Halloween Carnival, Volume 5

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  “Sounded like a door slam.”

  “Ah, that will be Ruby giving Madison the grand tour of the backyard. Coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  Lane wanted to ask her more about that long-ago dare but was wary of showing too much interest in something that might be a hoax. If she had gone into a stranger’s house and seen something that frightened her, surely she would remember it? She didn’t quite trust Bobbi, and thought her story might be a Halloween trick to pay her back for all the times Lane had scared her with ghost stories when they were children. And yet there must be some reason for the hold the tower house had on her imagination. Maybe it would come back to her.

  They talked about their children and jobs as the coffee brewed, and then Bobbi remembered she had made chocolate-chip cookies. “I’ll call the girls.”

  There was no response from the house or the backyard, and it occurred to Lane that the sound of the door they had heard closing had come from the front rather than the back of the house. She said as much to Bobbi.

  The front yard was a small, bare, open patch of grass and flowerbeds, with nowhere to hide. Before the echoes of her own voice calling could die away, Bobbi was walking briskly down the street. Fearful and sick at heart, Lane hurried after her.

  There was no need for discussion; they had the same idea of where the girls had gone. The only questions were what route they had taken and how far ahead they were.

  “Maybe we should take the car?”

  But turning back, the search for keys, seemed a promise of more delay. Bobbi was power-walking; Lane had to break into a run to catch up to her.

  At every corner they paused just long enough to peer down each street, hoping to spot two small figures, but they saw no one except a boy doing lonely wheelies on his bicycle, who shrugged when asked about two little girls, and a man raking leaves, until at last they reached the boulevard.

  At the corner of Azalea, Bobbi gasped, “Ruby!” and Lane squinted against the sun and made out the solitary, diminutive figure dressed in black.

  “Where’s Madison?” Despite her pounding heart, Lane sprinted forward, intent on grabbing the little girl and shaking the answer out of her, but Bobbi was in her way.

  “Don’t you ever, ever go off like that without telling me! You are in trouble, young lady, big trouble—no treats for you tonight.”

  “Where’s Madison?”

  Looking scared, the little Goth pointed at the tower house.

  “She went inside? When? How long—” Then she saw Madison stumbling down the walk, a wobble in her course suggesting she’d been forcibly ejected from the house. Lane rushed and caught hold of the child. She was shivering. Freckles stood out boldly on cheeks otherwise drained of color; her eyes were wide and staring.

  “Sweetheart, I’m here, it’s all right, you’re safe now—oh, what happened? What happened, what did you think you were doing, you silly girl?” She jabbered, a mixture of fear and relief driving her questions and not allowing her to pause and wait for answers. “Come on, let’s go, you can tell us all about it later.” It seemed imperative to get away from this house as far and as fast as possible. Bobbi must have felt the same, for she was already nearly at the end of the street, hustling Ruby along.

  Madison moved slowly, leaning on her grandmother and dragging her feet as if the force of gravity were too much. Lane felt wildly impatient, but the child was too big to lift and carry—or so she thought until, just as they made it across the boulevard, Madison swooned, and Lane only just managed to catch her dead weight before she hit the ground.

  “No! Oh, Madison, wake up,” she said and groaned, but it was no good, she had fainted and would not be roused.

  They sat, the woman supporting the child, like a living pieta on a stranger’s front lawn for perhaps as long as a minute before Madison stirred and sat up.

  “Sweetie, what happened? Are you all right? What happened? Can you remember?”

  Too many questions, but Lane couldn’t help herself and repeated them all until at last, in response to one or all, Madison nodded.

  “What? Honey, tell me, please.”

  The little girl opened and closed her mouth a few times before she whispered, “Save her.”

  “What?” She bent closer to catch the faint, breathy little voice.

  “She’s in the box. Save her.”

  “Who?”

  But Madison seemed to have exhausted her ability to speak. She struggled to her feet and together they walked back to the house on Cranberry Street, where they found Bobbi waiting anxiously, half in, half out of the front door. “Is she okay?”

  “I don’t know. She fainted.”

  “Come in; what shall we do? Water? Juice?”

  “She’s cold; could you get a blanket?” Ensconced on the couch, cocooned in a fluffy blue blanket, Madison shut her eyes and relaxed. She seemed to fall asleep at once. Her breath was shallow but steady.

  “Probably best we let her rest,” said Bobbi, looking down with a worried frown before trailing Lane back to the kitchen, where she picked up her purse. “You’re not going?”

  “If I can leave her with you; she needs rest. I won’t be long.”

  “You’re going back there?”

  “I need to know what happened. I’m going to talk to whoever lives there, get their story.”

  Bobbi stopped her at the door. “Wayne will be back at five, he’ll go with you.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “Call the police.”

  “And say what, my granddaughter entered a stranger’s house and when she came out said…” Lane shut her mouth and turned away. “No. I need to find out if there is a reason to call the police, or if it’s just…kids fooling around.”

  “What did she say?”

  “A girl in a box.” Lane shook her head, scowling. “That story.”

  “Call me,” said Bobbi, following her out the door. “Call me when you get there.”

  Lane got into her car without answering.

  “Call me,” Bobbi repeated more loudly. “I mean it. Leave your phone on, so if anything happens, I’ll know if you need help.”

  Too late, as she watched the car leaving, Bobbi remembered they did not have each other’s phone numbers.

  —

  It had been half an hour. Madison woke as Bobbi was carrying her out to the car.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Go back to sleep.” As she started the car, she heard the girls whispering to each other in the backseat. She glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Madison sitting up. Her color was better and she looked more alert.

  “Oh, no,” said Ruby as they turned onto Azalea, and when Bobbi stopped the car in front of a driveway, “Gamma, no!”

  There was no sign of Lane’s car. Bobbi opened her door.

  “Don’t go in there!”

  “Ruby, settle down. I am just going to knock on the door. You kids wait right here.”

  Ruby moaned as her grandmother got out of the car, and Madison whispered, “It’s okay, it’s okay now, she’s not there.”

  No one answered the knock on the door, and the bell made no sound. Tentatively, she tried to turn the knob, but the door was locked. A scattering of dusty advertising flyers littered the doormat. The longer she stood there, the more Bobbi felt that no one was home. After worrying at her bottom lip, she made up her mind and called the police.

  —

  The police broke down the door. The house was empty and appeared to have been unoccupied for many months. There were a few pieces of furniture but nothing in the tower room and nothing anywhere remotely like the carved wooden chest Bobbi insisted they had to find.

  The police were polite and as patient as they could be but must have thought she was a crazy old bat. Ms. Alverson was a competent adult. There was no reason to believe any harm had come to her, and certainly no reason to put out an alert, especially as her own daughter was of the opinion that her mother, who had been a reluctant and difficult
guest, had probably made a spur-of-the-moment decision to go home early.

  Bobbi never saw or heard from Lane Alverson again. Only in her dreams, she sometimes heard her old friend calling, but when she went to look, the room was empty, except for the presence, inexplicably sinister, of a carved wooden chest.

  No matter how many times she had the dream (and it would haunt her the rest of her life), Bobbi never dared to open it.

  The Halloween Bleed

  (A Dr. Sibley Curiosity)

  Norman Prentiss

  “Have we met before?”

  The older gentleman didn’t rise from behind his desk to greet her. His question was appropriate, considering she’d shown up at his university office without an appointment and bluffed her way past his secretary. His manner struck her as strange, however—though she struggled to put her finger on the reason. He wasn’t playing some celebrated host looking down his nose at an under-dressed gatecrasher (I doubt we’re from the same social circles, dear). No, not snobbish or confrontational. Theatrical, more like.

  She stepped forward, and the office door closed behind her. “My name’s Adeline.” She fumbled to produce a business card she’d clipped under the front cover of her spiral notepad, then she held the card over the expanse of his desk. The entire surface of his desk was covered with papers and stacks of books. There wasn’t even room for his old-fashioned landline telephone: It sat on a crosshatched pile of folders to the man’s left, so precarious that the vibrating ring set off by an incoming call would likely cause the whole pile to fall over.

  He lifted a hand, palm outward, refusing her offered card. “Let me guess. A reporter. You are writing a Halloween story, and you’ve come to me.” Even after the initial challenge, he spoke in a booming “classroom voice,” apparently used out of habit even in the confines of his office. Habit, or a deliberate attempt to intimidate.

  She set her business card atop a stack of books at the facing edge of his desk. “You’ve divined my purpose, Dr. Sibley.” The small white rectangle shone bright against the bare black cover of a cloth-bound reference book. She turned the card so that, if he cared to, Sibley could read her name and see the logo for her newspaper.

  “No divination necessary. You wanted me to know. That reporter’s notepad, with the pen pushed through the spiral loops along the top—that’s for show, isn’t it?” He tilted his head, scrutinizing her through the crescent bifocal region of his glasses. Reading her. “That thick pen is jammed too hard into the loops and won’t come out easily. You rarely use it.” In contemplation, he placed one hand over his chin, covering the strange tuft of gristle-gray beard that puffed prominently in his publicity photo for the school’s Classical Literature Department. “Instead, you have a digital voice recorder hidden in your…in your purse, is it? No, your shirt pocket.”

  Very good! Adeline nodded and patted her hand above her left breast as if to reassure herself the item was still there. “Do you mind?”

  “Feel free. I’ve been recorded before.” He waved a backhand, an almost dismissive gesture, and Adeline reached into her shirt pocket and pretended to initiate the device. The recording had already started before she entered Sibley’s office.

  She pointed to the guest chairs, neither of which had been cleared off for use. “May I?”

  Another weak wave of the hand. Suit yourself, he seemed to say.

  The chair with the fewest items on it contained a stack of opened books, spines down, folded over one another to mark particular pages. The stack was too tall for her to move all at once, so Adeline carefully lifted the top dozen, holding them tightly to preserve the bookmarks, and she transferred them to a clear space on the floor. She did the same with the remaining half, then scooped up a loose gathering of pens and pencils, a clump of binder clips, and some folded pages with scribbled notes. It was like getting a ride from a friend who rarely accepted passengers: She wouldn’t have been surprised to find gum wrappers, fast-food cartons, or stray french fries.

  She made small talk as she used her hand to sweep a layer of chalk dust off the seat of the chair. “So, how did you figure Halloween? The date is still several weeks away.” A puff of chalk filled the air between them, and she waved it away before sitting down.

  “My department isn’t newsworthy at the moment,” he said. “No spectacular faculty achievements to note, or embarrassing student complaints that I’m aware of. So you’re gathering research for a future story, and Halloween would be the next calendar holiday. I’m no expert, but I might provide a better Halloween quotation than I could for, say, Thanksgiving.”

  “No expert?” In this windowless office, they were surrounded on all sides by tall bookcases. Adeline gestured at the nearest case to reinforce her point. Strange knickknacks populated spaces among dictionaries, grammar textbooks, and survey anthologies of world, American, and English literature: a hunched demonic figure carved in wood; a crystal pyramid on a claw-handled base; the tiny skull of a long-toothed mammal; a large black feather dipped in an inkwell with strange markings etched into obsidian glass. Other items balanced at the lip of each shelf, blocking easy access to the books. And above some books, farther back in the dark recesses, lurked shapes and shadows she couldn’t identify—including, in one particular recess, two glimmers spaced like the eyes of a small cat.

  “Oh, those.” Sibley acted surprised, as if no guest ever commented on his cluttered display of oddities. “Some of those were gathered during my youthful travels, then in days when my wife was alive. The collection has since expanded through no effort of my own. You know how it is: People decide you like a certain sort of thing—penguins or frogs, for example; candles or scented soap—and that’s the only kind of present you get. Apparently, I’m easy to shop for.”

  Adeline accepted the truth of his comment—with a slight shiver of unease at his initial mention of penguins, which happened to be her own birthday-present stereotype. At the same time, she wondered which of the items were the oldest. And what kind of student or colleague might have gifted him an amber-encased water bug with a death’s-head design on its carapace.

  “Certainly, I can tell you about the literature,” Sibley offered. “Poe and Hawthorne, Lovecraft and M. R. James. But they didn’t just write for Halloween. In fact, Montague composed his fiction for a different holiday, in the grand English tradition of Christmas ghost stories read around a warm fireplace.”

  “That’s a good starting point,” she said. “A recommended list of Halloween stories would be helpful.”

  “Again, I’m not sure I’m the best source. My expertise is in Greek tragedy, don’t you know.”

  Perhaps the remark was intended as a slight jab. She should choose her interview subject more carefully, or at least know his background. “Sophocles,” Adeline countered. “Your book on the Oedipus cycle.”

  He smiled for the first time in her presence. It was the smile of a proud parent—though the child had long-since grown, had left home, hadn’t really made his name in the world. Sibley’s book was influential in its day, by all accounts, but was a single-author study with old-fashioned ideas, of little use for modern academic study that embraced feminist and multicultural and queer theory, linguistics and psychoanalytics, formalist or new-formalist criticism.

  “That book helped me secure this job. Probably before you were born.” He cleared his throat, sat up straighter in his chair. The careless wrinkles of his blue-striped oxford shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, now appeared smoother due to his improved posture. “Please forgive me for alluding to a lady’s age.”

  Such a strange interview. After the initial bristle, Sibley had shifted into that gentlemanly comment about age: an out-of-date remark, just as she’d been thinking about him as old-fashioned. A polite comment, or one targeted to offend a feminist? Or, regardless of any gendered reaction, a reminder that she was younger, less experienced.

  Sibley’s in charge here. She’s in his world. His rules.

  And then he surprised her with
complete cooperation. He rattled off names of books and stories, beginning with the authors he’d mentioned previously, and then each story seemed to remind him of someone new. The titles came quickly, a free-associated stream that was the sign of a lifelong teacher: an encyclopedic knowledge that was better than an encyclopedia, each title offered with fresh, emotional appreciation of a story’s impact. “Oh, the chilling atmosphere” of this one; “You’ll never forget the final image” of that one.

  Adeline was grateful for the digital recorder. If she’d used that pen and notepad—which she’d brought only to ease Sibley’s reported distaste for modern technology—she’d have filled a dozen pages, barely able to keep up.

  “Shall I go on?”

  “That’s fine,” Adeline said. “It’s a great list.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to simply repeat the usual suspects.”

  He had warmed to her, she was certain. Her expression had no doubt signaled appropriate awe at his vast learning—the kind of reaction he probably didn’t get often enough from his students.

  “Do you do anything special with your classes on Halloween?”

  He chuckled. “My dress-up days are long behind me, though I don’t discourage students from attending in costume. We discuss whatever literature happens to fall on the schedule. Although…one year I presented a flannel board story at the public library. For the younger kids.” His fingers rearranged imaginary shapes in the air. “I use cloth cutouts to illustrate the story I tell. It’s a lost art.”

  “Might be an interesting subject for another article.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Let’s try some other Halloween topics. Traditions, for example. Like the origin of trick-or-treat, or Halloween pranks in the neighborhood.”

  Sibley offered an indulgent smile, then shrugged. “You might ask one of my colleagues in History. As for pranks, I always provide Halloween visitors with appropriate treats, so I lack experience in that particular type of retaliation.”

  Keep trying, she told herself. Hit him from another angle. “No local legends that you’re aware of?”