by Paula Guran
“A shape? Good God almighty, Ezz—”
“Hold on there. It was just a shadow, that’s all. You got me all messed up here.”
“Shadows only happen when something throws them.”
“Not this one. It was just the clouds over the moon . . . something like that. Wasn’t nothing more than that. Just clouds across the moon.”
Ezzie tried to picture the two of them, standing in their respective hallways looking out of their homes at each other’s home, not able to see the other person, talking about—
“What did he do to . . . to this boy?”
“Bill Westlow,” Bea hissed, “little Billy Westlow. Never did anything to anyone. Good as gold he was.” The line went quiet. “He should have had his mom with him, it being Hallowe’en and all.”
Ezzie waited until the line went quiet again before saying, “So what did he do to him? The man?”
“I. Don’t. Know.” The words were clipped and deliberate. “He just kind of wrapped himself all around him. In a cloak.”
“Get outta here! A cloak? Like Dracula? Boy, that’s taking the Hallowe’en thing a little too—”
“You didn’t see it, Ezzie. He wrapped the cloak around him out there on the grass, right at the side of the street, and he fell down on top of him so they were just like a big pile of cloth, the two of them together so you couldn’t see any skin. Then the man stands up and . . . and Billy wasn’t there. And—” She stopped dead.
“And what?”
“His mouth, Ezzie.”
“What about his mouth?”
Ezzie had never appreciated how someone could shout while whispering . . . until right now, that was.
“It was big, Ez . . . so very big.”
Elizabeth Rafaelson gave a shudder that travelled all the way down her body. It went like an avalanche, from the neck locket that her mom had passed on to her when Sydney Rafaelson (who could figure giving a man’s name to a beautiful baby girl) found that the lump in her left breast was going to take her out, and all the way down to the cloud-patterned house-slippers that Ezzie had bought for $9.95 from T.J. Maxx, over to the Resthaven Mall outside of Forest Plains.
“Big?” was all Ezzie could think of to say to that, but she said it so low it was almost a mime. The answering silence made Ezzie think that maybe her friend hadn’t heard her but then Bea went and said something so the gap must just have been Bea nodding. Ezzie had seen her doing it many times when she was listening to someone on the telephone, like the other party could see her doing it from miles away.
Bea said, “He ate him.”
“He ate him?”
She was nodding again; Ezzie knew it.
“You telling me the guy with the big mouth just up and ate this kid? This Willie Westlow?”
“Billy,” Bea said, her voice calm now. “It’s Billy Westlow. Don and Margie’s boy. You know that, Ez . . . please tell me you know that.”
Ezzie wasn’t going to say anything of the sort. Maybe Bea was having some kind of breakdown. Naybe she—Ezzie—should call the police herself. But then, hadn’t Bea called them? Ezzie said, “So you called the police.”
“So I called the police. First off I called you but you weren’t there. So then I called the police. And . . . Ezzie?”
“Yeah? I’m still here.”
“He saw me.”
“Who saw you? The man? Saw you how?”
“I was on the phone, door wide open, watching him stand up while I waited for my call to connect.”
Ezzie waited and then said, “What did he do? When he saw you?”
Ezzie could hear a hollow sound down the wire: it sounded like the wind but when she turned to the window there was no movement in the trees or the bushes. Then Bea said, “He just . . . disappeared.”
Two small-sized bedsheets came into view walking along the sidewalk holding hands with a much taller Frankenstein’s monster—Ezzie would recognise the creature’s lumbering gait anywhere. It was Pete Winters and his twin sons, Benjamin and Jake.
“Disappeared?” Ezzie asked. It was like she was doing this whole thing for a script. None of it made any more sense than it did on TV shows when some poor shmuck was trying to come to terms with the downright absurd.
“Like . . . ‘poof!’ ” Bea said, wonder in her voice.
“Maybe you backed away, blinked or something.”
Ezzie sensed her friend shaking her head. “Uh-uh. He just up and vanished. Like he was never there. But you know what?”
Ezzie was not sure she wanted to know anything more at all, but she grunted interest and waited.
“It was like he was surprised.”
“Surpised?”
Nod nod. “Like he wasn’t expecting me to be able to see him.”
“Why would he be not expecting you to see him?”
“I dunno. But that’s the way I felt.” There was a brief silence and then Bea said, “I was just checking outside . . . make sure he hadn’t come back.”
“Come back? So he went away? When he saw you’d seen him?”
“Ezzie, he vanished.”
“He vanished?” Ezzie repeated, suddenly feeling like one of the characters in an old Bob Newhart routine: And then he lit it, Walt? Ezzie half-expected some canned laughter but there was nothing.
“He . . . he waved to me, and then he disappeared.”
Ezzie watched the bedsheets with a kind of detached feeling. One of them dropped something—a coin, maybe or one of the tiny chocolate lanterns or pumpkins that she’d seen in the store—and he stooped awkwardly to retrieve it while Frankenstein’s monster stood by patiently, holding onto the other bedsheet. “Who came out?” she asked Bea at last—it was the only thing she could think of saying that might move the conversation on a little.
“Huh?”
“Who answered your call-out?”
“Ed Lacy.”
“Did he come out?”
“Uh-uh. Too busy. I think he thought I’d been at the bottle.”
“He say that?”
“He didn’t need to. I know when I’m been patronized, girl.”
Ezzie nodded. “How’s his wife doing? I haven’t seen her down at the store in ages.”
“I think she’s doing okay. He never mentioned Marnie.”
The bedsheets had crossed the street and were now heading up Old Man Wilmetts’s front walk to where a shining pumpkinhead sat on a porch table, candlelights glittering from behind its knife-slashed eyes.
I guess he wouldn’t, Ezzie was tempted to say but she didn’t, deciding it was better to leave the sheriff’s wife’s drinking problems well alone. The bedsheets had stopped on the sidewalk, heads tipped forward as they went through their spoils.
“Ezzie?”
“Yeah?”
“What if . . . what if there were things that could blank out your memories?”
“Like drugs?”
“Yeah, like drugs . . . but maybe these things are people. Or people-sized, anyways.”
“Girl, you just are not making any sense here. And I got this cak—”
“And they feed off of people. And when they eat the people—these things—they can blanket everyone’s memories so’s it’s like they never even existed.”
Ezzie didn’t know what to say. She moved the telephone into her other hand and waited.
“I can feel it happening with me, Ezzie. With—” She stopped. “Shit!”
“What is it?”
“His name. I forgot his name?”
“Whose name?”
“The boy. The second son I told you about.”
“Westlow? You said Westlow. Don and Margie. A second son.”
“That’s it . . . Westlow.” She paused. “What was his name? His first name?”
“Will—no, you said Bill. His name was Bill. Bill Westlow.”
“But you never heard of him, right?”
Ezzie watched the bedsheets comparing swag. “No, I never heard of him. I never heard of him because he
never existed, Bea.”
“He did, Ezzie. But that . . . that thing out there, the thing that ate him up, it moved every trace of him from my memory.”
Ezzie thought of that for a moment. Then she rationalized. “But what about the Westlows’ house? And all the folks who had—who have—photographs of this Billy Westlow? What about them? And the school prizes, the morning register, the office of births, deaths and marriages? What about all the records there?”
Ezzie knew Bea was nodding.
“Yes, I thought of that. And that’s what makes it worse.”
Bea lowered her voice a few more notches.
“What if,” she whispered, “what if somehow—and I have no idea how, so bear with me, now—what if this thing, or things if there’s more than one of them . . . what if they’re able somehow to wipe it all clean. Just like that—” Bea clicked her fingers.
“Doesn’t make any sense,” Ezzie said. “And anyways, it’s not possible.”
“What if—” Bea stuttered to find the words. “What if one time, a ways back, you had a sister-”
“I do have a sister, you know tha—”
“No, Ezzie, hear me out now. What if you had yourself a second sister—let’s call her Maisie.”
“Maisie? Why on God’s green earth are my folks about to call—”
“And one day, who knows when, these things caught your sister. And they ate her. And then . . . then they blanked out all trace of her.”
Ezzie looked across at the chest of drawers right there in the hallway, saw the framed photograph of her and Doreen, standing outside a beach-stand selling lobster rolls, each of them holding one of those rolls in their little fat hands and laughing fit to burst.
“Ezzie?”
“I’m here.”
“You thinking about that? What I said?”
“I’m thinking about it.” And she was. She squinted her eyes almost closed and imagined the Doreen half of the photograph suddenly getting itself all blanked out.And the books that Doreen had bought her, all of them either just disappearing or having the scribbled notes from the endpapers wiped clean. And no end of other stuff.
“And then,” Bea said, “what if every now and again, someone catches them at it.”
Outside, the bedsheets had returned to their work and, as Ezzie watched them, they reached old man Wilmetts’s door, pulled the bell and waited. Ezzie fancied she could hear it chime, way deep in the house and all the way across the street. She was about to say something to Bea when a dark blot exploded from the dwarf rose bushes ringing the porch railings and enveloped one of the twins, knocking him to the ground.
“Oh, Jesus!” Ezzie exclaimed.
Frankenstein’s monster and the other bedsheet looked around from the door at the tussle taking place on the walkway right at the very moment that Old Man Wilmetts opened the door and put on a mock scared face. The bedsheet turned back to face the door and, while Frankenstein’s monster took a step back to let his son take center stage, the boy beneath proffered the hand holding his swag-collector.
“What is it?” Bea hissed down the telephone line.
On Old Man Wilmetts’s walkway, the blot swirled like a dark mass of material and wrapped itself around the stricken bedsheet-clad form . . . and, the strangest thing happened then. Well, two things, if truth be told. The first thing was that the blot straightened itself up and became human again—
Human again? Ezzie thought. Then what had it been in the short timeframe when it was crumpled over the—?
—and that was the second thing right there. Just as the thought came into Elizabeth Rafaelson’s head it was replaced with a blankness. Like an eraser taking out an annoying pencil slash on an otherwise pristine book cover. And the thing was that she could feel it happening and could even see it happening . . . could see it in her mind’s eye, happening at a calm and measure pace but happening nevertheless. It was like someone was reaching into her head and removing certain items—she watched it happen and then, just as suddenly as it had started, it finished. The hand withdrew.
“Ezzie, you still there?”
“Still here.”
Across the street, the bedsheet accepted something into his swag-bag while Frankenstein’s monster tousled the sheet’s head with one hand and shook old man Wilmetts with the other.
“Jeez,” Bea said, the relief obvious in her voice. “I thought you’d gone off or something.”
“Nope, still here. Thought I saw something but wasn’t nothing. Just Ben Winters and his dad getting treats from old man Wilmetts.”
She sensed her friend nodding and, just for a moment, wanted to correct herself—there was some distant nagging voice that made her want to call Ben by another name . . . Jack? Or Jeff? Now it was Ezzie’s turn to shake her head.
Ezzie watched the old man close the door while the bedsheet and Frankenstein reached the sidewalk and turned right. The moon way up above and the pool of light from the streetlight made the two walking figures into a very poignant tableau, but some part of Ezzie felt there was something even more poignant about them. She glanced back at the grassy sward leading up to old man Wilmetts’s porch and, just for a second, she thought she saw the outline of a dog—maybe even a fox. Jackie Gooding down at the general store had said there were a lot of them this year, getting ballsier in coming up into civilization. But whatever it was disappeared as fast as she noticed it . . . kind of unfurling itself (she couldn’t think of any other way to put it) and then blowing like a black plastic bag across the next yard and up against Bea’s porch.
A piece of plastic? Ezzie wondered.
A slab of gen-you-whine cape once belonging to a true Transylvanian count, perhaps? But she didn’t think so.
Bea, Ezzie thought, reluctant to commit her unfounded and unreasonable fears to actual sounds, get out! Take off! Take a hike! Take a powder! Make like an egg and beat it, girl! That wasn’t no piece of plastic just as it wasn’t no five-and-dime Taiwan-made vampire cloak. It was an honest-to-God slice of October midnight hell-bent on dark mischief.
“Bea,” Ezzie snapped, “you got to listen to me.”
Jake, that was the other name she had been trying to think of. But Jake? Jake who?
She watched the air around her friend’s house contract and expand like heat haze over the summertime blacktop, crinkling reality all around. Now the shape took form-
“Bea, are you listening to me?”
“That you, Ez?”
Is that me? Ezzie thought. What the hell kind of a question was that to ask a girl when you’d been on the telephone with her best part of a quarter-hour . . . and when she’d placed the damn call herself, for chrissakes.
—and now it reared up on what passed for legs and moved on towards Bea’s door . . . reaching up a long arm now, the hand clenched into a fist and—
“Bea?” Ezzie wanted to explain to her lifelong friend that she needed to leave her home and hi-tail it to safety . . . walk or even run right out there into the night, no topcoat and maybe not even a sweater, phone hanging from the cradle, swinging in the now-empty house—but she didn’t want to panic here. And, deep down, Ezzie wasn’t sure at all if Bea would heed her words.
Then Bea said, “Oh for goodness’ sake.”
Ezzie could hear a rhythmic thumping from somewhere back in Bea’s house and she looked back across the street and saw the Midnight Man (or whoever he was), his hand raised, repeatedly bringing it down on the door. And was it a trick of the light or did his whole head look like it was hinged around the mouth area?
“Someone at the damn door, Ez,” Bea said, her voice a mixture of exasperation and relief: after all, it was Hallowe’en and here was someone knocking at her door to trick or treat her . . . and everyone surely knew the bogeyman didn’t go around knocking on doors, no sir.
“Bea,” Ezzie shouted again, shifting position so she could better see Bea’s front door. “Don’t answer the door.”
“Hold on there,” Bea shouted, her face away f
rom the telephone.
“Bea!”
“Damn kids,” Bea said, chuckling.
“It’s not kids, Bea—”
No, it’s the bogeyman hisownself come calling on you this All Hallows Eve and he’s a mind to introduce you to all kinds of nastiness
“—it’s . . . it’s someone else.”
The banging came again and Bea shouted, “Oh, hold your horses now all you little ghosts, ghouls, and goblins.” Then, “Hold the line, Ez . . . I got a little treating to do here.”
“Don’t open the door, Bea!”
“ ‘Don’t open it’? Why, why ever not, Ez?”
Ezzie turned from the window and heard Bea’s thick bolt hammering back, heard it even over her own cries. Then she heard the big key turning in the mortise lock that Virgil Duke (“God rest his philandering soul,” Bea always said, followed by a mock spit) had taken almost an entire weekend to install.
“Bea!” Ezzie now screamed.
She heard a new sound on the telephone. It was the sound of the outside flooding into Bea’s house. Hello? she heard Bea say, heard her say it again and then once more, as Ezzie’s friend stepped out into Hallowe’en and looked around her yard.
Ezzie turned to the window and watched Bea, wiping back a streak of frizzled hair from her forehead and hugging her apron tight around her against the wind. “Oh, Bea,” Ezzie whispered—no point in shouting now—“please be careful.”
But as far as she could see, there was nobody out there to be careful about.
Bea retreated into her house and, without turning her attention away from the window, Ezzie heard the lock being turned once more and the bolt being thrust home.
Outside, the clouds had slid off of the moon and its light shone down onto the street. It had been raining, she now saw, slick puddles reflecting house-sides and street lamps and the occasional small vampire or hunchback lumbering along the sidewalks, one hand held by tall helpers while the other clasped a trophy jar of nickels and dimes, candies and chocolate bars.
Then, just as she heard crackling on the telephone, Ezzie saw the shapes moving down the grass from around back of Bea’s house, heading for the road, warping space around them, blistering reality the way the paint on the doors went when Ezzie’s long-left husband, Wayne took a blowtorch to the them when he was re-painting the house.
