Halloween

by Paula Guran

  “You should have thought of that before you opened your dirty little legs!” He backed away, shaking, into the shadows, the mask fading from sight. “ . . . your dirty . . . little legs . . . ”

  The moonlight seemed to dim on Juno and Laura and Mom—and to increase near Neva, as she emerged from the shadows. “As time passes,” intoned the old woman of Neva’s mask, with simple conviction, “it pulls things this way and that—they move in one direction and then they’re pulled in another; they resist and yet they submit, and in the struggle comes their shape; and so a tree becomes gnarled, a vine becomes tangled, a face becomes imprinted with selfishness, or kindness. And time pulls, and tugs against us, and we’re shaped by the struggle with time and the world . . . ”

  The moonlight shifted, like shafts of light underwater as clouds boil and the surface roils, and Juno seemed to see another room, in her mind’s eye; another place: She saw Donny approaching her, wearing his father’s face, speaking in a voice that was his own, but with an adult resonance—a voice that went with the mask he was wearing. His mask didn’t move its lips, yet it seemed to take on shadings, emphasis in light and shadow that underscored the words of the drama; as all the masks did.

  “ . . . but, a chiropractor, Judith?” said the mask of Dad to Juno.

  To Juno who wore, who was, the mask of her mom. Juno as Judith.

  “He made me feel like something again . . . he called me every day—”

  “You weren’t something already?” The voice of a man, only a little too high, through the mask of that man, coming from the body of a boy.

  There was no way Donny could make this stuff up on his own, thought Juno in some distant part of herself.

  “You were a wife, a mother. You’ve got Juno, and Donny now . . . ”

  “He said . . . I wanted to learn something, to be something . . . I could be a homeopathist maybe . . . ”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s this new thing—it’s not new, it’s ancient but it’s sort of new to us—”

  “Forget it, I don’t care, for God’s sake. Good Lord above, couldn’t he have paid for a motel room?”

  Juno . . . Judith . . . was weeping. “I’m so sorry . . . sorry about you finding us like that . . . We got carried away.”

  “And you wanted to be ‘something’–like Lupe with her gallery shows? What good did it do her—he cheated on her anyway.”

  “She’s so caught up in her career . . . She hasn’t got much time for him . . . ”

  “Oh yeah, I feel so fucking sorry for him. I feel sorry for our kids—that’s who I feel sorry for.”

  “Look, I’ve told him I won’t see him again . . . ”

  “Then you won’t have either one of us,” he said, relishing it.

  “What?”

  “You heard me. I’ve already packed. I’m gone. There’s a lady who’s interning for my attorney . . . you should see the way she smiles at me. If I were free . . . ”

  “You’ve walked out on me before . . . ”

  “And came back. That’ll be the difference this time. This time I won’t come back.”

  “But you enjoy it so much—walking out on people. You even walked out on your kids when they forgot Father’s Day. When I reminded them, they wanted to take you out to dinner—but you used the excuse to play golf . . . ”

  “You think I enjoy this? I won’t enjoy being separated from my kids—or paying you child support, for Chris’sakes . . . And the alimony . . . Oh no. But I’ll enjoy not having to wonder what I’ll find in my bed when I come home . . . ”

  He turned and walked out of the moonlight . . . Donny being Dad walking out . . .

  Judith . . . Juno . . . tried to follow—and a door slammed in her face, though there was no door in that wall.

  Then Mom—as her own mom, Juno’s grandmother—stepped out of the shadows, and said, “Judith? Go after him. This isn’t right.”

  “I deserve it, Mother,” said Juno—said Juno as her mom. “I deserve it.”

  “This is hurting me, Judith. I don’t want to go out this way . . . ”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m not sure—I’m getting a second opinion. You’d better take me to Kaiser to get the results . . . Oh Judith I don’t want to die with you kids breaking up like this . . . ”

  “And that’s my fault too, I guess? I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . ”

  Little Mick had pulled off his clothing, his shoes, and, taking a feral joy in the cool October air on his skin, he crouched ankle deep in the Gundersons’ koi pond, snarling, swiping at the blotchy black and gold carp.

  The moonlight seemed to infuse the fish with a glowing energy. Swipe, splash, he had one. He could hear—and almost taste—the blood pumping through its frightened heart. But it slithered and flopped back into the pond before he could tear into it.

  He went all statue-still, to make the fish think he’d gone. The rippling water slowly quieted, and his face came into reflective focus in the pond at his feet—the triumphantly bestial, powerful face that showed who he was now.

  He lifted his head as he heard a muted yowl from the back porch. He moved slowly, carefully, on hind legs and all fours by turns, crept away from the pond and across the back yard toward the back porch. The cat made a growl of warning—which only drew him more quickly toward it . . .

  He could see the ghostly white outline of the cat against the glass back door—a white cat. His other self, his unmasked self, knew its name, and sometimes played with it.

  He couldn’t remember its name, and he didn’t care about playing. Mick He was hungry, achingly hungry.

  He could smell the warm life of the fat white cat from here.

  He set himself . . .

  The moonlight had tripped away and returned, time had passed, and now Frank Carpenter was emerging from the shadows, wearing his mask, putting his hand on Juno’s arm. Only it was Juno’s mom he was touching, in their drama—Judith Weiss: Juno’s mask.

  “If Lupe won’t let you go . . . we can’t really fight that . . . ” said Juno, through the mask of her mom.

  “She’s Catholic. She tries to be so modern, with her progressive Catholic Worker crowd—but she’s still Catholic,” Frank said. “She won’t agree to a divorce. I just want to know–if she were out of the picture, if she were gone—”

  “You mean she’s fallen in love with someone, Frank? She wants to marry someone else?”

  “If she were gone in any sense. If Lupe were gone in any sense—you’d marry me, Judith?”

  “I’d do anything for you, Frank. You’re all I have.”

  “That sounds like it’s me by default, Judith. That’s why you’d do anything for me? Because you couldn’t be without . . . someone?”

  “No, no—I mean—you’re everything to me. Of course I’d marry you if she . . . if she left or whatever.”

  The room darkened; the darkness lingered; there was muffled sobbing. Juno almost came back to control of herself. But then some unseeable hand dialed up the reflected glamour of the moon, and a lunatic spotlight caught Linda in the mask of her mother, Lupe—and her dad, Frank Carpenter, in the mask of his younger self. Only the mask seemed to have aged a little. It was Frank Carpenter six or seven years ago. He was approaching Linda, who was curled up on the sofa, wearing the mask of her mother Lupe. “Frank?” asked Linda as Lupe, sleepily. “Is that you?”

  “Lupe . . . Did you think it over? You said you’d think it over . . . ”

  She stretched, yawning, though her mouth couldn’t be seen under the mask. “I prayed over it, anyhow. I spoke to Father Devsky. I just can’t in good conscious say yes to a divorce. And what’s come between us, I mean, really? Infidelity, Frank. If you’re screwing someone else, how can you say you’re working on your marriage? No, I can’t do it. I can’t live with a divorce. Look, I couldn’t sleep last night and I finally managed to take a nap . . . Let’s talk later.”

  “I’ll let you sleep,�
� came Mr. Carpenter’s voice, from behind the mask.

  As Juno breathlessly watched, from that dim place faraway behind her own mask, Mr. Carpenter seemed to struggle within himself—or with the mask. He reached up toward the mask, as if about to take it off. His hands froze. His shoulders trembled. Then his reach changed direction: he reached for the pillow behind Linda’s head, pulled it out from under her head as she—as Lupe—shouted in protest, just once, before he pressed the pillow over her face, holding her down; she flailed; her feet kicked.

  “I’ll let you sleep,” Mr. Carpenter said again hoarsely.

  Juno tried to drag leaden limbs across the room to stop him . . . She managed a few steps . . .

  But then Little Mick burst the drama apart. He ran into the living room, naked and streaming blood . . .

  Vomiting blood as he came, then wailing . . .

  The electric lights came back on. The room flooded with artificial light.

  The smeared mask fell away from Mick, falling into fibrous stream-

  ers, so that they could see the gobbets of red-sticky white fur rimming his mouth like a hideous parody of a beard; fur gore-pasted to his own baby teeth; blood-soaked fur vomiting up to splatter the very center of the caramel-colored carpet.

  Mr. Carpenter stood up straight—free now, to pull his mask away—and he threw it aside.

  Linda sat up, unhurt, pulling her own mask away—

  Mom lumbered toward Mick but she hadn’t taken her mask off yet and he screamed and floundered back, falling, scrambling across the floor to get away from her; from the disorienting mock of Judith’s face. She flung the mask aside and went ponderously to her knees beside him, scooped him up though he were her own child.

  “Oh Mick—what happened . . . ?”

  “What happened to all of us?” Donny asked wonderingly, tossing his mask aside.

  Juno was looking for Neva . . .

  The front door was open. Neva was gone; her bag was gone too.

  Juno went to the porch and shouted for her. She walked out to the sidewalk, and looked up and down the street, and saw no one but a car full of laughing, drunken teenagers weaving down the cross street, on their way to being in a newspaper article.

  Juno was lying on her back in the bottom bunk, looking through the window at the gibbous moon; the moon shattering and reforming, breaking and becoming whole between the brown, shedding leaves as the big tree in the back yard surged in the night wind. Juno was hoping that alien sense of connectedness to cosmic scale would come back, if she looked at the moon—usually it scared her, but now it made her feel like she didn’t have to be part of this family . . .

  Linda was sleeping in the top bunk that Mick slept in when he was visiting his half-siblings. Linda wouldn’t stay at Mr. Carpenter’s house anymore; wouldn’t stay in a room with him, her own dad. Knowing he was a murderer.

  Mick had gone back to his mom and dad, the next morning—washed and numb and quiet.

  An insomniac old man had seen a small, masked boy running naked through the yards, Halloween night; the naked boy had snarled at some little girl, and chased her, and rooted through her dropped candy bag, finding nothing he wanted; then he’d leaped a fence and splashed through a goldfish pond; and he’d trapped and killed a cat with his hands and with the sharp edge of a garden stone. The old man hadn’t known the boy. Only Juno’s family knew who the boy was.

  Juno thought about the others. Granddad Morris had been hospitalized with a stroke the very next day, at five a.m. He was lingering in critical care. He was not expected to live long. Juno was only a little ashamed when she realized she was glad he was dying. The way he’d treated her mom . . .

  Laura claimed she was moving to Ireland, been selling her furniture and things. She’d always wanted to live in Ireland, though she was not in the least Irish.

  Juno sat up, thinking about checking the doors again. She wanted to make sure they were locked.

  Mom had had the locks changed, because of Frank Carpenter. He had threatened her, when she’d gone to the police and said she wanted to testify. She signed a paper saying that Frank Carpenter had told her that he’d killed his wife, Lupe; that she’d been afraid to speak out till now.

  He’d been arrested. Linda’s dad, arrested. He’d put up the bond and now—as far as they knew—he was alone in his own house, though Linda thought he might jump bail.

  Now, Linda’s voice floated out of the darkness. “Juno . . . ?”

  “I thought you were asleep.”

  “Sort of, for a while. But sometimes when I start . . . .you know . . . ”

  “Drifting off?”

  “Yeah, I–feel the . . . the thing . . . ”

  “The mask?”

  “Yeah. I can feel it on my face.”

  “We burned the masks,” Juno said, though she knew what Linda meant.

  “It’s just a feeling—it’s sort of a dream. And then I feel I’m my mom . . . and my dad is . . . ”

  Juno didn’t finish that one for her. She could hear Linda’s soft weeping. After a while, Juno said, “Linda . . . chill. You can always stay with us.”

  “I can’t stay here all that long . . . I don’t want to. Your mom knew.”

  “She didn’t tell him to kill Lupe. She never, like, said to do it. She told me everything—she said she didn’t know he was going to do that shit.”

  “But she didn’t turn him in when he told her.”

  “She was afraid they’d take her kids away, because she was half way mixed up in it . . . I mean, seriously, why do you think Mom got so fat? She didn’t used to be like that. She was so neurotic about the whole thing, she was just freaked—but she couldn’t talk about it. It was like she had to hide it under . . . just more body, or something. And—your dad just kept saying, ‘I did it for you, I did it for you’ and she couldn’t tell him to go away, he was so—he was, like, all dependent on her somehow. But she stopped, you know, going over to . . . ”

  “Don’t say it. I don’t want to think about my . . . about him and your mom . . . ”

  “I know. Especially now.”

  They were quiet for a few moments. The wind rattled the window; the moonlight falling on the floor shifted nervously.

  “Juno? Did you guys ever find Neva?”

  “No. Linda—there’s something I haven’t told you. Mom didn’t want me to talk about this . . . Linda . . . ” It was hard to say because it was hard to accept. It sounded like a lie. But it was true. “Linda . . . we don’t have a cousin Neva. We never did. When we heard her name, we were all . . . it was like we sort of remembered her . . . we pictured her at the family things, you know, Thanksgiving or something . . . we, like, saw her in our memories? But it was all like . . . something was suggesting it to us. Linda—we never heard of Neva before Halloween. Linda? Are you listening?”

  Silence.

  “Linda?”

  “She’s asleep, Juno. She won’t wake till morning, now.”

  Oh no.

  The voice had come from the window. Neva was sitting on the dresser, her head haloed by the tossing gold of the moon, her legs primly crossed. Dressed exactly as she had been on Halloween.

  “It wasn’t a costume . . . ” Juno murmured.

  “No. Juno, it wasn’t. I’ve come here to—”

  Juno rounded on her. “What did you do to Mick?”

  “Don’t shout, Juno, you’ll wake your mother. I only gave Mick the experience he wanted—and I showed him something special. He has seen the Beast that all men live with, the bestial god they share their bodies with, the one they must contend with if they are to climb the hidden staircase. But few choose to climb it. Mick, now, will climb it—because he has seen, he has known the Beast, and he cannot forget it. You were afraid he was going to become some kind of . . . what? One of those who murders for pleasure?”

  “You made him a psychokiller . . . or . . . the beginning of one.”

  “I have seen what will become of him, or more accurately what he will choo
se to become. He has seen his dark self, and this will give him awareness. He will one day climb the staircase. He will be a leader, and lead people away from the thing he met that night. ”

  “Neva . . . Are you . . . ?”

  “Yes. I’m really here. You and I are here together. You called me, after all.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did. You called me, Juno. You have that power—you have that natural ‘connectedness’ to the cosmic, to the real source of Life. You’re like me . . . and it was you who really made the mask game possible. You knew somehow what Frank had done to Lupe. And to your mother. You felt it. You knew about the sickness in your family, and the masks behind the masks behind the masks . . . ”

  “Go away. Get away from my house.”

  “Juno—You knew, and you called me. Now I’m calling you, Juno. You try to be one of these haunters of malls, these ghosts in chat rooms. But you don’t belong there. You’re more substantial than that. If you choose . . . it’s all a matter of choice . . . Linda will be all right. Your mom will take care of her. Linda will let her atone. All you have to do is listen to what the night has to say. Just listen . . . to the silence between breath, between heartbeats . . . just listen, and know . . . And ask yourself—‘What do I really want?’ ”

  In the morning, Mom found Linda, deeply asleep, and smiling, dreaming sweetly.

  But as for Juno . . .

  They never did find Juno. She didn’t even leave a note.

  A year passes, like a twisting root, shaped by impulse and resistance; by time and struggle.

  It is Halloween, in Portland, Oregon, just after sunset. The smallest trick or treaters are already going from door to door, holding their mothers’ hands.

  Mr. Stroud is the only one carving the pumpkin on the porch with a kitchen knife. He couldn’t get the kids interested. He is listening to the radio he’d set up in the window, the classic rock station’s Jimi Hendrix marathon, Jimi playing “Voodoo Child.” And Stroud was watching the sidewalk; expecting visitors. He saw the two young women walking up toward him from half a block away. Yes, they are turning in at the walk to the front door, coming up between the juniper hedges.