Halloween

by Paula Guran

  “Too much painting and tobacco will account for that, well enough.”

  “Come along,” I said, “or my wife will be getting anxious. You’ll come in and have a drop of whisky and drink confusion to ghosts and better sense to me.”

  “I ought to go up to Palmer’s, but it’s so late now I’d best leave it till the morning,” he replied. “I was kept late at the Union, and I’ve had to see a lot of people since. All right, I’ll come back with ye.”

  I think he fancied I needed him more than did Palmer’s girl, so, discussing how such an illusion could have been possible, and deducing from this experience large generalities concerning ghostly apparitions, we walked up to our cottage. We saw, as we walked up the garden-path, that bright light streamed out of the front door, and presently saw that the parlour door was open too. Had she gone out?

  “Come in,” I said, and Dr. Kelly followed me into the parlour. It was all ablaze with candles, not only the wax ones, but at least a dozen guttering, glaring tallow dips, stuck in vases and ornaments in unlikely places. Light, I knew, was Laura’s remedy for nervousness. Poor child! Why had I left her? Brute that I was.

  We glanced round the room, and at first we did not see her. The window was open, and the draught set all the candles flaring one way. Her chair was empty and her handkerchief and book lay on the floor. I turned to the window. There, in the recess of the window, I saw her. Oh, my child, my love, had she gone to that window to watch for me? And what had come into the room behind her? To what had she turned with that look of frantic fear and horror? Oh, my little one, had she thought that it was I whose step she heard, and turned to meet—what?

  She had fallen back across a table in the window, and her body lay half on it and half on the window-seat, and her head hung down over the table, the brown hair loosened and fallen to the carpet. Her lips were drawn back, and her eyes wide, wide open. They saw nothing now. What had they seen last?

  The doctor moved towards her, but I pushed him aside and sprang to her; caught her in my arms and cried—

  “It’s all right, Laura! I’ve got you safe, wifie.” She fell into my arms in a heap. I clasped her and kissed her, and called her by all her pet names, but I think I knew all the time that she was dead. Her hands were tightly clenched. In one of them she held something fast. When I was quite sure that she was dead, and that nothing mattered at all any more, I let him open her hand to see what she held.

  It was a gray marble finger.

  THE GREAT PUMPKIN ARRIVES AT LAST

  Sarah Langan

  It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown is playing in the background of Sarah Langan’s short and not-so-sweet story. The animated feature was first aired on October 17, 1966 and has been re-aired annually. Written by Charles Schultz, it was produced and animated by Bill Melendez with music by Vince Guaraldi. Based on characters from Schultz’s Peanuts cartoon-strip characters—The Great Pumpkin was first mentioned in Peanuts in 1959—the story revolves around Linus van Pelt’s belief that The Great Pumpkin rises from the pumpkin patch on Halloween and delivers gifts to those who sincerely believe.

  Tom wasn’t happy about this. Not even a smidge. But life, it makes its decisions for you, so what could he do?

  He took a drag and held it. Count of three. Let it go. On television, Linus van Pelt was babbling about The Great Pumpkin. On the floor, Laura was down on her hands and knees, drawing a pentagram inside a circle with chalk. She pretended to be all kooky and shit, but he got the feeling she learned her craft from old episodes of “Charmed.” The chalk was pink, by the way. And she’d bought the Parker Brothers Ouija board from Walmart. Which made her a capitalist, not a wiccan.

  She looked up at him. Pretty brown eyes, short, pixie hair that framed her face. I’m a serial killer for Halloween, she’d said when she arrived an hour ago. I don’t need a costume. We look just like everybody else. Then she giggled, because he’d been his donning his housemate’s discarded red plastic pirate boots and an eye patch, like an asshole.

  “What kind of cowboy wears an Ironman T-shirt?” she’d asked, her eyes watering with glee.

  “The kind that will brand-your-ass!” That got a laugh, which was pretty great, which had led to a screw, which had been even better. Then they’d lay there, the middle of the day like a couple of slugs. He’d let his finger trace the smooth seams of her skin, and then she’d sat up fast, covering her nakedness with a dingy sheet.

  “I can see him,” she said. “He’s got green eyes you like you.”

  Tom and Laura had nothing in common. She was three years older than him, with a degree in world religion under her belt, and a scholarship to Rome to study the Etruscan civilization scheduled for the spring. Basically, they were doomed, so he probably shouldn’t have agreed to all her spirit nonsense in the first place. But her optimism was contagious, and he held some hopes that together, they might endure.

  “You nervous?” she asked from the floor. Pink chalk scrape-scraping.

  He took another drag. Counted to three. Thought about the Bud in the fridge. He was waiting until after the séance, because he’d heard drunk people can get possessed. Were there four left, or five? Because if Laura wanted one, he wouldn’t have enough to last the night. Wait, had she asked him a question? “What?”

  She wiped the sweat from her brown with the back of her arm. This apartment was overheated. “You’re so high. That’s not good. Why do you always get so high?”

  He decided to answer the first question, because the second was too involved. “I’m not scared. This is bullshit. I’m only doing it for you,” he said, even though, looking at that crazy-ass pink pentagram, his stomach slid down, abandoning its post, and was now living in his large intestine.

  She finished drawing, and started lighting candles. Good thing his housemates were out for the night, because this was really weird. They were all sophomores, but he was a left-back junior. That’s what happens when you don’t show up for class. In the short term, it’s awesome, but it was the long term he was worried about.

  Out the window, a couple of kids dressed as Michael Myers and Freddie Kreuger rang his bell. He kind of wished he could rewind his day right now, and save a few bucks for candy corn instead of spending it all on sweet air. Like a Time Bandit, only taller and less ugly.

  The bell rang again. Zzzt! Zzzt! Sounded like a bug killer. Laura looked at him. Shook her head slowly like: you fuck up. Then she laughed, so he laughed, too. “Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” she said, like that was all she needed to say. Her hands were pink with chalk—murder light.

  The bell rang one more time before the kids turned back down the walk. They smashed the jack o’ lantern he’d carved beneath the hedges, that had gotten soft in the middle, and rotted, so its face was black. Which was mean, but in character for Myers and Krueger, which in turn reminded him of his brother.

  Hey Tommy, you really stink, Michael had once said to him, then started laughing, because he’d emptied his bedpan under Tommy’s sheets. Hardy-har-har.

  Tommy took another drag. Then pulled a Bud from the fridge. The fall leaves outside were bright red. The sunlight reflected off them now, and shone through his window, so the house looked it was on fire.

  “We’re almost ready,” Laura said. She breathed the words instead of saying them, and the arms of her peasant blouse were wet with sweat, which made him wonder if she was scared, too.

  The candles were the vanilla scented kind. Everything smelled like his mother’s bathroom back in West Hempstead. All the entrances there still had wheelchair ramps, which probably explained why he never visited.

  Hey Tommy? Wanna touch my leg? Michael used to say before the amputation, because he’d lost feeling by then, and unwittingly bumped it so often that it oozed.

  Laura dusted the chalk from her hands by wiping them on her jeans. Then she smiled crookedly, like she was half-happy, half-terrified. “You don’t think I’m crazy, do you?”

  He’d picked her up about a month ago in front of
Hofstra’s anthropology building. She’d seemed like a real sweetheart, sitting on that bench, her lips moving as she silently read her book: The Widening Gyre. Round, rosy cheeks, legs crossed at the ankles. Old fashioned pea coat. No make-up. She’d been a teaching assistant in his freshman religion class, delivering impassioned speeches about man’s boundless potential for redemption, and marking wrong answers with “Nice try!” Seeing her there, looking lonely but content, like somebody who knows the secret to life, but hasn’t found anyone to share it with, he’d wanted to sweep her up and carry her away. Save her from the mean world that would surely break her, once she started living in it.

  Hey, Tommy? Why ya crying? You never touched a dead cat before?

  He’d watched Laura on that bench for a long while, and tried to remember a time when things in his life had been good. Maybe before his big brother got sick. Maybe when he was a toddler. Maybe never.

  “Hey, Laura DeGraff from World Religions!” he’d said, then sat next to her.

  She’d startled, like she’d been alone for so long that she was unaccustomed to other people. So for the first few minutes, he’d done the talking. At first, she was nervous, chewing her thin red lower lip. But then he got her to laugh, and he knew he had her: “Admit it,” he said. “You used to be on the Mickey Mouse Club. You were the one with the lazy eye and the middle part, right?”

  She’d looked at him, and then, with a grin, crossed her eyes and giggled. Damn if in that instant, she hadn’t stolen his heart.

  He’d learned early how to charm, and because of that he’d had friends his whole life, and got more breaks than he deserved. It was all about listening, and then mimicking: You like Yeats? I do, too! Never talk about yourself too much, or your audience gets bored. Instead, reinforce what they’ve already told you, because everyone likes to be reassured. If they’re mean, make a joke at someone else’s expense. If they’re nice, talk about saving the whales and your decision to become a vegan. If you’re good at it, you always think you’re telling the truth, even when you’re lying.

  With a bat-shit crazy brother like Michael, he’d learned to smile a lot, and pretend things were better than they were. And maybe that had taken its own kind of toll, because he got high a lot, too, and when he woke up in the morning, he didn’t look forward to much. But looking at Laura’s earnest, open face that crisp day in September, he’d thought she might be different from anyone he’d ever known. Maybe his days as a slug were numbered, because she was about to make him a better man.

  He took her out for a burger that night at B.K. Sweeney’s. A workaholic holding a full load of graduate courses, it was probably the first time she’d been off campus since school started. After that, they went back to her dorm room, whose walls were painted black.

  “Nice,” he’d said.

  “Not really,” she’d told him, “But I get distracted by color. I see too much.”

  Given her shyness, she was easier than he’d expected. But maybe she was lonely. She didn’t have pictures of friends anywhere, and except when a professor called, her cell phone never rang. Surprisingly, her bra had been frilly lace, and her bed had smelled like talcum powder. She was the eighteenth girl he’d slept with, which was high, but not ridiculous. He rated her somewhere at the bottom, but he figured she’d get better with time. After they were done, he picked up and replaced the knick-knacks on her dresser. A porcelain cat, a signed photo of Christian Bale, a voodoo doll wrapped in rosary beads.

  “You’re kind of a freak, huh,” he’d said, more to the Bale photo than the voodoo doll, which he’d in fact found endearing.

  “Actually, I’m a psychic,” she’d answered. “I communicate with the dead.”

  Hey Tommy! You wanna find out what happens to a cat when you put it under water?

  Tom had looked at her for a long time to see if he should laugh. But it turned out, she wasn’t kidding. Then he’d done a full circle around the room, but all he’d seen was black.

  “I noticed something from the second you sat down with me at the bench. It’s been following you all night,” she’d told him, then lit a candle in the dark, as if to scare it away.

  Over the next few weeks, they spent a lot of time together. She slept at his place most nights, or else he stayed at the dorm. She dressed mostly in black, and his housemates called her the freaky bitch, until one day he decided enough was enough, and told them to stop. He liked her black room, and he liked her short hair, and he liked her sweet smile, like everything hurt her just a little bit, because her feelings ran so deep.

  “What do you see in me?” she’d asked early on, her wet eyes reflecting the light of his joint.

  He could have told her she was fun, or she had a nice laugh, or that she woke something inside him that he’d been missing for a long time. “You need to get out more, or your wouldn’t ask that,” he said instead.

  The number of dead people she’d seen: five. Her grandmother, who stopped by on her way from heaven to say see you later. Some old guy who hung out near the swings at her day camp, though she could never figure out if he was dead or just weird. The rest had been less distinct: a black spot, an aura, a baloney sandwich. They were old and faded, or else, maybe not really ghosts, but stains of something that had once happened, and left a wound.

  And that made sense. Tommy was full of wounds. Most of them, he’d forgotten about, because forgetting is a lot easier than you’d think. There was his first girlfriend Janine—they lost their virginities to each other when they were thirteen, and afterward, crying, she’d told him that if she’d known it was going to hurt that much, she’d rather have joined a convent. After that, he’d made virgins his thing, just to right the wrong. Then there was his best friend Steven—they’d been thick as thieves until Tommy’s foot started bothering him, and he had to quit little league football. Overnight, Steven stopped saying hello in the halls, like they hadn’t build pillow forts at each others’ houses for the last five years. There was the bottle his mother broke when Michael got sick, and the way she’d crawled on the floor with a rag, bloodying her knees, because she’d wanted to clean it up fast so his father didn’t smell the gin. There was his father, who got sick of the smell of alcohol and hospitals, so he left the whole damn family for the fresh young thing who typed his letters.

  And then there was Michael, who’d pulled the metal rod from his back brace, and punched it through Tom’s foot, then guilted him into keeping it there for two days while their parents were out of town, because at least he wasn’t dying of a rare neurological ataxia. “It’s only fair, Tommy,” he’d said twelve years ago. “If I’m hurting, you should hurt, too.” When the doctors finally took it out, he was left with a permanent limp that kept him from joining sports, or running, which was sort of why he took up pot. Hanging out behind the 7-Eleven after school had been a hell of a lot better than watching his mom get drunk.

  Yeah. There were a lot of things he’d forgotten, but over that time with Laura, he told her everything. And, tears in her eyes, because her sympathy never ran dry, she listened, and he started to feel saved.

  She’d brought up the idea of a séance as a lark, but soon presented it more often, and more fervently. She said the stain had gotten darker since they’d been together, and that it never left, not even to sleep. Even when they made love, it watched.

  “I don’t have a lot of real life experience with all this—just what I’ve read. But most people, when this happens to them, they feel it. They see it. They’re haunted. Their lives aren’t right because these spirits won’t let them alone. Aren’t you haunted?” she’d asked.

  Hey Tommy? That your girlfriend, or monkey?

  “No,” he’d said.

  Probably, he should have found another girl, because clearly Laura was from Mars. But he didn’t believe in the power of Parker Brothers’ Ouija Boards, and he didn’t believe in spirits, either, so what was the harm?

  On the television, Sally and Linus were sitting in the pumpkin patch. He’
d always thought her hair was pretty stupid, but at least she wasn’t mean, like Lucy. On the ground, Laura was chanting. It sounded Gregorian. She was sitting Indian style with her hands on her knees, palms-up.

  “So what does this spirit look like?” he asked when she was done, even though they’d been through this before.

  She sighed. “Dark. It has a human shape. Kind of twisted, like. I don’t know, like its arms and legs are wrong.” She told him she’d been born psychic the way some people are blonde. She’d always known things before she got told, and picked winning lotto numbers, and seen the things people hide. She’d never done a séance, but she’d read Halloween was the best night for it.

  Hey Tommy? How’d football practice go today? You think you’re gonna make the team?

  “Michael was a shit. If it’s him, I don’t think we want to say hello,” he told her.

  On the television, the kids woke up on the Day of the Dead, and the Great Pumpkin never showed. Out the window, a couple of clowns rang the bell, and he felt so bad about that stupid candy corn that he was tempted to run out and throw pennies.

  Laura’s eyes got wet in sympathy. She really needed to get out more. “Don’t you see?” she sniffled. The candles around her glowed, and the whole thing was starting to feel unpleasantly real. “He’s like a weight that holds you down. Maybe he isn’t even real—just something your mind has produced. But it doesn’t matter. I . . . I can’t stand him.”

  It broke his heart a little, that she said that. Because it felt like something he’d done wrong. “What if it tells us something terrible?” he asked. “What if it’s Michael and he turns you against me?”

  She shook her head. “Everything I need to know about you I saw the first day we met, when you folded my clothes for me, and got me that Coke, so I didn’t have to get out of bed. You’re such a good person inside. But he follows you, and it’s too much for me. You see? I can’t be around you all the time, because it’s always there. It never lets us be.”