Halloween

by Paula Guran

  At the open door, Juno nodded toward a group of kids coming up the walk. “This bunch’ll be one of the last . . . they stop around ten.”

  Neva was gazing out the open door, at the beacon of the moon in the black sky. As if drawn, she walked across the room to Juno, at the door, her gaze seamlessly on the moon. “It’s not quite full, tonight. It’s waxing. Growing.”

  “Yeah. The moon’s really pretty tonight. It’s so bright.”

  “It’s awesome,” Linda said, coming to join them. “It’s all . . . ” Her voice trailed off, as usual; they gazed together into the night sky, each with the moon in her mind’s eye.

  Then another group of kids came, yelling “trick or treat” in a listless, off-hand kind of way, accidentally knocking over potted plants as they came up the walk and not stopping to right them.

  The doorbell stopped ringing about ten-thirty and, soon after, Neva closed the front door and said, “Almost time for the Mask Game.”

  Granddad Morris was in the Barcalounger. Donny, his makeup smeared—looking scowling and put-upon—was seated on the floor between Granddad and Aunt Laura; she sat stiffly on a kitchen chair she’d brought into the living room. Donny was industriously eating Halloween candy from a plastic orange trick-or-treat bag he’d brought back with him. Juno and Linda sat on the two arms of the overstuffed chair across from the sofa, under the painting of a troubadour singing to a Spanish girl on a balcony. Little Mick was playing Destructo on his PlayStation Portable, half curled up on the big chair. He had lost his beloved Batman mask somewhere, occasioning a minor crisis; but he’d forgotten about it when Donny pressed the PSP on him to quiet him down.

  Mr. Carpenter was leaning on the back of a turned-around kitchen chair, rocking its front legs off the floor, humming to himself while gazing vaguely at the plaster light-bulb-lit jack o‘ lantern in the front window. Mom had wanted to carve real jack o‘ lanterns this year, but the kids had all made excuses, and the uncut pumpkins were still sitting on the back porch.

  “Could we put on music?” Donny was saying. “And for once could we listen to something I like, something that’s good for Halloween? There’s that song ‘Kim’—”

  Juno groaned, “Not Eminem, please God.”

  “Juno come on, it’s Hallo-ween stuff—it’s a scary story about this guy who kills this girl and tells his daughter it’s all just a game but he’s getting the kid to help dump her in the lake . . . It’s just like a horror movie.”

  “It’s his sick fantasy about murdering his wife—that’s not Halloween—”

  “Actually,” Neva said, mildly, as she took the cloth covering off the masks in the sack. “I agree with Donny, I have heard that song and it is a Halloween story, very much so. A good one too. But music right now would be distracting . . . we have storytelling of our own to do with the help of the masks . . . .” With a mask gazing empty-eyed from her hand, she straightened up and announced with just the right air of mystery: “For now commences our Halloween Mask Game!”

  And she went counter-clockwise, starting with Grandad, passing out masks, one to each.

  The masks were like glazed papier-mâché—but it wasn’t paper, exactly. It was more like crushed straw, Juno thought, looking at the back: Some kind of fibrous plant. The front was beautifully painted, and shaped; they were human faces—familiar faces—not monsters. The workmanship was indeed of a quality beyond merely professional. It was “the art of the hands.”

  “Can I have that one . . . ?” Juno asked, pointing at a mask of an old woman.

  “No, I’m sorry, that one is mine,” Neva said sweetly, huskily. “Each has his own mask. Try yours on—it should fit quite well to your features.”

  Juno took her own mask: it was a mask of her mom’s face, not a mocking caricature, just Mom younger than now, more slender. Juno hesitated, not quite wanting to put it on.

  With a deeply-etched scowl, Granddad was staring at his own mask—which stared sightlessly back from his trembling, blue-veined hands. He grunted, and shook his head. The mask was a parody of his own face—much younger. “Me in Vietnam,” he said. “About that time . . . I was thirty-two. How’d she know how to . . . ?”

  Mom gazed at her own mask. “Why that’s my mother, rest her soul. They really are beautifully made. Neva’s done her research. I . . . it gives me such a funny feeling . . . You know, I should have done another art course. People give up so easily, when they try to take classes, and . . . I guess I did too. I wish I’d done some more art classes . . . like Lupe—but she was so good at them . . . ”

  At the mention of Lupe, Mr. Carpenter glanced at Mom, then looked quickly back at the mask in his hands.

  “Oh yes,” Aunt Laura said, “Lupe was very talented. You know, I’d have to be talented at something to really want to learn it—an art, I mean. I . . . I wanted to do more dancing but I didn’t think I had . . . ” She broke off, seeming embarrassed, as if she’d exposed herself.

  “Mine’s not like the others,” Mick said, tossing his PSP aside to take his mask. “It doesn’t have a face and it’s made of something else.”

  “It is made of something different! You’re a sharp boy!” said Neva, all charming encouragement as she pulled his Batman shirt off over his head, so that he was bare-chested. “It doesn’t have much of a face yet, but just wait. We need at least one real honest monster on Halloween.” She put the mask gently on his face and began to . . .

  What is she doing? Juno wondered.

  The mask had started out without any character to it; just a generic face. She was shaping the mask, under her fingers, as she spoke. “The other masks are made of something similar to paper, and they’re fixed in one shape by a glaze. This one is of a kind of special, stiff cloth that’s very easy to mold . . . ”

  The mask took shape, suggesting a werewolf. Not any particular werewolf; not Lon Chaney Jr, nor the Wolfen. Not Eddie Munster. But it was more or less, thought Juno, what Little Mick would look like if he turned into some kind of wolfboy.

  “There—you’re a werewolf!” Neva said, clapping her hands, just once. “You go on now, and be a werewolf boy! Explore that! Go see in the bathroom mirror what it looks like!”

  “Ow-WOOO!” Mick howled, to nervous laughter. His eyes sparkled at the attention; at everyone looking at him and laughing. Then he ran down the hall to the bathroom to look in the mirror.

  The laughter died down as everyone looked at their masks.

  “After you’ve had a good look at them, put the mask on,” Neva said.

  Everyone obediently put their masks on, except Granddad Morris. There was no string, no rubber band on the back of the mask—the top of the mask curved back into a kind of cap that held the mask on the head and against the face. It clung to Juno’s face with such unnatural steadiness, she took it off and put it back on a couple of times, just to reassure herself that she could take it off.

  Weird ideas get into your head at Halloween, she thought.

  Every mask fit perfectly, so far as Juno could see. How had Neva done that, without measuring everyone? Juno found she was afraid to ask.

  “Whoa-hey—like a glove!” Aunt Laura said, giggling faintly. Laura’s own mask was an image of herself as a teenager about Juno’s age.

  “No, it’s some kind of mean joke,” Granddad said, staring at his mask. Even as he said, “I won’t put it on.”—he put it on.

  “You just did put it on, Granddad,” Donny said.

  “I won’t put it on,” Granddad said again, his voice muffled from behind his mask.

  Juno started to laugh—then realized there was no humor in Granddad Morris’s voice. He wasn’t kidding.

  She was starting to get scared . . . Which was good, wasn’t it? Weren’t you supposed to feel scared on Halloween, at least some of the time? But then this wasn’t that kind of scared. It’d never occurred to her before that there was a good scared—and a bad scared.

  Linda’s mask was of her mother, Lupe, a pretty woman, half-Latino.

/>   Linda’s dad, Mr. Carpenter asked, jovially, “How d’I look?”

  “Like yourself, but younger,” Mom said.

  “What I want is the other way around—to be younger, but myself, Judith,” he said, chuckling.

  Donny’s mask looked like his dad—but younger. “We’re . . . we’re all each other,” he said, “or . . . the same but younger or . . . ”

  “Not you, you’re not someone here,” said Juno. “And Mom is her mom—and you’re Dad.” For some reason, the remark seemed to hang in the air, as if it wasn’t through releasing all its meaning.

  “But who are you, Neva?” Aunt Laura asked, as Neva put on her own mask.

  “I’m a grandmother crone,” said Neva. “Any grandmother crone. One of this family’s ancestors, perhaps—or another. It doesn’t matter.” Her mask was of a very old woman’s face, but not a scary-witch face—more like a matriarch, smiling softly but also determined, firm in her convictions. Looking at Neva in her mask, it was difficult to remember her original face.

  Neva was switching off the lights, one by one, lastly the ones in the living room, making darkness fall across the room like a “wipe” in an old fashioned movie. No one objected—this was a Halloween party.

  “Maybe we should have candles,” Aunt Laura said tentatively. “I could get some. I think there’s some in the garage . . . ” Her masked face, in the shadows, seemed a frightened child—though the mask’s expression hadn’t seemed frightened before she’d put it on.

  “We don’t need candles, we have the moon herself,” Neva said, and she pulled the bottom of the front window shade to make it snap up. Suddenly moonlight flooded into the room. It brought only a little clarity, but it changed the character of the room. And Neva turned to them and intoned, with more simple declaration of conviction than drama: “The waxing moon—a moon pregnant with Harvest.” Even in this faint light the edge of the mask Neva wore could be seen—yet the features moved like a natural face as she spoke. It made Juno shudder. “Tonight,” Neva went on, “there are solar flares, so the moon is even brighter than normal, reflecting the petulant fury of the sun. Lunar flares! We forget that moonlight is reflected sunlight—sunlight that has been stolen by the moon, and re-directed. This very light you see here—” She lifted her hand so that it was bathed in moonlight. “This light on my hand first struck the surface of the moon, before it struck my hand—it struck the filmy coating of moondust hundreds of thousands of miles out there, it struck the cratered hills of the moon—and it bounced off that moonscape, and came here, to us, to all of us in this room. But it still has in it something of the dead dust of those bleak, shadow-etched craters . . . and something else—a power we can use . . . ”

  “Gosh she’s good at that, isn’t she?” Mr. Carpenter chuckled. But there was a quaver, the faintest quaver, of uncertainty in his voice.

  “I knew it,” Juno whispered to Linda, “she’s been taking drama or something.”

  Linda suppressed a snigger. But Juno was far from certain that Neva was dramatizing. Even when she said something poetic, she seemed so unaffected about it all, as if she were speaking of the weather, or the stock market.

  “Now, each of you knows who your mask is,” Neva said, turning to them, silhouetted against the tarnished silver of the moonlit window. “To play the game, you need only listen to the mask. It will tell you what your part is, and how to play the role. Now stand you up, all of you . . . you too, Donny . . . Yes, and you too Clarence . . . ” Clarence was Granddad Morris’s first name. “Good. Now we stand here, facing one another . . . and we each take a step back, and as we do we step back from the people we pretended we were before—we step into the reality of the masks . . . into the people who are these masks, the masks who are these people . . . . ”

  Playing along—or perhaps caught up in some kind of eternity-touched ritual of solemnity they couldn’t articulate–they each took a step back, out of the pool of moonlight . . .

  Each masked face receded into the shadows, as they stepped back, so that only the faintest moonlit sketches of the masks remained, hanging unsupported, like bodiless specters, in the dim reaches of the room . . .

  Little Mick kept going back to the mirror. The bathroom was lit only by a nightlight in the wall outlet next to the mirror. It was sort of dark but he could see the wolfboy’s reflection well enough.

  He’d stand on the toilet lid and gaze into the dark glass. And every time he looked at the face reflected there—at the mask that was like an angry dog, to him who’d never seen a wolf . . .

  Every time . . .

  . . . the face seemed a little more powerful, more independent. But he never felt scared of it—it was not like the face was some monster.

  In fact this time, when he looked at the face, it seemed more like him—like Mick Weiss . . .

  After each mirror-look he would get down on the floor, and go prowling about the bathroom, growling, swaying his head from side to side; sometimes chuckling in wonder at the good feeling the growling and skulking gave him. He snarled at some plastic family-size bottles of bubble bath and hair conditioner on the edge of the tub—and struck out at them with his clawed, furred hands, knocking them into the tub, where the hollow ring of their bouncing sounded like frightened yelps.

  Mick went to the mirror one more time—and then the mask was finished, somehow. It hadn’t been finished till that moment.

  He climbed down and began to prowl down the hall . . . and into the kitchen, then out the back door, into the cool night air.

  “What . . . do we do now?” came Aunt Laura’s voice, a little angry, from the darkness.

  “Listen . . . ” came Neva’s voice urgently. “ . . . just try not to think about anything, even if only for a second or two, and listen, and you’ll hear what you should say . . . what the mask you’re wearing wants to say.”

  Then they heard Grandad Morris speak, and saw him step out of the shadows, into the moonlight, without his cane. He was still an old, bent figure, but he was moving easily now, and his voice seemed a little younger—though you could hear the age in it too. It was as if he were doing an uncanny mimicry of himself as a younger man.

  “Judith, get your heinie in here!” he snarled.

  Juno watched in fascination as her Mom stepped into the moonlight. A big shape but with that young, more slender woman’s face: the mask of Judith’s mother, Juno’s deceased grandmother.

  But Mom wasn’t in character yet. “Dad . . . ? Gosh you’re so . . . Are you all right? I’m not sure about this game . . . ”

  “Listen to your mask, Judith,” Neva prompted. “Even if it doesn’t speak in words, it will guide you. Give it a chance and the miraculous may come!” Neva spoke again—but not out loud. Her voice seemed to come from within each of them, in that moment, speaking without words. It seemed to say that something precious would be lost if they didn’t play the game. So persuasive was Neva’s own voice, in that moment, that all of them listened intently to the silence that preceded the murmur of their masks, and the drama began to unfold . . .

  “Yes, Daddy?” Judith’s voice, younger—and then Juno realized it had come from her. Judith’s voice coming from Juno!

  She found herself stepping into the light—as her mother stepped back into the shadows. She’d spoken in her mother’s voice, saying what her mask wanted her to say.

  “You going to marry this fella, Judith?” Granddad Morris asked.

  Juno—the mask of Judith—answered, hesitantly: “I expect so . . . But Daddy, I—”

  “You’re not sure? You’re not sure you’re pregnant? You’re not sure he knocked you up?”

  Juno falling into it now . . . hearing the words in her mind, even as she spoke them—almost like a memory, though it was one she couldn’t have. “Daddy . . . ” She found she was crying. “Daddy I didn’t want to . . . ”

  Yes, Juno decided—there was such a thing as a good scared—and a really bad scared.

  She wanted to shout for Neva to stop t
his. But she couldn’t. Like the others, she was carried inexorably along—she was watching it all from some distant part of herself . . .

  Then Aunt Laura, the teen-aged Laura, stepped up; the mask spoke: “Daddy—stop it. She couldn’t help it. He was too much for her. He sent her poetry every day. She had to.”

  “Had to!” He laughed sadly, contemptuously. “Laura—well hell, now I see you’re in danger of becoming exactly what your sister is. You’re right in her goddamn shadow! I will not spawn a family of whores!”

  “Clarence!” It was Juno’s mom—in her mother’s mask. Her mother’s voice. “I won’t have you speaking to the girl like that. ”

  “She has to learn what life is—it’s time, goddammit!” His voice shook with emotion. “This world is without pity, without mercy! I saw it! I saw them butcher innocent women and children, in ’Nam, butchered like sheep! That’s the kind of world this is—there is no pity in it. Women who lay themselves down to be used will be destroyed! People will see them as whores!”

  “Clarence—this is a foul way to talk around Laura . . . ”

  “Talk? I won’t talk to her! I’ll show her!” Still raging, he stepped over to Aunt Laura and slapped her, hard, across the face. The mask she wore didn’t budge from its place. Laura staggered and covered her eyes, then went slumping to her knees, as he shouted, “That’s how the world treats whores—better get used to it!”

  Strange, Juno thought, how the moonlight seemed to spotlight one person, then the other, as the drama unfolded . . .

  Juno—as her mom—pulled him away from Laura. “Stop it! You’re hurting her for what I did!”

  “Really, Clarence!” His wife’s outrage was palpable—but ineffectual. Juno’s mom as Grandma, Clarence’s wife.

  “You will marry that slick son of a bitch or you’ll get twice what she got and more! And I’ll see to it he marries you, you may depend on it!”

  Aunt Laura was sobbing . . . or the Laura mask was sobbing . . .

  Juno, as Judith, protested: “Daddy—I don’t think he really loves me. It was like he was . . . he was practicing on me. I don’t want to marry him. If I marry him now . . . ”