by Tony Ortiz
“What do you mean, you won’t have the–”
“I’m pregnant.”
Oz sat at the table, unable to speak for five minutes. Did she really believe Katie was pregnant? Katie was thirteen years old!
Finally, Oz spoke. “All this time, you’ve been – when did this happen?”
“Six months ago.”
“You know who the father is?”
Katie glanced into the living room before answering. “I don’t know. It was some college guy. I never saw his face. Well, I refer to him as a piece of–”
Oz gave Katie a stern look.
“It’s going to be a boy,” mentioned Katie. “Some nurses said I shouldn’t go to school anymore. They think I should take care of the baby. I’m going to call it Alfredo. That’s good, no?”
Oz managed a hesitant nod. “Katie, you’re too young.”
“Yeah. But it’s okay. The younger, the better.”
“What?”
“I mean, when you’re younger, then . . . you know how grown-ups hear all that negative stuff. I haven’t yet. I’ll keep Alfredo safe from all that, and I won’t let mí foster mamá within a mile of him. Jesse’s going to help. He’s going to make a wooden fort outside for us to stay in, like a three-story house or something. With some windows and a toilet.”
“He can’t make a–” Something clicked in Oz’s mind. I could tell she had figured it out.
“All I want is to go out on Halloween. Think of Alfredo.”
“Katie, are you lying to me? Let me see your stomach.”
Katie took out the pillow. Great! We were never going to go trick-or-treating. I was about to stand up, but then Katie shook her head at me.
“Oz, why don’t you let Jesse go out on Halloween? You might as well not celebrate Christmas or Thanksgiving.”
“I’m sorry, Katie, but I don’t want him going outside on Halloween.”
“But him missing Halloween is like me missing Cinco De Mayo.”
“But you’re not Mexican. You’re Bolivian.”
“I know, but it’s fun. Did you know asking for candy is like asking for soul cakes?”
“No. Katie, is this all they teach you in school?”
“No. I learned it from a book mí papá gave me. You know Halloween dates all the way back to a man named ‘sow-en’. It’s spelled s-a-m-h-a-i-n. I hate words like that. Makes me wanna re-write the dictionary.”
Oz actually seemed to be taking an interest in Katie's rambling.
“Samhain was a Celt who believed the living could live with the dead.”
“You lost me,” said Oz.
She had lost me, too.
“The Celts lived thousands of years ago in Ireland and the UK and Northern France and Asia.”
Oz, misty-eyed and wistful, stared past Katie. “My ex-husband loved Halloween. Every year he waited eagerly for it. He didn’t like to go out, but he loved to decorate and celebrate it inside. I never knew anyone who loved this day as much as he did.”
“Is he the reason you don’t celebrate Halloween?”
“Yes and no.”
“You know it’s been seven years since Jesse was mugged. You’re going to have to let him go outside sometime. He’s thirteen.”
“I know.” She took a moment to think. “You want to hear a story?”
“Yeah.”
Both of them sat down at the table. I got up and kneeled on the couch.
“I was about your age. Well, maybe a couple of years younger. Not as beautiful as you, but a decent looking girl.”
“You really think I’m beautiful?” asked Katie.
“You know Jesse likes you? I read it in his journal.”
I leaned so far in the sofa that it nearly fell backwards. I couldn’t believe she said that. I couldn’t believe she read my journal. And I never said I liked Katie. I said she was a good looking girl. I hated Oz! Thank God, she continued with her story.
“I was a witch for the first time that Halloween.”
“I told you.”
“I guess a witch does fit me. Well, my father would tell me a story every Halloween about a goblin he saw when he was little going into his barn cellar and taking a few boxes of Mouthful Sweets – they were very popular candy back then.”
“Wow,” said Katie in awe.
“That’s exactly what I said. I didn’t miss a single Halloween after that. I made my father take me to the farm every Halloween.”
“You ever see it?”
“I wish I could say yes, but after two years, traveling got tiresome. We went trick-or-treating at home from then on. Anyway, one Halloween, a couple minutes before twelve, my father called me inside for a late supper. But I waited a little longer, and then–”
“You saw the goblin?”
“No,” smiled Oz. “But I did see something. As I stood up to go inside, I glanced at the full moon and saw–”
“What?” Katie exclaimed. “What did you see?”
“A witch. I swear there was a witch on her broom flying across the moon.”
“Wow.”
“You know what? My father had been standing right behind me the whole time. I can remember his exact words: ‘Father’s gettin’ old, but I know what I saw. I don’t wanna see ya’ wearin’ that witch robe every day now, ya’ hear?’ And that’s why I’ve always gone as a witch for Halloween.”
“That’s an awesome story.”
“What are you going to be for Halloween?”
“A witch.”
I didn't care if Katie didn't want me to come into the kitchen. I wanted to know about Oz's life, too.
“Ready?” Katie said to me when I came in.
“Ready for what?” I asked, spotting a bag of dirt in her hand. “What’s the dirt for?”
“You said you wanna be dead. That means you gotta be dirty.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Yes, it does.”
“Really?”
“Yup. No dirt, no dead boy. But I have to get the glue at home. You don’t have any. So, Oz, wanna come? It’ll be two witches and . . . him.”
Oz almost laughed.
“Yeah, that’s a funny one,” I said, not impressed. It was just a matter of time before Oz told Katie to go trick-or-treating alone. What was Katie thinking? Oz never said yes.
“So?” said Katie. “Can we go out on Halloween?”
“Okay,” she answered. “But only for a little bit.”
“I’ll be back!” yipped Katie, already opening the door. We could hear her singing down the outside entryway. “Shake your head, it’s halloween - crust that head, paint that face, dress those hips and funny feet. Now you’re ready to dance . . . ”
“Katie’s not a bad singer,” said Oz. “Maybe you two should start a band.”
I pulled a freakishly ugly face.
“So . . .” Oz looked like she wasn’t sure what to say.
I couldn’t believe that she had changed her mind. She always thought Halloween was a dangerous holiday. I believed her a little. There was a possibility that candy could be stuffed with bugs.
“Oz, I don’t have to go.”
“I think we all need a little fun."
What was going on? Now she was calling Halloween fun? “Will you let me eat the candy?” I asked.
“Not until I check it.”
“For bugs?”
“What do you mean for bugs?”
“Never mind.”
“So, you going as a ghost, then?”
“Uhmm . . . I guess.”
Oz was pensive for a long time, then stood up and said, “Come with me. I want to show you what I've been hiding from you.” She headed toward the cabinet with the safety box that had the orange envelope inside.
CHAPTER FOUR
OZ’S SECRET
Oz walked right past the cabinet and into the hallway where she pushed aside a rug. She then pulled out a chair from the corner and slid the legs into four holes in the floor.
“Step back,” sh
e said, stepping up on the chair so she stood on top of it.
I took a step back.
“More.”
I was almost back in the kitchen. Thinking she was going to pull down an attic door, I looked up, but nothing was there.
Oz kneeled down a little, then jumped up and stomped down on the chair so the legs sank halfway into the floor, causing a large jolt of the entire house. I quickly grabbed onto the cabinet while Oz casually stepped off of the chair.
“Just one more thing.”
She walked further down the hall and removed a painting of an Australian spider off the wall. Behind it was another hole. She pulled out a broom from the hall cupboard and stuck the handle into the hole and pushed it in as far as it could go.
“Okay,” she sighed. “That’s it. Follow me.”
I followed her into her freezing cold bedroom, filled with a thick layer of fog.
“Come on,” said Oz cheerfully, standing next to a part of the wall that had been pushed out. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”
What was she talking about? There was fog in her bedroom.
I inched my way around the protrusion, seeing a flight of muddy stairs spiraling down under the floorboards.
“W-we’re g-going down there?” I stuttered in the cold. “It’s dark.”
“It’s not that dark. . . . It gets quite damp down there,” she added as she handed me a box of matches. “Go on. There’s a lantern on the wall. It’s very old so be careful with it.”
“You’re g-going, right?”
“It’s better if you experience it by yourself. And don’t daydream down there or you’ll fall off.”
“What do you mean fall off? I don’t want to go if there’s a chance – Oz, aren’t you worried that I might fall?”
“Jess, you’ll be fine. Just take one step at a time.”
Great. I took a step forward and landed in a pile of mud. I took a few more, and reached the flat ground. It was pitch black the rest of the way. I couldn’t do this. I turned back, but there was now a wall blocking the opening. I quickly snatched the lantern off its hook and without hesitation pulled out a match and lit it.
“Oz?” I yelled, lifting up a rusty iron lantern with green glass panels. There was a slight echo. “I don't want to do this!"
Running footsteps above me thumped across the floorboards. What was she doing now? Well, it really didn’t matter. I had had just about enough of her scares. I held the lantern out and started my descent, taking one step at a time, which was hard in itself because I could only see the step I was on. Luckily, there weren’t that many and the next passage was a long corridor lit with tiny lamps. The walls were lined top to bottom with black bricks and dirty roots, leaving space in the middle for ragged plywood and locked cupboards labeled with names like Lingering Tom and Boo Goth Lawrence. One label said: James Skool, a babel gargoyle who died in Wandering Lost from a malicauht’s nevetru curse in H.D. 2439.
A little ways down, there was a stone werewolf sculpted into the plywood. Most of its body was hidden inside the wall, and its head was at the top corner, easily eight feet high. I lifted the lantern above my head to get a better look at the scary face. It looked a little like Charles. The label for it was blank. That was kind of creepy.
I lowered my head as I hurried by the sculpture.
Hello.
The voice was deep and eerie. I peeked back and saw a dark shape move smoothly into the glow of my lantern and over to the sculpture.
"Hello," it said again to the sculpture.
I couldn’t tell what it was. One thing for sure, it did not move like a person. The ghostly silhouette eyed the sculpture for a moment, then planted a small pumpkin at the werewolf's stone feet. The black ghost turned its featureless face back to me, then disappeared.
Scared, I ran out of the passage and stumbled out onto a flight of stairs, made of branches and sheets of distorted plywood. There wasn’t any railing or wall this time, or was there a ceiling. All I could see beyond the steps were huge tree branches stretched high above me. Inside the crevice of one, there was a crooked sign.
Y o u a r e two-h u n d r e d f e e t b e l o w
Oh, my God, what was this place? Why did I just find out about this underground today?
I took a deep breath and continued. The stairway went on and on, taking me deeper underground and further away from the lit corridor. Every so often there would be another marker telling me how far below the house I was. I stopped reading them after a while, turning my attention to staying on the path while dodging countless bugs crawling all over the steps.
All of a sudden, I ran smack into a bundle of prickly branches.
“Ow!” I yelped, whacking the branches away and scrambling forward.
Just ahead of me was a massive tree trunk with an enormous owl hole. I knew exactly what kind of tree it was. It was a sequoia, said to be the tallest tree in the world, and I was somewhere high up in it, slowly descending it by its branches.
To the sides of the hole were two wooden werewolf statues, each with terrified expressions and clutching a rotten pumpkin to its chest. I bowed my head once again and hurried past the statues and into the hole. The inside was as big as my bedroom. There were empty shelves built into the walls, an angled roof and a deep alcove with a single door at the back. I shakily put the lantern as far out in front of me as possible. Living in the door itself was a snoring jack-o’-lantern with flaring triangular nostrils, breathing hot air. Its eyes were shut, but every time it snorted, the eyelids fluttered, illuminating a red light from inside. How was this possible? How was all this possible? I was inside a sequoia, hundreds of feet below my house.
I didn’t wait for the jack-o'-lantern to wake up and ran out of the tree, down a sloping root leading me away from the tree. Finally, I had reached the floor.
“Oz!” I called out into a cloud of heavy fog. There wasn't an echo at all. “I’m at the bottom now! . . . Oz!”
I knew she wasn’t coming, but I waited anyway. After a few minutes, the fog dispersed a little, and I continued on my journey through a field of weeds and hundreds of pumpkins of all shapes and sizes. In the thickest part of the weeds, there was one the size of a car. A huge toothy smile was carved into it. It almost looked as real as the one in the door. As I walked around it, I noticed at the far end a green-tinted scarecrow sitting at the very edge of a block of hay. Its creepily thin body was mostly hidden by a brown coat and a large black hat. Something about it was creeping me out, and I didn’t want to be anywhere near it. I exited the field and hurried up to a fifteen-foot tall gate surrounding a hilly cemetery. The top was weaved into:
H a l l o w e e n’s H i l l
The gate's door was locked with giant padlocks created to look like a roaring gargoyle. As I leaned through the iron bars I tripped on something hard. On the ground, there was a flattened stone. Etched into it was:
I kNoW yOu BeTtEr ThAn YoU dO yOuRsElF
TrUsT mE
cOmE fOrWaRd If YoU dArE
i Am YoUr FrIeNd ThE jAcK-o-MaN
dOn’T lOoK bAcK uNlEsS yOu DoN’t FeAr Me
“Yeah, right,” I said to myself. However, I cautiously turned around.
“BOO!” shouted Katie excitedly, jumping in the air like a ninja.
“What – what are you–” I gasped, stumbling back and landing on my butt.
“Isn’t this the best? . . . I can’t believe Oz kept this from you. It’s amazing! Did you see the large pumpkin? Oz planted it fifteen years ago. What about the pumpkin in the door? That thing scared me.”
“She told you about this place?”
“Yeah, just now. She said this used to be a haunted house.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“I don’t know.”
I looked behind Katie, becoming aware of a steady glow silhouetting her body. More of the strange writing was carved on the back of the huge jack-o’-lantern.
TrY tO tRiCk Me AnD
i WiLl GiVe YoU a T
rEaT yOu WoN’t FoRgEt
TrIcK oR tReAt
YoUr FrIeNd, JaCk
Katie ran over to the gate and read the words on the stone. “It’s a riddle. Jack was a prankster.”
“Who’s Jack?”
“I thought I told you about him,” she said.
I shook my head.
“Jack was an Irishman who liked playing cruel tricks on people. He was denied into Heaven and Hell seven times. He now lives forever, trying to find a way to get back at them. A man as evil as him can never die.”
“Didn’t you say some guy, Jaculus, might have killed your mother? Is this the same guy?”
Katie didn’t answer, distracted by something on the gate. There were two words set far apart from each other:
t r i c k t r e a t
“Trick or treat,” I read.
“Jesse, I can read, you know,” she stated.
“I know.”
“We have to choose.”
Katie must have already made up her mind because she was running over to the trick sign. She pulled back on the tooth-shaped handle, and the gate screeched open onto a wooden bridge, built over a cascading stream that ran around the cemetery.
“No, this is the best,” said Katie, already climbing on all fours up the hill. “How could someone have made all this?”
She waited for me to catch up. We both stopped at a large tombstone.
Aidan Edana Alroy
Beatrice Ailean Deri
Caronwyn Aili Dara
Cameron Aoife Jenna
Delwen Sean Gail
Tomás Llyn Jean
Rowena Hagan Lair
Rossalyn Haley Leslie
Dallas Gwen Sheila
Ainsley Elwyn Ilisa
Fionna Eilwen Máire
"They're all Irish names," she pointed out. "I know these names."
"You do?" I asked as I crawled up beside her. I didn't know any of them.
