“Maybe we are going the wrong way,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Tricia murmured, her eyes raised above my head, and I turned and saw the shadow shape fill the doorway. Whatever it was wore a black cowl, complete with hood, and it was big. Six and a half feet tall, at least. I couldn’t see its face. But it was carrying a gavel.
“Okay,” I said. “Down, Tricia.”
Down we went. The shape stayed where it was until we reached the landing, then took a single step after us. Tricia reached the landing first.
“What’s below us?” I called, catching up.
“More stairs,” said Tricia, and the torch behind us went out. “Fuck.”
“Let’s go. Forward is homeward.”
“Arm, please, Professor R.”
I gave her my arm. We continued down. Five steps. Ten. Down. Down. Every few seconds, we heard a single creak as the judge thing in the cowl pursued at its leisurely pace.
From deep inside me, a laugh swelled. I felt it crest in the back of my throat, then break into the open air.
“Oh my God, shut up,” said Tricia.
But I kept on laughing. Truly, I thought, this was the best I’d ever seen. Then my foot plunged ankle-deep into water, and I shouted and teetered backward.
“GROSS!” Tricia yelled. She fell back beside me, shaking her leg, and we lay together on the steps.
Somewhere above us, a stair creaked.
“Kate hates puddles,” I said, trying to imagine her coming through this. Abruptly, I had no laughter left. I was just overwhelmingly tired. And Brian Tidrow was dead. I hadn’t liked him. I liked his being dead even less.
“What if they just lead everyone down here and drown them?” Tricia murmured.
“That would lower my overall rating of the experience,” I answered, trying to rouse myself to push ahead. How much longer, really, could all this be?
“We could be walking in a sewer.”
“There aren’t many people out here, though. So the amount of actual sewage—”
“Shut up, Professor R.,” said Tricia. But she laughed, or at least expelled the air she’d been clutching in her teeth.
I got up. Tricia got up, too, and the stairs above us creaked again. But there was no light to see by. Gritting my teeth, I stepped straight down into the wet, tugging Tricia behind me. The floor underneath was solid, anyway. Tricia moaned as her ankles sank, but she didn’t say anything. We went forward.
Mostly, for the first few feet, I was listening. I wanted to hear where the water we disturbed rolled into a wall, thinking maybe I could judge the size of this tunnel, space, whatever it was. But I couldn’t.
“Tell me this is water,” Tricia whispered.
“Hadn’t even thought of that. Thanks, Tricia.” I shuddered. I was whispering, too.
We’d gone another fifteen steps when overhead lights burst to life, blinding us, and shut off just as quickly, igniting fireworks on my retina. I stopped hard, the water sloshed, and the disturbed dark flapped and fluttered around us.
“Now what?” Tricia said.
“Let’s see if that happens again. Maybe we can figure out where we are.”
We waited maybe a minute, which felt like twenty. Nothing happened. Shrugging, I tugged Tricia’s arm, took a step, and the lights bloomed, held a split second longer this time, and died.
“Hmmm,” I said, and started forward again.
Five steps later, the water got deeper. It happened in a quick, slipping slope, and we were up to our knees, then nearly our waists. I continued to insist to myself that it was water. At least it wasn’t cold. If anything, it was a little too warm.
This time when the lights flashed, they stayed on a good five seconds. My pupils telescoped, my brain locked, and I got just a glimpse of wooden walls to the sides and another staircase less than fifty feet ahead, leading up. Then the dark slammed down.
“Okay. Exit ho,” I said, and felt the first bump against my leg. “Uh-oh.”
“What?” said Tricia.
“Just walk.”
“Hey,” Tricia said, and then, “Jesus. There’s something—”
“Walk, Tricia. Wait for the lights.”
“I don’t want to see.”
The lights exploded. I was watching the water. I very nearly fainted into it.
Drifting on the black, rippling surface were fingers. Thumbs. Dozens of them. Hundreds, floating like dead fish in a dynamited pond. I saw part of an ear. The lights went out.
“Professor,” Tricia said, her voice very small. “Did you see—”
“Walk, Tricia. Fast.”
Mercifully, the water got shallower just a few steps farther on, but the things in the water swirled more thickly around us. I kept my hands locked against my chest and burrowed straight ahead. Tricia was even faster, very nearly running as we scrambled up another slope. The water level fell toward our knees. Both of us heard slower, steadier sloshing behind us. But when the lights came on again, neither of us glanced back.
Seconds later, we were on the stairs, breathing hard. I might have bent over and kissed the firm, dry wood beneath me except that my pants were soaked and felt awful when my skin pressed against them. Walking sopping-wet across the frozen prairie to the car would be fun, I thought.
But worth it. The whole damn thing had been more than worth it. I couldn’t wait to grab Kate, hold her, laugh with her. I couldn’t wait to start digging around town for wood-purchasing and electricity records in the hopes of tracking down the creators of all this. I couldn’t wait to interview Robert Hayright and everyone else who’d been here about exactly what they’d seen. For the first time in years, I felt like writing.
More than anything else, though, I felt grateful. All my life, I’d considered myself a sort of library phantom, haunting the graveyards and record morgues of my own history without ever, somehow, materializing inside it. But I was soaking in it now, shivering in the relentless, terrifying rush of it.
I looked up and saw the exit sign glowing plainly, red, twenty steps above me.
“That’s it?” Tricia said, clutching her arms against herself and holding her sopping pantlegs very still.
“Are you joking?” I answered, but I knew what she meant. I didn’t want to leave. I wanted to go on being this kind of scared forever.
Except that I didn’t really want the judge thing to catch us. So when I heard him sloshing closer, I started up the steps. I had reached the landing, halfway to the top, when the strobe light strafed us and the pajama people stepped out of the wall on either side of the staircase. There were two on every stair.
“Bummer,” I said, because I knew this trick. I’d seen it in half the haunted houses I’d ever visited. True, I was impressed by the doors cleverly carved into the walls to hide all these people until we were right on top of them. But now I was going to start up the stairs, and the pajama-people would produce hatchets and clubs and raise them, slowly, looking all lurchy in the twitches of light, and then they’d lean in and menace us as we made for the door.
“Ohhh,” I heard Tricia moan. I also heard a slosh and then drip from below, and I knew that the judge thing had reached the foot of the stairs.
“No worries,” I muttered, and, ignoring the wetness in my legs, started upward again.
“I hate strobes,” said Tricia. But I heard her stepping behind me.
I had my hands in my pockets. As I passed the pajama people, I glared straight into their eyes. The only thing that surprised me was that none of them made any sort of mock-threatening motion. In fact, they didn’t move at all. They just stood, silent as heralds in a painting of a medieval procession, and watched me go.
“Unnh,” I heard Tricia say, and I looked back, and everything went to hell.
Full-blown, blazing, ordinary light flooded the space down there, more than enough for me to see the judge thing. He had not actually stepped onto the staircase and was instead standing knee-deep in the black pool of wetness we’d traversed. I coul
dn’t see his face because of his cowl. But I could see the fingers and thumbs floating around him.
They were moving.
Dozens of them clung to the fringe of his cloak or crawled blindly up his hanging arms, wriggling. Like bees over a beekeeper, I thought wildly, and my breath flew from me, and Tricia screamed and shoved me out of the way and hurtled out the exit door.
Staggering, I tore my eyes from the judge thing and stumbled up the last few stairs. Still, the pajama people made no move to hold me. Tricia had left the door half open in her flight, and I scrambled for it, very nearly tumbling to my knees. Three steps more. Two.
Then I was out, in a sort of clearing on the prairie, several hundred feet from the red house, and the door was starting to shut, and a crushing burst of desperate longing exploded through me. For a split second, I thought it was for the house. The knowledge that I would never experience another like it. That the eternal Halloween search of the lifelong Clarkstonian was over for me.
Then I realized what had been so strange about Tricia’s flight from the house. Or, rather, the moment just before it. When she’d screamed, she hadn’t been looking at the judge thing. She’d been looking into the shadows right beside her. And the look on her face wasn’t terror, or not only terror. It was also recognition.
I knew, then. I knew even before I turned around. And I thought I understood, at least a little. The wriggling fingers. The judge thing, and the nature of its power. The barefoot pajama boys and the decrepit gorilla. Not why. Not how. But something. And I knew the plains weren’t empty after all, not the way we’d thought all these years. In fact, they are overflowing, overrun with Native Americans, homesteaders, dancing girls, ranchers, Chinese, buffalo. All the murdered, restless dead.
I watched Kate watch me from the top of the stairs. She hadn’t been issued her pajamas yet, I guessed. Her coat was open, at last, and there was no blanket around her, and I could finally see the hole Brian Tidrow must have blown in her stomach, just as she walked in his door, in the seconds before he’d shot his own head off.
“No,” I said.
“Goodbye, David,” Kate said softly, and the door swung closed as she blew me a kiss.
The Facts in the Case of My Sister
Lee Thomas
My mother called at one in the afternoon to tell me about my sister. I was in the middle of a terrible lunch, an Indian buffet with coworkers, when the phone sounded. The grief in my mother’s voice, the sniffles and sobs that punctuated her awkward greeting, sent me from the table toward the relative privacy of the restaurant lobby as she sketched out the events of the morning and begged me to meet her at the hospital. She knew that Joyce and I had experienced a falling out, but that shouldn’t matter. She insisted it didn’t matter. Joyce needed her family.
I never returned to the table. I called my supervisor after pulling onto the freeway.
A frothing autumn sky darkened the road, forming a ceiling on the world painted to resemble a tortured ocean moments before a tempest ravaged its surface. Memories of my sister flashed like lightning: she was a frightened princess; I was her protecting wizard; there was a key and a carnival and an ogre who seduced his victims with fluffy, sweet cotton candy.
After three hours, it felt as if I had been on the freeway forever, and my sister was still a forever away.
—
In the too-warm kitchen I dry the dishes Joyce is washing. She is eight. I am eleven. Pumpkin and spices scent the air as pies bake in the oven. In the next room, Mother vacuums the carpet. Joyce hands me the last bowl. It is small and silver like the brain pan of a robot. I briefly imagine the final moments of my confrontation with a Terminator. He is programmed to think me human, just bone and meat. But I produce fire from my palm, a daring trick from the magic kit occupying a place of importance on the top of my dresser. The AI tries to process the appearance of flame from skin and is confounded by the impossible feat. I take advantage of my split-second reprieve and deliver a punch with my Ultra Glove, a weapon that exists only in my imagination. The Terminator’s head ratchets back, and its red eyes go black. As the victor, I claim its head for my trophy case.
It is Sunday afternoon. We have already gone to church. Father hasn’t been home in days.
“Do you know any new tricks?” Joyce asks, wiping her hands on the thighs of her jeans before hopping off the step stool that provides her access to the sink. “We could practice before dinner.”
I tell her I’m working on something special, and she insists I tell her what it is, but I don’t.
“It’s the best,” I assure her.
“What is it?”
I roll my eyes and present her with a stern you-know-better-than-to-ask-a-magician-that-question frown before setting the silver bowl in the drainer.
The vacuum’s growl fades and then dies. Mother, plump and pretty, appears in the kitchen doorway. She wipes at her sweaty brow and breathes hard, appearing as if she’s just run home from the supermarket. Turning to check the dish drainer, she smiles and holds her arms wide.
Hugs are her currency.
We cash in. Each of us takes a side and Mother wraps her heavy arms around us. She smells like flour and cinnamon. Her dress is damp against my cheek.
Joyce asks if father will be home for dinner, and Mother squeezes us tighter—an honest answer that tells us nothing.
At the back of the house, I close the door to my room. Books rest in a pile beside my bed. Stretching out on the mattress, I drape my head and arms over the edge and pick through the sloppy archive. I’m not browsing the titles. The one I want is on the bottom of the mound: a last-minute hiding place used when Mother burst in to insist my chores had waited “…quite long enough, young man.”
The corner of the red leather cover becomes visible as I pull away a thick volume of Poe’s collected works. In celebration of the coming of autumn, my teacher, Mrs. Oliver, had read from his poem “The Raven,” and the rhythm and language drew me, like a beacon, to his other stories. When I came upon the tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” the word mesmerism leapt out at me. I’d seen it in my book of magic, but the author of that text insisted on withholding valuable information, as he believed mesmerism (and its clumsier heir, hypnotism) was for advanced “practitioners of the illusionary arts” only. Having mastered the Chinese Linking Rings, the Cigarette Guillotine, a dozen card tricks, and the power to make a spongy red ball disappear and reappear at will, I considered myself firmly in the advanced camp.
The Science of Stage Hypnotism.
With the red book in hand, I rolled onto my back and returned to the chapter that had confounded and obsessed me since I’d first read it:
Consigning Subjects to the Hypnotic State.
—
In the dim light of the hospital room, my mother sat quietly. Her thin frame took up all the less space for its bent posture. The cancer had done more for her than Jenny Craig or Atkins ever could. Now that surgery and chemotherapy had removed the disease from her body, she felt it had been something of a brutal godsend. She clung tightly to God’s mysterious ways. Everything had a reason in the great plan.
The doctor would not commit to the outcome of Joyce’s surgery. He talked about waiting and tests. He discussed the severity of the injuries. The danger of infection. Or seizures.
Under tubes and bandages, under the cheap blue blanket and thin print sheets, Joyce took in the oxygen and fluids. Half-moon bruises stained the skin beneath her eyes. A bandage covered her nose like a white tent. The lips that had once called me “best friend” were swollen and split. Stitches ran from just below her nose to keep her upper lip together.
I asked what happened, and Mother just sobbed.
—
It is the middle of the night, and Joyce screams. She is convinced that her closet harbors a monster with talons and teeth as long as butcher knives. Though her fear once hinged on pure speculation and the odd sound in the middle of the night, she now insists she can see the monster
emerging from the black void that holds her jeans and dresses.
My belly and chest tighten like setting concrete. Mother rushes down the hall, her steps heavy and uneven. “It’s okay,” she calls to my terrified sister. “I’m coming.” Then my sister’s sobs become audible as Mother pushes open the door to Joyce’s room.
I wish I could take away her fear. I wish she never had to see another monster.
—
In the cafeteria, Mother lifted her cup of tea and picked at the edges of a Danish. The green walls with white moldings were meant to be soothing; they appeared cold. I noted an elderly gentleman, sitting alone near the elevator bank. His hand shook as he attempted to lift his coffee. He gave up and dabbed at his eyes with a white paper napkin. Mother coughed and pinched an edge of the Danish. The pale pastry rose around the wound-red filling like swollen skin.
We found conversation difficult, so I was grateful for my husband’s call.
He asked about Joyce, and I told him what the doctors had told me and Mother, which amounted to nothing more than “Wait and see,” as they performed tests which may or may not advance a prognosis.
Briefly, I remembered visits with Mother in this same hospital. Her every phrase had been punctuated by whispered breaths and long pauses. She’d told me she didn’t mind feeling sick, but she missed her hair.
On the other end of the phone, my husband, Larry, grew agitated. He insisted that Joyce move in with us the minute she was well enough to travel.
I thanked him. I didn’t mention how unlikely her survival felt.
—
I’m sitting under the oak in the backyard, nestled in a pile of brightly colored leaves. One leaf of a particularly vivid orange rests on my thigh. I’m saving it. I’ll take it to my room later and tuck it into a Ziploc bag before placing it between the pages of The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe.
The red book is lighter in my hands now. After frequent visits to the dictionary, I now understand most of the words in the chapter. I believe I know the specific procedure for sending a willing subject into a trance.
Halloween Carnival Volume 2 Page 5
