew a new one or did you go back there and smoke a cigarette or something, thinking you could fool us?”

  “I promise I did no such thing,” Cassie said, blowing some hair away that was dangling in her face. “Can I get you anything else?”

  “I suppose we’ll just have the check now,” the man said. “If we order anything else we might be in our graves before it gets here.”

  Pleasant thought, asshole.

  “Of course. I’ll be right back with your check.”

  Cassie first went back over to the girl’s booth to pour her coffee.

  “Helloween, huh?” Cassie said, opening up the bridge for conversation. “I haven’t seen one of those shirts in a long, long time.”

  “We’re from a better time, Cassandra,” the girl said, again giving strange little hints that she knew something about Cassie.

  “Indeed we are,” Cassie agreed. “A lot of what passes for good music these days is just silly. How did all that emo shit creep into metal all of a sudden?”

  “Amen.”

  “I don’t see many people who really look like us around here. That table over there,” Cassie pointed to the grumpy older couple, “were whispering to each other that they thought I looked like a Satan worshipping witch.”

  “Now that’s just silly,” the girl said with a chuckle. “I know you would never have anything to do with demons or Satan.”

  Cassie visibly paused, thinking of Red Eyes.

  Maybe I shouldn’t be too friendly with this one.

  “You okay?” the girl asked. “You don’t really worship Satan, do you?”

&nb
sp; “No, of course not!” Cassie laughed.

  There I go with the paranoia again. Just a friendly customer.

  “Okay, good,” the girl said, sounding pleased. “There is hope for you yet.”

  Ugh. So that’s it.

  “Are you from some church?” Cassie asked the girl. “I’m really not interested.”

  “No!” the girl blurted out, almost spitting out her coffee. “I’ve been to a lot of strange places and done some very strange and unbelievable things, but no. I’m from no place so bizarre as a church, honey. Though, Leedham, Massachusetts is a pretty damn strange place.”

  Okay so she’s not a Jesus-freak, but this is getting weirder and weirder.

  “You’re from Leedham?” Cassie asked.

  “Yup. Class of nineteen-ninety-eight.”

  “Ninety-eight?” Cassie scoffed. “You look like a teenager! What’s your secret?”

  “My secret? Oh dear, I’ve got secrets coming out the wazoo. We’d be here for eternity if I started in on my secrets. It’s your secrets that I’m more interested in talking about.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me, Cassandra. Your secrets. Some of us know all about what happened back in Leedham.”

  Now Cassie was beyond paranoid and just plain scared.

  “Who are you?” she demanded, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the handle of the coffee pot tighter.

  Before the girl could answer, an eruption from the other table captured her attention.

  “Are you going to bring us the check or stand there socializing, young lady!” the older man shouted from the booth.

  “I’ll be right back,” Cassie said to the mystery girl, and ran off to the register to print out the bill for the old couple.

  Whatever this is, it can’t be happening, Cassie’s internal monologue dictated to her. I left Leedham far behind me.

  Anxious to get some answers, she practically ran back out into the dining area and threw the check down on the older couple’s table. As she turned to the girl’s booth, she found it empty.

  “Of course,” she groaned, then moseyed over to see if the girl had even paid for her coffee. Much to her surprise, there was a twenty dollar bill underneath the empty mug. Lifting the mug up to retrieve the cash, she found a small piece of paper with a handwritten note on it.

  I know all about the shadows.

  ***

  Cassie got home at eight o’clock that night after pulling a double shift, feeling frightened and alone. Her strange visitor had brought back a great many memories that she wished could vanish from her mind.

  There was Red Eyes, the very essence of Hell. And there was Tommy.

  The shadows.

  Cassie stripped off her awful waitress uniform and got in the shower. Again turning the hot water up so high that it almost stung, she stood under the stream and took a succession of long, deep breaths. Though she tried to fight it off at first, she gave in and let her memory bring her back to that awful day.

  Standing in her bedroom in that crummy first floor apartment back in Leedham. The broken corpse of Brent crumpled up in a ball on the floor while Red Eyes stood before her and laughed.

  The shadows.

  Herself looking down at her bedside table and writing the note to little Tommy.

  She had made an unspoken promise to the boy, not even fully knowing what her promise meant or entailed.

  Always look into the shadows, Tommy. I’ll be there.

  The night before Red Eyes took care of Brent and hid his corpse far away from Cassie, a woman in white had come to her in her dreams.

  Standing under the burning hot stream, the dream came back to her in vivid detail.

  Cassie was kneeling at a pew in a dusty, abandoned church. Out of the darkness that surrounded her, the woman in white appeared.

  You know all about the boy who lives next door, Cassie. You can help him. You’ve made a terrible choice, dealing with that dark, Red-Eyed man. But there is always a way to fix our mistakes. There is always a way to make it right. I know what you’ve agreed to do.

  In the dream Cassie had struggled to speak to the woman, but was unable to express even a grunt.

  There’s no getting out of what you must do come tomorrow, Cassie. But remember that I’ll be back for you.

  Cassie struggled to ask for a more detailed explanation but still could not speak

  I cannot say when, the woman said, answering her silent question. But you will know.

  Cassie shook herself out of the replaying of her dream and got out of the shower. She dried off and threw on her pajamas as quickly as she could, battling with the question that was running wild in her head.

  Was that her today in the diner? That young girl?

  Cassie didn’t think it could possibly be her. She was just a young, pretty girl as corporeal and in-the-flesh as anyone else in the diner that day.

  Cassie lit up a clove and crashed down on her couch. She sat smoking and fidgeting in a frenzy of spastic unrest for a few minutes until finally she could take it no more and grabbed her laptop computer.

  She’d seen and done enough in her life to accept the supernatural as something very, very real. She also knew that Leedham was a hotbed for such activity. She ran a Google search for ‘Leedham urban legend’ and clicked on the first result to pop up.

  She felt silly reading a webpage that she thought looked like it was designed by a forty-something virgin who lived in his mother’s basement, but continued on anyway, looking for anything about a woman in white. At first she found absolutely nothing about any such entity, but grew curious when the name Stephanie Waltman appeared.

  Stephanie had been one of the two teens who allegedly set fire to Saint Anthony’s church on Halloween night in nineteen-ninety-eight.

  1998.

  “The girl told me she was class of ninety-eight,” Cassie said to herself, savoring the sweet minty smoke of her clove, drawing any comfort from it that she could.

  Further reading on Stephanie Waltman gave her birth and death years: 1980-1998. Technically she would have been in the class of 1998, but it became painfully clear to Cassie that the girl wasn’t talking about her year of graduation, so to speak.

  A link that read IMAGES OF STEPHANIE WALTMAN AND BILL RICHMOND was at the bottom of the information given about her life. Hastily clicking on the link, Cassie found just what she had expected: a picture of a teenage couple taken from a photo booth. The girl in the picture was Stephanie Waltman, and there was no question about it ─she was the very same girl Cassie had been visited by today at the diner. What was most eerie about it, was that she looked exactly the same as the day the picture had been taken in 1997. Her hair was dyed exactly the same, black all around with white in the front, and she was wearing the very same Helloween t-shirt.

  Cassie decided she had seen enough and closed her laptop. After stubbing out her clove in the ashtray next to the couch, she lit up another and tilted her head back against the headrest, attempting relaxation as she watched the tendrils of smoke float upwards and come apart as they hit the ceiling.

  Relaxation failed to come to her, as did any more than fifteen minutes of sleep that night.

  The time has come to answer for what I’ve done. It’s time to head back to the shadows.

  All night Cassie went between tossing and turning to smoking in bed while staring up at the darkness of her bedroom ceiling.

  In the shadows of her bedroom, Stephanie Waltman was in the corner, standing guard against Red Eyes and watching as Cassie wept, smoked and wondered whatever happened to little Tommy Sullivan.

  ***

  Tom decided that after a hot shower and a shave he would be out the door and headed down Route 95S on his way to Leedham.

  At first, while standing under the rejuvenating stream of his shower, he felt that he was wasting valuable time. Pressing matters were at hand, and here he was wasting precious moments getting clean. But after a moment of contemplation he knew he was right i
n his actions. If he was going to find Cassie he wanted her to see what a handsome man he had grown into, or at least, he hoped she’d see it that way. So he washed himself and followed it up with a scrutinizing shave of his face and what little stubble was left on the back and sides of his head.

  Once he was out the door and in his car, he deliberately avoided driving past Bob’s house. He had seen enough of that mess already. Bob was dead of supernatural causes, at the hands of Red Eyes, and he had to just accept the gruesome horror of that fact and press on.

  Pre-noon traffic on the way to Leedham was minimal and he made it there in just over an hour. Much to his surprise, the ride was peaceful. He felt at ease cruising down the interstate with the windows down and taking in the cool air. He had expected his travel to be interrupted by anxiety and fear, and anticipated that at any moment some ghost or demon would appear in his passenger seat, but none came.

  It was not until he pulled off of Route 1 and rolled into Leedham that the horror began mounting. There were no visible signs of it around him. The horror was only within his head. The atmosphere of the town had changed very little in the last twenty-four years, and that which did change had changed for the worse. Furniture warehouse stores that flourished back in nineteen-ninety were now dirty buildings that were boarded up and empty. Even the FOR LEASE signs that plastered their brick siding were collecting dirt and mold.

  “Where do I even begin?” Tom asked himself over the sounds of “Plan 9 Channel 7” by The Damned playing on his car stereo.

  For about thirty minutes he drove around looking more out the side window than paying attention to the road.

  “Am I kidding myself?”

  It didn’t take long for discouragement to set in. Leedham was a small town, but what did he expect? Cassie wouldn’t just be standing on the side of the road holding a sign that read HERE I AM TOMMY.

  “Think for a second,” he said aloud.

  He pulled over on the side of a narrow side street and lit up a cigarette. Once he blew out the first exhale of smoke, he felt at ease enough to think about this whole mess with some patience and logic. He knew he was avoiding the obvious answer. Where were the answers likely to be? In the darkness. In the places he dreaded. Just like Brent had told him. The answers wait in the darkness, in those moments of life you leave behind to turn to dust.