And you can round that off to the lowest common denominator and say that Charlie Steiner would have scared just about anyone. Sure, you’d know he was a guy in a costume if you got a look at him. But even on first glance, you might believe this kid was twenty-three going on four thousand.
Look a little closer, you’d see the important part: Charlie Steiner was twenty-three going on insane. There was no dodging that if you got close enough to spot the mad gleam in his eye—the one he hadn’t covered with mortician’s wax. Or maybe if you spotted his right hand, the one dripping blood . . . the one he’d shorn of a couple fingers with a butcher’s cleaver. And then there was his tongue, half of it cut out of his mouth with a switchblade, its purple root bubbling blood.
Charlie wrapped those things up in a jackal’s hide he’d bought from the back pages of a big-game hunting magazine with Ernest Hemingway on the cover. Who knew if that hide was real but Charlie believed in it, same way he believed in the little statue of a cat-headed goddess he added to the stash, along with a dozen withered red roses, his own fingers and tongue, and a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card.
The same way he believed in the dream those things would deliver to him.
The same way he believed in the madman’s trail he was about to travel.
Charlie tossed all those things in the back of the family station wagon (along with one other important ingredient), and he drove down to the local lover’s lane, which wasn’t far from his house. At that time of year, the place was deserted. By the time Charlie had things set up to his satisfaction, he had swallowed so much of his own blood that he might as well have eaten three raw steaks. But he kept on moving—readying his incantation mummy-slow . . . sure but steady. Just the way you’d expect a mummy to do business, moving like the sands of time.
Just the fact that Charlie could do that was a little slice of a miracle all by itself. Whittling himself down like that, how’d he even keep walking? Chalk it up to drugs he stole from the VA hospital. All through high school, Charlie worked in an after-school program up there, pushing guys around in wheelchairs. He learned about pain management during that time, and he’d continued working as a part-time attendant after he graduated. In other words, Charlie knew what he was doing with the needle and the knife.
So Charlie Steiner was walking on a cloud that night. Or an imaginary dune overlooking an Egyptian oasis, with jackals howling in his head and a mad priest’s plan in his heart. On this single night, at long last, he’d finally become the sum of his dreams . . . or maybe a dream personified. And what wasn’t locked up in his own skin was wrapped in that mojo hide . . . or waiting, bound, beneath a blanket in the back of the station wagon.
Put it all together and it was an offering, a single wish boiled up, and Charlie had a place for it.
Not in the plywood temple he’d abandoned. No. His place was out in the night and under the Halloween moon . . . just a stone’s throw from lover’s lane.
Beneath the same stars that shone down on Egypt.
If you’ve seen those old mummy movies, you know something about mummies and their dreams. And Charlie knew that, too. He knew those movies backwards and forwards, and he knew that mummy was always after the same dream. Kharis was looking for a reincarnated princess, Ananka, who died on the altar of a dark Egyptian god and left Kharis alone to pay the price for their twin blasphemies. Which, when you strip the Hollywood mysticism and curses and high priests of Karnak window-dressing off the tale, means one thing: Kharis died for love, and he came back from the dead looking for a second eternal helping of the very same thing.
Pure love. Eternal love. Love that didn’t backslide.
That’s what Kharis was after, and almost every knockoff mummy who came in his wake wanted the same thing. That’s what Charlie Steiner was after, too, and his madness started on the day he wrapped his needs in the bandages of the most accessible mythos he could find. And while that’s a ticket that buys us an egress to Charlie’s story, it’s a long way from the whole deal, because there was a lot of other mumbo jumbo that Charlie Steiner believed. But eternal love was the final destination Charlie had in mind, and the path that led to it traveled through Egypt and Hollywood. As crazy as he was, that’s all Charlie really wanted. The quest for same lay beneath the insanity, and the magic, and the bad things he’d done and was about to do.
Who knows.
Maybe the whole thing came to him in a dream.
Of course, I didn’t understand any of that back then. That’s because I was just a kid, out on the prowl on Halloween night in 1963, looking for candy and ready (or so I thought) for whatever came my way.
We were out trick-or-treating for the very last time before our teenage years closed the door on the holiday. My brother Roger and me and Roger’s best friend. On the loose without the parents, or any adult supervision at all. I was twelve, Roger was thirteen. We were a pair of Irish twins, as they used to say back in the day, brothers born just eleven months apart.
Me, I was dressed up like a soldier—mostly courtesy of the local army surplus store, but with a coat my dad had worn in Korea. Roger was a baseball player. Yankee pinstripes just like Roger Maris, and a Louisville Slugger, too. The preacher’s kid who lived next door to us was a vampire. Hair slicked back with Brylcreem, he looked like the greaser son of Bela Lugosi himself.
Of course, our parents had given us ground rules for the night. Stay on the streets. Don’t go anywhere the street lights don’t shine. But we had our own agenda, and we got down to business with it once our treat sacks were full. And that put us on the edge of town, where the blacktop ended at a rust-flecked twenty-foot stretch of guardrail capped with a NO TRESPASSING sign.
Beyond that was a dirt trail that twisted through a eucalyptus grove. And beyond the grove was a cattail-choked hollow, a place called Butcher’s Lake. Maybe that was the only place for us to go that night, because by then we wanted to find out if there was something more to Halloween than knocking on doors and getting candy. We were looking for something a little more exciting.
Butcher’s Lake seemed like the best place to find it. Though there were a few ghost stories about the place, it wasn’t named for a murder spree or anything quite that exciting. No. The far side of the lake just happened to mark the border of a couple of neighboring cattle ranches, and that’s how it got its name. The only other thing about Butcher’s Lake was that it was the local lover’s lane, but by the time Halloween rolled around that action had pretty much shut down for the season.
That night, it was ghosts we were after.
So Butcher’s Lake was where we went.
That’s where we found Charlie Steiner.
Or the thing he’d become on Halloween night.
Or the thing he most wanted to be.
As soon as we climbed over that rusty guardrail, Roger’s friend, the preacher’s kid, said, “I don’t know, Rodge.” He said that practically right away, before we took a single step on that trail that led through the eucalyptus grove, as if he was already primed to turn tail and head for home. But my brother gave him a look. “We’ve been planning this for weeks,” Roger said. “We’re not turning chicken now.”
Rodge meant it. Every word. Like I said, he was only thirteen, but he’d grown up on John Wayne movies and TV cowboys and that was how he operated. If you didn’t grow up back then, it seems impossibly archaic now. But in those days, they built us to do what we set out to do, and finish the job. Or, as our old man always said, “If you talk the talk, you walk the walk.”
So we set out, putting one foot in front of the other. Roger took the lead on that snaking path through the eucalyptus grove. He had a flashlight, but he didn’t turn it on—we were counting on the moon that night, and we didn’t want to spook anyone who might be down by the lake Anyway, the trees grew close in the grove. Straight. Thick-bodied. Tall. And the moon was full, but you wouldn’t have known it. Those eucalyptus trees blocked out the light and made everything you heard seem twice as loud.
The soughing wind tearing snakeskin flaps of bark from straight, smooth trunks.
The short whispering breaths of three kids on the prowl.
Ahead, near the lake, the sounds were moist and alive. Crickets cut their music in the night. Frogs croaked a hundred yards away, where the trees gave ground to a muddy little patch of beach that rimmed the first wall of cattails.
And there was another sound just ahead . . . one that hung over the night like a shroud. It was enough to make us slow our pace as we approached the last stand of eucalyptus trees, and I remember telling myself that it was probably just the sound of the wind cutting through the cattails.
It might have been . . . but it wasn’t.
Chanting. That was the sound waiting for us down by the water.
Bright moonlight shone over that muddy little beach. It washed in waves, as if buffeted by the winds and the clouds—silver light lapping over the dark water and the sandy banks of the lake, each little glimmer of moonlight washing in rhythm to the sound that I’d mistaken for a soughing wind.
Because now I knew what that sound was. Someone was down there, ahead of us in the night. He stood before the lake and the swaying cattails, silhouetted by the glow of the moon, watching the water. We didn’t know it then, but he was watching for a sign.
Of course, there were a lot of things we didn’t know then. All we knew was what we saw, and we couldn’t believe it as the moonlight spilled over the figure and turned that silhouette into something we could recognize.
A big thing pacing back and forth along that shore. Wrapped in bandages.
Gray and silent as a mountain of cobwebs.
A mummy. At Butcher’s Lake. On Halloween night.
The preacher’s kid said something, and Roger cut him off with a sharp whisper. The monster didn’t see us. We stood frozen at the edge of the grove. Every once in a while he’d stop and stare at the water, but there was nothing waiting for him except the sound of his own chanting rolling over the surface. The moon washed over it and spilled a reflection on the murky waves like a spotlight that could open a hole into a black brimming pit. And that mummy would stare at that white hole in that black sky, and the white hole in the water, and the emptiness of both seemed to drive him mad. He stared up at the heavens, and he swung his free arm like a crane, and the wrinkled fist on the end of it was like a wrecking ball ready to tear down the universe.
Of course, we didn’t know the reason for that then. We had no idea that it was Charlie Steiner beneath those bandages. We didn’t know he was casting a spell to that dark water and that bright moon and whatever gods or demons worked their magic in it, tossing the contents of his jackal-hide mojo bag into Butcher’s Lake. We didn’t know he was waiting for a sign that would tell him it was time to conduct the most difficult and dangerous part of his spell. We didn’t know he was trying to raise a dream woman from the depths of Butcher’s Lake. All we knew was that his pendulum wrecking-ball fist was swinging in a way that told us he was coming up empty, and he wasn’t happy about it, and that there was going to be hell to pay.
From some god we hadn’t heard of. Or some devil. Or the universe itself.
Or maybe us.
Then Charlie Steiner started screaming, and it got worse.
I’ll never forget the sound of that tongueless scream. Even though we were hidden from view in the tree-line twenty feet away, I’ll never forget the sight of it, either. The mummy turned toward us, and his cobweb lips opened into a black hole that even a full bucket of moonlight couldn’t illuminate, and more black spilled out of it, dripping blood that ran in rivulets through the irrigation-ditch wrinkles that covered his chin. And then came the sound—a buzz-saw screech that descended into a roar so heavy with anguish it could have made a deaf man jump up and take notice.
“Oh, God,” the preacher’s kid said, and just that fast he was gone.
We didn’t even hear him running back to the road. The mummy was coming toward us now, still screaming, taking one sloughing step after another. At first I thought he’d spotted us for sure, but then he suddenly reversed course and headed toward the deep shadows near a thick stand of cattails.
At that moment, we had no idea what he was up to. But it came clear later. With his three-fingered hand, Charlie Steiner was ready to grasp for the final straw that might seal the deal he’d tried to cut with the powers of darkness.
That meant he’d gotten down to the portion of night that was really bad business.
The worst.
The mummy stopped at the rear of a station wagon. Swaying just a bit, as if it were fighting gravity itself. Then his fist swung down, and the tailgate dropped, and a light came on in the rear of the vehicle.
We couldn’t see much by that light, but we could see the mummy bending low. He reached inside, grabbing for something. There was a muffled scream as he took hold of it, and something tumbled to the sand.
“Sweet Jesus,” Roger said. “It’s a little girl.”
The mummy bent low, staring down at the prone figure before him.
He wasn’t chanting anymore.
Three words crossed his ruined tongue and bubbled over his bloody lips, and they were the only words he said that night that we truly understood:
“Dream . . . wish . . . sacrifice!”
The girl was nine, maybe ten. In the moonlight, I could see that her ankles and wrists were bound with ropes. And she wore a princess mask—the cheap plastic kind you found at a drugstore. Expressionless, with black hair cut straight across in bangs, and lips as red as red could be. That mask was taped to her head, thick swatches of sticky plastic stuck to her own black hair as if she’d been mummified herself.
If she hadn’t screamed, I would have thought she was dead. She lay there on the ground, gasping now, the breath knocked out of her. She couldn’t have moved if she wanted to. I stared at her, still unable to move myself. Roger was staring at her, too.
“We’ve got to stop him!” Roger said.
He wasn’t whispering, and he was moving forward, flicking on his flashlight as he advanced.
“Hey!” Roger shouted. “Stop!”
The mummy whirled, holding up a hand against the bright beam. For the first time we saw that he truly was as gray as a grave, except for the places he was black-red. One hand was missing a couple fingers and dripped blood. More gore spilled from the thing’s mouth—it looked like he’d been chewing razor blades.
Given all that, it was amazing how fast he moved when he saw Roger coming. One big arm swung down, and he snatched up the girl, and his bandaged feet kicked up gouts of sand that hissed against the October wind as he walked toward the edge of the lake.
His back was to us now, and he raised the girl over his head.
“He’s going to toss her in!” Roger said. “He’s going to drown her!”
I started across the beach, following Roger. He’d already covered ground. He’d dropped the flashlight and was closing on the mummy’s back with his Louisville Slugger in his hands.
Someone else was coming, too. At least I hoped there was, because I heard police sirens rising in the distance. But I couldn’t be sure they were headed in our direction, and there was no time to waste. The mummy already had that girl over his head, and before we knew it she was sailing through the dark night.
A hollow splash, and the lake took her. All I could think of as the water closed over her head was the black and bloody pit of that mummy’s mouth snapping closed. And then the mummy whirled. Perhaps it was the sound of the sirens that brought him around, or maybe he heard Roger racing toward him. But that wrecking ball fist of his swung out, and it banged my brother to the side.
For a moment, Roger was airborne. He hit the sand rolling. Then he came up, but he’d lost the baseball bat in the fall. By that time I was already halfway across the beach, splitting the distance against the mummy to come at him from the other side.
“No!” Roger yelled. “G
et the girl! She’ll drown!”
I was close to the mummy now. Close enough to see the crazy gleam in his eye. People have asked if I realized that he was a man in a costume, or if I thought he was real. To tell the truth, I can’t remember any of that. I only knew that he was dangerous, and that if he had a chance he’d kill both my brother and me.
And that’s what he tried to do. His fist flashed out again. I ducked and dodged the blow, trying to give Roger a moment to recover the bat. The mummy lurched forward, gaining ground for another strike, but I’d given my brother the moment he needed. Roger was up again, charging the mummy with his Louisville Slugger. As I turned toward the lake I heard it land once, and the mummy grunted. Another blow struck home and the mummy groaned, but I couldn’t afford to look behind me. I already had my eye on the water and the dull moonlight washing those little bands of wave.
I searched the surface for a ripple . . . any sign of the girl as I tried to remember where she had gone under.
I should have had my eyes on the shadows.
Because the mummy was still coming for me, even as Roger struck him again with the bat.
He was coming with one fist raised like a wrecking ball.
And the sirens were louder now. Definitely coming our way. I was skirting the shore, moving quickly, when I realized that I had almost run into the rear of the station wagon. I got my hands up before I slammed into it, and then the mummy’s fist cut a path through the shadows.
I never saw it. I never heard it. I can’t even remember the first blow striking me. I know it caught me from behind, and low on the base of my neck, because I still get a little click in my top vertebrae anytime I turn my head to the left. Anyway, I staggered and spun on my heel like a drunk.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 3
