Lucas frowned. “What big day?”
“Halloween, Dad! You know, trick-or-treating. How could you forget?”
Lucas ruffled his boy’s fine sandy hair. “I didn’t forget, Gerry. I know that it’s Halloween.” He paused. “But I’m not sure we’ll be able to go trick-or-treating this year.”
Gerald’s jaw dropped. “But we do it every year! Every year you take me and Donnie out trick-or-treating. Donnie says he has our costumes ready and everything!”
Lucas cupped Gerald’s face in his huge hands. “I know that, Gerry, but I just heard on the radio that there’s a big snowstorm coming in. Biggest one in nearly fifty years, they’re saying.”
Bethany suddenly chimed in, her hands deep in dishwater. “There’s no way you are going out in that blizzard, Gerald Forsyth. I don’t care if it is Halloween.”
“But, Mom!” Gerald protested, but his father turned his face back so he could look him squarely in the eye.
“Hey, you listen now. Your mother’s right, Gerry—it’s not safe to go out there. Maybe the blizzard will blow right by us, but if it doesn’t, well, it’s not the end of the world if we miss Halloween. We can always go next year.”
Gerald’s bottom lip bulged. “But it’s our family tradition, Dad. We go every year—you, me, Donnie, and Donnie’s dad.”
Lucas crouched down to his son’s level. “I know, Gerry, I know. Let’s just wait and see what happens with the storm, okay? Now, you go upstairs and your mom and I will talk about whether you can go see Donnie, okay?”
“Okay, Dad,” Gerald said. The boy walked mournfully out of the kitchen, his eyes on the floor all the way as he walked up the stairs to his bedroom. He got dressed slowly and sighed heavily, as if life had suddenly become a chore. He looked through his bedroom window and cursed the snow, which was being “totally unfair” by ruining a perfectly good Halloween.
—
While Donnie waited, frost had begun to creep across the glass of Gerald’s bedroom window. The street outside was coated in white, and the more Gerald watched, the thicker the snow became, swirling and falling with determination. The prospect of simply going next door to visit his friend—let alone trick-or-treating—became more and more remote.
Gerald sighed, defeated. He turned back to look at his unmade bed, the desire to just fall into it and give up on his favorite holiday tugging at his mind. He was about to do just that when a loud thump suddenly resounded behind him. He whirled on his feet to see a large splodge of snow sliding down the windowpane. The ridiculous notion that the snowflakes were getting bigger made him shake his head, but the abrupt squeal of white noise from his walkie-talkie made him jump.
“Ger…ry!” a voice said.
He stepped to his dresser drawer to retrieve the walkie-talkie and pressed the receiver.
“Donnie—is that you?”
“Co…m to…wind—!” the voice crackled.
Gerald turned the squelch dial down on his walkie-talkie, but the crackling only became more incessant; the storm dominating everything.
“Say again, Donnie?”
“I said…to the…dow!”
Gerald stepped to the window and peered down through the gaps in the frost to the front lawn. He saw his friend standing ankle deep in the snow, wrapped in a heavy winter coat, scarf, mittens, and woolen cap. Donnie seemed to fade in and out in the falling snow, like a lightbulb on its last legs. Gerald slid open the window and the snow swarmed in his room.
“What are you doing?” Gerald cried through the wind.
Donnie cupped his gloved hands around his mouth. “You gotta come down here and play—it’s awesome!”
“But…the blizzard?”
“Chicken!” Donnie fired back.
“Mom and Dad won’t let me go outside. They say there’s a really bad storm coming and we might not be able to go trick-or-treating tonight!”
“Yeah, that’s what my dad said, but what do they know, right? Come on, get your sled and we’ll hit the snow!”
Gerald hesitated; he wanted to chase Donnie away, slam the window shut, and accept defeat, but Donnie was already outside and the snowstorm didn’t look so bad. In fact, the snow looked like it would be a hell of a lot of fun.
—
When Gerald was certain his mother was busy in the linen cupboard looking for more blankets and his father was down for a nap, he snuck outside through the back door into a world of white.
He found Donnie sitting on the curb, his coat powdered with snow. Gerald pulled up the hood of his own coat, secured the earmuffs of his bomber hat, and ran stealthily across the lawn to meet him. He noticed immediately that Donnie didn’t have his own sled with him.
“Where’s your sled?” Gerald said.
Donnie smiled and shook his head. “Don’t worry about that—we’re not going sledding.”
“What?”
“We’re going trick-or-treating.”
Gerald’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth to seek more of an explanation when Donnie promptly turned and ran across the street—Blake Street—toward an oak tree on the other side. Through the snowfall, Gerald could just make out Donnie rummaging inside a bag of some kind. Gerald, reminding himself that Donnie could be frustratingly unpredictable, had little choice but to trot after him. The freezing air burned inside his nostrils.
“Donnie, what’s going on? We can’t go trick-or-treating in this weather.”
Donnie peered deep inside his bag. “You want to celebrate Halloween, don’t you? You want candy, right?”
Gerald tried to rub more warmth into the arms of his coat and looked at the snow slowly erasing every detail of Blake Street.
“Yes, but I don’t know, Donnie—I think it might be too cold. I think we should go back home.”
Donnie stopped searching in his bag and lifted his face to shake his head condescendingly at his friend. His green eyes narrowed and curls of his hair waved in the wind.
“Have you forgotten our promise?”
Gerald sighed. “No.”
“We said that we’d never miss a Halloween, no matter what. That’s what we said.”
“I know that, but this storm is crazy, Donnie.”
Donnie pulled a bundle of clothing out of his bag and shoved it into Gerald’s hands. “It’s not that bad—now put this on!”
Gerald looked at the bundle in his hands and a sneering face stared back at him—a pale white face, with red lips and blood-streaked fangs. Gerald was looking at the rubbery depiction of the great Count Dracula. The mask swam within a large black polyester cape. Gerald had to stifle a look of glee.
“We’re really going to do this?” he said. “Donnie, no one will open their front door in this cold.”
“Just put it on!” Donnie told him as he retrieved his own mask and jacket ensemble from the bag.
Gerald watched as his friend pulled on a putrescent green face. Its forehead was elongated and bore garishly painted scars. Two silver painted rubber bolts protruded from the neck. The unmistakable face of Frankenstein’s monster, modeled after the great Boris Karloff. When Donnie gave the mask a downward pull, Gerald recalled a painting he’d once seen in a schoolbook of a person on a bridge screaming. To complete his costume, Donnie put on an oversize navy-blue suit jacket, covered in old mud and ropy gobs of red poster paint. Donnie struggled to get it over his winter coat, but the doubling up of clothes certainly gave him that muscled look. Gerald couldn’t help but laugh.
“You look fat,” Gerald teased.
“Do not!” Donnie said out of the corner of his mouth. He sniffed hard and rubbed his nose, then he pulled a small tube of green poster paint from the suit pocket, squeezed it into his palm, and rubbed it all over the mask and his neck for good measure.
“Aww, gross!” Gerald said, grimacing at how authentically undead his friend now appeared.
“Didn’t you see the movie poster for Frankenstein? He’s green—so I have to be green. too. There’s some of my mom’s makeup in the bag
and some fake blood. Put some on your face and let’s go.”
Gerald shook his head. “Donnie, I really think we should just go home.”
His friend wiped his paint-smeared hands on his jacket, and Gerald, assuming the jacket was Donnie’s father’s, didn’t think that was a good idea.
“We do this every year—we can’t stop now. If we start door-knocking now, we should get most of the street done before the storm gets any worse. So are you coming or not?”
Gerald looked down at his mask and cape; he’d been so excited about Halloween and he couldn’t believe a blizzard was going to ruin it. He watched Donnie zip up his bag; it looked as if he was going trick-or-treating—with or without his friend.
“Donnie, we really shouldn’t—” he began.
“Oh, shouldn’t what?” Donnie said, his impatience making his Frankenstein’s monster face look even more menacing.
“Nothing.” Gerald slipped the cape over his shoulders and it billowed in the wind. He pulled on the mask, and through the narrow eye slits he saw Donnie smiling wildly.
“Awesome! You look so cool, Gerry! Come on—let’s go!”
Dracula and Frankenstein ran away from the tree, then toward 3 Blake Street, leaving a trail of ghostly snowflakes in their wake.
—
Mrs. Doris Farley barely opened her door a crack when Donnie and Gerald knocked on it. She gawked at them in disbelief over her half-moon glasses.
“What in the name of all that’s good and holy are you boys doing outside? Don’t you know there’s a storm coming?”
Donnie held out his bag and bared his teeth, trying to look as a monster should.
“It’s Halloween, Mrs. Farley,” he said.
“You boys need to get on back home. It’s too cold to be trick-or-treating.”
“Please, Mrs. Farley,” Donnie whined. “We just want to get some candy. Do you have any?”
A gust of wind burst onto Mrs. Farley’s porch, sending a swarm of snowflakes right into her face. Her subsequent squeal would have given a banshee a run for its money. She slammed the door, but not before she said: “Go home, before you freeze to death!”
The pair were left standing on the porch, shoulder to shoulder, for warmth—Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, the reanimated dead.
“What are we going to do now, Donnie?” Gerald said. “No one is going to answer their door to give us candy!”
Donnie turned and walked down the stairs, scanning Blake Street. Gerald wondered what he was looking at, because all he could see was white; the storm hung over Duluth like a death shroud.
“We can’t just give up after one house,” Donnie told him. “What about Mr. Colton’s over on Washington Street? Mrs. Colton’s always nice—she gave us homemade peanut brittle last year—remember?”
Gerald nodded at the recollection of how good Mrs. Colton’s peanut brittle was. “Maybe she’ll invite us in for a cup of cocoa?”
“Yeah,” Donnie said, before sniffing and rubbing his nose again.
Gerald pushed his friend’s shoulder playfully. “Have you been picking your nose again? It’ll make it bleed, doofus!”
“Shut up—at least it’d make my costume look more real.”
The two of them laughed in agreement and broke into a sprint toward Washington Street. They playfully jostled for front position, laughing, forgetting about the blizzard, and remembering that Halloween was all about having fun.
Gerald laughed as they ran through the snow toward the intersection of Blake and Washington. Behind him, he could hear Donnie giving chase, his boots crunching the snow, which must have been at least two feet thick on the ground now.
“Last one’s a rotten egg!” Gerald teased over his shoulder at Donnie. “Or is that…a rotten corpse?”
Gerald saw Washington Street before him; the houses nestled together, inviting yellow light glowing from the windows. But it was just as Gerald came to the point where Washington merged with Blake Street that he suddenly felt…strange. He came to a stop and stared at his boots. A moment later Donnie appeared at his side, puffing and panting.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
Gerald looked at the road surface beneath his feet, squeezed his eyes shut, and then reopened them.
“The road,” he said.
Donnie looked at the road. “Yeah, it’s a road—so what?”
Gerald pointed at it as if his friend couldn’t see it for looking. “There’s no snow on it.”
Gerald watched as the realization slowly emerged on his friend’s face; a slight dip in his eyebrows, a quizzical upward curve at the corner of his mouth.
“What—how?” Donnie said.
Gerald held out his gloved hands to the air; not a single snowflake fell on the intersection. Curiosity getting the better of him, he turned on his heels a full 180 degrees to look behind him, back up Blake Street. His gloves slowly filled up with snowflakes. Donnie copied Gerald and gasped.
“Man, that is so cool!” he said.
“It’s weird,” Gerald replied, turning back to stand in the center of the intersection. “Don’t you think it’s weird that the snow isn’t falling here on this spot?”
Donnie sniffed and rubbed his nose. “Yeah, it’s a little weird, but who cares—come on, let’s go to the Coltons’ already.”
“I don’t know, Donnie.” Gerald couldn’t take his eyes off the unblemished gray asphalt.
Donnie shoved his friend with one hand while he rubbed his nose again with the other. “Don’t be such a baby. It’s probably just the wind or something blowing up the street.” He took a step onto Washington. “Damn it!”
“What—what’s wrong?” Gerald asked, suddenly afraid to move.
Donnie stared down at his own gloved hands. “My nose!”
Gerald saw the droplets of blood on Donnie’s gloves, watched them soak into the wool. He drew his eyes up and saw a steady drip of blood falling from his friend’s left nostril, almost like a running tap.
“Oh, no!” Gerald said, stepping off the curb and onto the road toward Donnie.
The blood dripped onto the sleeve of Donnie’s jacket, down and down, to spatter across his boots. Donnie quickly clamped his hands over his nose and squeezed to stem the flow. His brown gloves became red.
“It won’t stop!” Donnie cried through his hands. His eyes were wide with panic.
Gerald knew Donnie occasionally had nosebleeds, but never one this bad. “Move your hand!” he told Donnie, reaching up to pry his hands away. “Let me have a look!”
Donnie complied, dropping his hands. The blood was running down over his lips.
“Aw, gross!” Donnie said, before turning to spit a great gob of blood onto the road. It hit the asphalt with an audible slap.
Abruptly the wind stopped howling. There was only the road, yet it was more dirt than asphalt. All the houses had disappeared; there was only the crossroads and the two boys. Gerald and Donnie looked around them. The sky was blue and cloudless. The air was warm, so warm they felt the urge to take off their winter coats.
“Where are we?” Gerald said.
Donnie let go of his nose and realized it had stopped bleeding.
“What’s happening?” he said to Gerald.
The landscape was lush and green, apart from the dirt crossroads beneath their feet. There were no structures of any kind, only a large oak tree, which cast a looming shadow over the pair. Gerald’s heart hammered against his ribs.
“Donnie—I don’t understand…”
The sound of a branch snapping made them turn. The oak tree was thick, its bark rippled and veined with age. The leaves were turning gold, heralding the rapid approach of fall.
“What was that?” Donnie said.
“I…don’t know.”
There was more rustling, too loud to simply be the wind. Then again, there was no wind, only the harshness of the sun and the tree’s shadow.
“Hello? Who’s there?” Gerald said in the direction of the tree.
The rustling ceased at the sound of Gerald’s direct question and a shape emerged from behind the tree’s broad trunk—a person. The boys saw the silhouette and wanted to run, but something even more powerful than their fear fixed them to the spot.
The stooped, thin figure shuffled toward them, bleeding out of the tree’s gray shadow to reveal itself as a woman. Her hair was knotted and black, her skirt torn, corset coming apart at the seams. These aspects, however, paled in comparison to her face, which was the color of ancient death.
There was no mistaking she was dead: the way her head rested on an angle, the way the bones of her neck bulged beneath her parchment skin. Her neck had clearly been broken—and viciously. In her gnarled right hand she held the noose that performed the deed.
“Hello, little ones,” the woman said, her voice echoing behind them, beside them, and above them.
The boys instinctively came closer to each other, out of fear.
“Is she…dead?” Donnie said, keeping his voice low.
“I…don’t know,” Gerald said.
“But look at her neck.”
The woman’s gray eyes moved from Donnie to Gerald and back again, yet her eyelids never blinked; she simply stared at them from that awful askew angle. She stepped toward them, her left foot dragging in the dirt. The boys took a step backward in response.
“It’s been an age since anyone has visited me,” the woman said through leathery lips. “So very long.”
“We’d like to go home now, please,” Gerald said, very slowly, carefully.
The woman turned her head to look at Gerald and her skull lolled forward, grinding shattered vertebrae together.
“Already?” The lips curled downward. “You have only just arrived; please stay and talk with me.”
“How did we get here?” Donnie asked, glancing furtively at the tree.
She reached up with her right hand and, very precisely touched the tip of her crooked nose.
“Your blood, child—your blood summoned you to me.”
Donnie stared at the dried blood on his gloves and suddenly felt disgust. He tore the gloves from his hands and threw them on the ground.
“I don’t want to be here anymore!” he said to the woman. “I want to go home!”
Halloween Carnival, Volume 3 Page 13
