Halloween Carnival Volume 4

by Brian James Freeman (ed)

  The prospect of visualizing this as reality brought something largely unrelated to mind, and he laughed out loud at it. “Darlin’,” he’d said, trying not to spill any more beer down the front of his shirt, “if it came to all that, you know I’d have to help you shuffle off Halloween-style. You know that’s my bag, MAR-LEEN. Now, if you remember your Halloween studies at all, you know that the official nursery rhyme of the holiday prescribes that I, Peter, keep you very well in a pumpkin shell. Says so right in the thing, and everyone’s heard that bit of holiday cheer. Even Halloween-hatin’ you. But you know I hate pumpkin, so I think you’re safe on that score.”

  Think again, darlin’, he thought, still staring, still grinning.

  Yep yep. That was one beautiful backyard pumpkin table, just waiting to be born.

  —

  Half an hour later, Pete was back at his favorite breakfast table, nestled into his favorite nook, eating warm Granny Smith apple pie. His seasonal favorite.

  The Halloween dinner his wife made had been a little light on substance, especially for autumn fare, but Pete figured that was likely just another passive-aggressive shot at him on his special day: She knew he liked his Halloween evening meal hearty and seasonally appropriate, and she had decided it was better that both of them eat like clinically depressed birds.

  Still, he didn’t say a word about it to her. Not when she told him what she was making, not when she handed him a colorfully sparse plate that looked like Pompous Someone’s image of elevated food, not even when he finished his allotted portion of art just three minutes later.

  After tonight, he was done pissing and moaning about shit like that.

  So when she handed him a second generous helping of his favorite pie, he dove right in. It was still warm and the crust was as buttery and flaky and perfect as he’d come to expect of a typical Marlene pie, though she didn’t quite nail the filling this time around. Bad apples, maybe.

  He muscled through the back half of his second piece while he watched her put the prior course’s dishes in the washer. This done, she turned to the oven and removed the other pie she’d made, the one for herself. While some would have found the emergent aroma enticing, the sudden smell of baked yam made the wires in Pete’s head cross, and he winced.

  “Must you?” he asked around a mouthful of inadequate pie filling. “I’m eating here.”

  His wife didn’t reply, but she did set the offending pie down onto the base of a nearby pie stand and then place the cover over it, which smothered the aroma more or less completely.

  He stared at her intently as he finished the last of his pie, and when he was done he set his fork down on his plate and pushed them both away from him. The sound it made sliding across the breakfast table was jarring, and he watched her shoulders jump. After, she put the forefingers of one hand to her lips, inhaled deeply through them, and slowly turned around.

  “You can’t even face me, can you?” Pete said across the kitchen. “Not even now.”

  His wife stood motionless. Head down. Back to.

  “Before we wrap all this up, I just have to know…honey, were you ever gonna tell me?”

  Still motionless, head down, back to.

  “Were you?”

  Motionless, head down, back to.

  “ANSWER me!” he snarled, and the savagery in his voice was a clarion between them. His wife made a sound, he couldn’t quite tell if it was a sob or something else, and walked hurriedly to one of the cabinets on the far side of the room.

  “FORGET THE GODDAMN PIE, MAR-LEEN!” As he rose to his feet a terrible itch appeared in the palm of his left hand, and he scratched distractedly at it with his right hand as he worked to extricate himself from the far side of the breakfast table. “You need to answer for this…”

  From across the kitchen he heard his wife reply, but he couldn’t believe the words that carried themselves across those expensive floor tiles to his ears: “No. I don’t.”

  “Is that right?” Pete reached into his pocket, pulled out a pair of workman’s gloves, and slowly but effectively put them on. “If you don’t have to answer, then I guess I’m done askin’.” He was around the side of the table now, striding confidently across the divide to his wife.

  As he came upon her huddled form he raised his gloved hands up and reached out for her. In the moment that followed he had just enough time to register the fact that he felt strangely like a zombie in an old Romero film, all coming to get Barbara and shit, before the itch in his left hand suddenly exploded into a ball of invisible fire curled up on his open palm.

  “What the…” he sputtered. All forward motion ceased while he stared in terror.

  Marlene turned around. In one hand she held what looked like a little brown bottle with an eyedropper top. In the other hand she held what Pete had (gravely) mistaken for a spray-can of whipped cream at first glance, and what turned out to be a bug spray more lethal than Raid.

  This she sprayed directly into his face. By the time he could swat it from her hand, it had completely coated the left side of his head and effectively corroded his left eye to nothing.

  Pete’s breath seized up and he staggered backward, coughing violently. And that’s when the searing pain in his palm roared to greater life and shot up his arm like wildfire.

  One moment he was standing in his kitchen, in full control of the situation, and the next his diaphragm was producing an involuntary oooff sound as his body fell roughly backward. He landed by the breakfast table, head on the floor, looking up at the underside of a chair seat. His chest felt like someone heavy now sat on it. Circuits of pain arced between it and his hand.

  His mouth wouldn’t form words yet, but his head screamed, What the fuck’s happening?

  From across the kitchen, as though reading his mind, his wife answered with a question:

  “Did you know that ipecac is a poison that can cause heart failure?”

  Pete’s good eye bulged. Beads of gleaming sweat dotted his forehead and upper lip.

  “I’m guessing no,” Marlene continued as she stepped over to the kitchen counter. “That’s probably the kind of thing that only people who read would know. Well…readers and fans of the Carpenters, I guess. Ipecac is what helped Karen puke her way into an early grave. But then you’re not much of a reader, we both know. And you once called Karen Carpenter ‘that mopey anorexic bitch.’ ” This last she punctuated by setting the terrible can of weaponized insect killer down on the counter.

  “I laughed it off at the time, of course. Just like I laughed off the rest of our marriage. But it wasn’t all that funny, Pete. And plotting to kill your wife…not so funny, either.”

  Her husband’s face had gone from a livid red to a whiter shade of pale.

  “I’ve been poisoning you for a while now,” Marlene said, lifting the lid off the pie stand. The odor of fresh-baked pie again wafted out, and Pete’s gorge had to work to suppress a heaving wretch. “All those stomach issues you’ve been having?” She held the little brown bottle up by her face and gave it a couple vigorous shakes.

  “You…fuck!” her husband spat, and the effort made black stars bloom before his eyes. “You’re…cheating…on me…”

  “Because you wouldn’t touch me.” Marlene’s voice was still calm but now carried a tremble that wasn’t there a moment earlier. “For over two years, Pete. And that’s just like you, assuming women don’t have needs, too. But it doesn’t matter. None of it. If I am cheating on you, you leave me or you kill yourself. You don’t spend nine hundred dollars planning to kill me.”

  Her husband’s watering eyes, recently narrowed by pain, bulged out at her once more, this time in errant surprise. “How did…?” he sputtered. “Was careful…didn’t…use cards.”

  “No, you cleverly paid cash. But you not quite so cleverly kept the receipt in your truck.” She sucked air between her teeth. “Oops.”

  Pete stared at her in abject horror, sweat coursing down his glistening cheeks.

  Ma
rlene picked up the cake knife and wiped it clean of her husband’s apple remnants.

  “I have to admit, it took me a spell to suss out,” she said, carefully drawing a straight line down the center of her pie. “But ultimately, I kept coming back to that stupid nursery rhyme.”

  She pulled the knife free—burnt orange pie guts clung to it now—and pointed it at him.

  “I hate to say it, husband of mine, but you really are that predictable. And maybe you shouldn’t have compounded the problem by actually bringing the thing up with me. I know you love Halloween, asshole.”

  Pete took his last chance.

  Summoning what remained of his energy reserves, he hooked his fingers below the crossbar under the seat directly overhead and heaved the kitchen chair at his wife’s face. It turned over once in the air as he pushed hard to struggle to his feet. Its two back legs came swinging down just as it collided with her.

  He heard a startled cry, small and feminine, as she went down on the kitchen floor, and a split second later there arose a clattering cacophony from the linoleum tiles where the chair landed and cracked apart into four pieces.

  Something animal and male in the deepest part of his mind reared up at the sound of that cry. Hackles raised to the highest, it told him that his wife was in danger and pain. His wife. And for one horrible moment Pete was certain beyond reason that even if he could somehow find the strength to gain the upper hand, he still wouldn’t be able to go through with it—would be in some way biologically unable to take her life—and so she would fucking win after all.

  And then it ceased to matter, as first his legs and then his lungs gave out on him in quick succession. He sank back down to the linoleum like an explorer giving in to quicksand, coughed once, listed briefly to port, and tipped over. The side of his head smacked the tiled floor and the sound it made echoed curiously around the room before fading like a sigh a heartbeat later.

  The silence spooled out. A quiet suburban kitchen on a dark Halloween night.

  The stillness shattered with a moan. Marlene pulled herself up with one arm, the other clutched feebly against her, and steadied herself at the kitchen counter. The small red mound of a contusion was starting to rise high on her forehead, but otherwise it was her left arm that had taken the brunt when it tried to shield her face and neck from impact. It quivered as she winced.

  Her husband answered her moan with one of his own. His sounded a lot worse.

  Without moving her arms, she turned her head so she could look straight at his face, now down at eye level with the floor. “Wanna know the best part?” She sounded almost giddy.

  Moan.

  “The best part,” she said as she lifted a steel spatula off the countertop, “is that you’ve already handled the messy clean-up for me.” She carefully cut and lifted a slice of pie up, over, and onto one of the plates, visibly straining with the effort but just as visibly pleased with it.

  “See…I’m going to bury you in the same festive tomb you planned so carefully for me.” She smiled at him, this time with genuine warmth. “Into the great pumpkin goes Peter! And don’t worry, dear. I know how to mix cement.”

  Mooooaaaaaaann.

  “You’re a big fella, so I probably couldn’t get you in there on my own.” She cast a satisfied look down at her plate and picked it up. Then Marlene turned to face her husband.

  “Lucky for me…you don’t have to go into the pot in one piece.”

  She made her very best Resting Witch Face and walked slowly toward him, the report of each advancing footfall somehow quieter, somehow farther away than the one before it.

  Pete’s eyes glazed over as he watched his wife take a seat at the breakfast table he built, nestled in his favorite nook in the house, and help herself to a piece of sweet-potato pie.

  When the Leaves Fall

  Paul Melniczek

  “What’s down there?”

  I didn’t know the answer to Kyle’s question. Far as I knew, nobody else did, either. They say every town has its own weird place, where someone got killed, hung themselves, or did bad things to other people. Haunted houses and stuff. Well, where we lived, on the outskirts of Haverville, we had our own creepy place. Graver’s Farm.

  “Don’t you want to find out?”

  Not bothering to reply, I leaned over the bars of my mountain bike alongside my best friend and peered down into the hollow. A dirt road snaked its way between a narrow field of high grass, bordered on both sides by deep woods, the kind that you couldn’t see very far inside, not even on a bright day. And today was cloudy, the air cool. Leaves had begun their slow, patient glide to death weeks ago and now September was just a recent memory, as October wrapped the landscape in its dusky arms and stole its life, peeling apart the summer flowers and snatching up the burnt orange and yellow leaves, pulling them to the ground where they dried into husks and shriveled away. Autumn’s frosty breath swept across the countryside, the vegetation fighting a hopeless battle against the coming winter. I hated the cold season, but fall was a fun time of year, with Halloween and all the mischief that came along with it. Now I felt chills scamper across my skin as I looked into the hollow, and in the distance I saw water from the swamp reflecting off a chance ray of sunlight which had somehow managed to seep through the gray cloud cover, quickly vanishing once more.

  “One of these nights we’re going in there and see where the old farm is.”

  I frowned. “Are you serious?”

  Kyle nodded, staring at me. “What’s there to be scared about? Anyone ever die down there?” He laughed, although it sounded a bit forced.

  “No. I don’t think so. But the stories…”

  “Chris, let me tell you. We go out raiding, and running around town all month long, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We never get caught and are pretty smart about it, I think.”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “And why do we do it?”

  This made me pause. Why did we do it? Well, we both liked to cause pranks, for sure. But there was more to it than just that. We enjoyed the freedom of being out on our own, stalking the neighborhood streets of the small town and answering to no one. We loved Halloween, spooky movies, ghost stories, and raiding. And one more thing, I had to admit…the risk of getting caught.

  “It’s an adventure, a challenge.” Kyle hit it right on the head.

  “Yeah, I do know what you mean. It beats all that boring school stuff, too.”

  Neither of us cared for sports and after-school activities. It was all just a big drag to us. But then, our home lives were different than some of the other kids’, too.

  “The only thing I like about school is knowing we’ll be out in a few years. I hate it and most of the teachers.”

  My feelings weren’t quite as strong as Kyle’s, but I certainly had no desire to go, either. I did want a job when I graduated, and this gave me some motivation. The following year I was going to learn about engines and cars. What made them tick and how to fix them. I already had a pretty good working knowledge, thanks to Craig. One thing I definitely did not want to do was end up in the factory like my dad and many other of the town residents. No way…

  Shadows grew long, and a sudden gust of autumn air blew against our faces, and even Kyle’s face showed a hint of uncertainty at his own bold words.

  “Ready to go? We’ll see what Craig’s up to,” I suggested.

  Kyle stared down at the hollow for long seconds, then shrugged. “Yeah. But don’t forget what I said. I want to see for myself.”

  He pedaled off ahead of me and I was right behind, not wanting to be there by myself for any longer than necessary. I chanced one last glimpse toward the unknown farm, and in that moment I realized something.

  Nervous or not, I was also curious for answers as to what was really down there…

  —

  A few minutes passed as we rode our bikes along the road, never seeing a single car, which was pretty normal. We lived on the high
est top of a long chain of hills, and going around the block for us meant winding roads several miles in length separated by deep woods, an occasional home, and scattered farms. Not much else. If Haverville had a frontier, we lived on its fringe. There was a lot of wilderness around us, and I didn’t forget it. A small house loomed up before us, a high hedgerow nearly obscuring the property. We glided in, going to the side and letting our bikes fall gently to the ground. A blue Nova was parked on the grass behind the back of the home, and we knew Craig was around. Another building sat farther back, and we heard a radio playing.

  “Boston. Great album.”

  Kyle nodded in agreement. “Coolest picture ever. If you turn it upside down, the guitars are actually spaceships.”

  We headed toward the garage, then walked through the open doorway and found Craig inside, pulling out spark plugs from a beaten Chevy pickup. The thing looked like it had seen better days.

  “Hey. What’s going on?”

  Craig flipped a few fingers our way in acknowledgment, still focusing on his work. His hair, long and black, cascaded down to his shoulders, and he wore blue work clothes that said trent’s garage on the front.

  “Not much,” said Kyle. “We were just down at Graver’s Farm, looking around.”

  Craig stiffened, pausing in his work. “I told you guys before, stay away from that place.”

  He had told us that a while back, but never really explained why. I fidgeted, but Kyle wasn’t to be intimidated.

  “We didn’t trespass or anything. Just wanted to see what’s there, you know. Can’t see squat from the road.”

  “Nothing but trouble if you mess with that place.” Craig stared us down for one long moment, then continued with his work.

  “How come? Ever been there?” This time I asked the question.

  He hesitated a moment before answering. “Nope. I know better. But any farmer will come after you with salt in his shotgun if he catches you trespassing. If you’re lucky…Sometimes it might be the real thing. Or maybe they’ll have loose guard dogs. Either way, it’s a bad idea, and I don’t want to see you two get hurt.”