by Mark Parker
Parker learned to hate his father even more for ruining Halloween.
***
Parker double-checked that the front porch light was turned off and retreated to his library. Dropping his briefcase to the hardwood floor, he practically collapsed into his favorite reading chair, immediately feeling at home in its soft leather embrace. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to settle his breathing.
He was feeling worse. He'd decided to skip dinner—he wasn't very hungry at all, which was unusual—and spend his evening reading and listening to music.
Parker pushed on the armrests and the chair readjusted itself into a lounger. He reached over and took his book-in-progress from the end table and rested it on his lap. He closed his eyes again (just for a second he thought), and just as he heard the first distant chatter of trick-or-treaters out on the street, he drifted off to sleep—and dreamed of his father dressed as Frankenstein chasing him down a dark sidewalk.
***
It was little surprise that a beloved book resting in his lap had helped to lull Parker to sleep. In many ways, books were his security blanket and salvation.
Not surprisingly, he had learned his love of literature from his mother. As far back as his memory stretched, he could remember his mother borrowing stacks of books from the local library and reading to him in his tiny bedroom. Reading wasn't limited to bedtime in their house; it was an any-time-of-the-day activity. It wasn't until Parker was a little older—and reading himself—that he understood what his mother was doing, what she was providing for them both.
An escape.
An escape from the nightmare world they lived in.
An escape to faraway worlds and experiences that were often magical and mysterious and, most importantly, happy.
This certainly explained why his mother read two or three books herself each week. She couldn't defend her son from the almost daily physical blows and psychological torment, but she could teach him that other worlds—better worlds—existed within his reach.
After she was gone, Parker realized that his mother had blessed him with the most precious gift of his lifetime—hope.
***
Parker awoke with a start, heart thudding in his chest, face bathed in a sheen of sweat. He jerked to a sitting position, and the book tumbled from his lap onto the floor. He couldn't remember his nightmare, but he knew it was a bad one.
He looked around the dark room, confused, the flickering orange flames from the gas fireplace the only available light.
Something was wrong—with him and the room.
I could've sworn I switched on the lights in here…and I know I didn't turn on the fireplace…and why was everything so damn blurry and out of focus?
Parker bent over and picked up the book and placed it back on the end table. His hand was shaking. He carefully got to his feet, steadying himself against the chair. He was dizzy and could feel a blue-ribbon headache blooming in the back of his head.
I'm dehydrated, he thought. Need water.
He started to shuffle his way out of the library—but stopped abruptly, legs frozen, eyes wide, when one of the shadows in the corner of the room detached itself from the wall and slithered behind a tall potted plant.
"Who's there?" Parker asked in a trembling voice. "I saw you. You can't hide in here."
There came no response.
Parker held his breath, listening for a sound of any kind.
Nothing.
Summoning courage, he took a slow, silent step forward—just as someone banged three times on the library window.
Parker let out a little scream and almost knocked over the big, museum quality globe that was the centerpiece of his library. He steadied himself again and focused on the lone window in the room, a dark square floating against an even darker backdrop. Had someone knocked on the outside of the window—or the inside?
The thought made Parker's head spin, and he brushed it aside.
Enough of this, he thought, and deliberately made his way out of the library and into the hallway. The foyer ceiling light was on, and he shielded his eyes from the sudden brightness. He started for the kitchen—
—and the front doorbell rang.
Parker froze and looked at the door. Stupid kids.
The doorbell rang again.
"Go away!" he bellowed. "No trick-or-treaters allowed!"
He was answered by a violent pounding on the door—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Using the wall to support himself, Parker shuffled into the foyer and took out an umbrella from the base of the coat rack. He held it high over his shoulder, poised to strike, and reached for the doorknob.
***
Parker yanked open the front door—“I told you kids to get out of here!”—and found the porch empty.
He squinted into the darkness, peering up and down the silent street. It was later than he thought—how long had he slept?—and the sidewalks were devoid of trick-or-treaters.
A sudden rustling noise came from the bushes that bordered the right side of the porch. Parker lifted the umbrella high above his head. "Who's there? Come out and show yourself!"
When no one answered, Parker leaned back inside the doorway and flipped on the front porch light.
He turned back to the bushes on the side of the porch—and froze in terror.
His eyes locked on a large, green puddle of rubber—a Frankenstein mask—lying on the edge of the concrete porch, and right next to it, scrawled in big, dripping red letters, a single hateful word: FAG
"Nooo!" Parker wailed.
He stumbled toward the mask, his face twisted in disbelief, and then he sniffed the faint scent of liquor in the night air. The smell struck him like a physical blow and he slammed back against the house, hitting his head against the brick and dropping the umbrella. Dad?
Rustling came from the bushes again, and this time, Parker could see the shrubs moving.
"Dad?" he whispered, not recognizing the sound of his own voice. "Is that you?"
The shrubs abruptly stopped moving. A gentle breeze stirred the bare trees. A dog barked. Somewhere down the street, a car started and drove away.
"It can't be you." Parker took a step forward, his voice louder now, already edging into panic. "You're dead. It can't be you."
Another step—and the smell of liquor touched his nose again. "Nooo! It can't be! I killed you, you son-of-a-bitch!" He surged forward. "I ran you down like the junkyard dog you are!"
He dropped to his knees and picked up the mask in both hands—and that's when his tired heart finally burst inside his chest.
Parker, a simple man with simple hopes, had just enough time to look at the mask and think Wait, this isn't Frankenstein; it's Shrek, isn't it? before everything went black and he collapsed dead to the porch floor, still grasping the rubber mask in both of his hands.
***
November 6, 2016 edition of the Baltimore Sun newspaper:
JUVENILES ARRESTED FOR HALLOWEEN PRANK GONE AWRY
Baltimore County Police Detectives made several arrests yesterday in the tragic, accidental death of Forest Hill resident and longtime Fallston Middle School teacher, Benjamin Parker.
Names are being withheld because the suspects are juveniles, but numerous sources report that three arrests were made yesterday afternoon at Fallston Middle School, including one female and two male students.
Parker, 51, a resident of the 1900 block of Hanson Road, was found dead on his front porch the morning of November 1, 2016 by concerned neighbors.
An investigation was launched after police found a hate message sprayed on Parker's front porch and a mysterious rubber mask still grasped in the deceased's hands.
While the coroner's report listed cardiac arrest as the official cause of death, subsequent toxicology reports indicated the presence of an unusually high dosage of a yet-to-be-named drug, which most likely caused blurred vision, severe confusion, heightened anxiety, and hallucinations.
An unnamed police source revealed that
one of the students allegedly spiked Parker's coffee during school hours, then all three students allegedly appeared at Parker's Hanson Road home later that October night to play a Halloween prank on him.
All three suspects are being held in the Baltimore County Eastern Precinct until a bail hearing can be arranged…
THE MAZE
Lisa Morton
Three seventeen-year-old boys and one girl stood at the front of the dilapidated farmhouse, eyeing the hand-lettered sign that read “CORN MAZE – $5 – ENTER THROUGH BACK”.
“This looks a lot more like the ‘trick’ side of ‘trick or treat’,” said Dozelle, shifting his jersey-clad bulk from one foot to the other.
Adam ran a tattooed hand through his long blonde hair, blown about by the late October breeze. “Yeah, Doze is right. This just looks lame, Sean. I hear that haunted house out by the mall will scare the shit out of you. They’ve got these guys made up as zombies who eat real raw meat—it’s just totally fucked up.”
Smirking, Ashley said, “You’re the fucked up one, if you believe those stories.”
Sean eyed the surroundings, silently debating. He was genuinely curious about elderly Miss Mackenzie, who owned the house and a couple of acres of farmland behind it. When a local blogger had reviewed her maze, he’d said that Miss Mackenzie had avoided using any of the usual agri-entertainment companies that specialized in creating corn mazes and had used her own methods of cutting the design, although she wouldn’t divulge her “trade secrets”. She was rumored to be into some strange stuff, and Sean, who’d recently developed an obsession with folklore, wanted to see the “bizarro Halloween shit” hinted at in the article.
And, although he’d never admit it to his friends, he missed trick or treat. He’d loved Halloween as a kid—the candy, the costumes, the rich feeling of being out in the night disguised as someone else, someone more powerful than Sean Andrews. He wanted to find a special Halloween experience to fill that hole. He was the only one of the quartet in costume—old moth-eaten army fatigues he’d found in the attic—because he hoped to crash some parties later in the evening, since he hadn’t actually been invited to any.
Dozelle made a dismissive gesture. “Let’s go.”
Sean was about to try to convince his friends to stay when Ashley stepped in for him. “C’mon, we can do this and still do the haunted house.” She gave Sean a slight smile, and relief flooded through him.
Adam shrugged. “What-fucking-ever. Let’s just get it over with.”
Sean led the way around the ramshackle house, its peeling sides badly in need of paint, the roof creaking two stories overhead. As they passed beneath an open window, he got a whiff of something musky and pungent, some sort of herb he couldn’t name.
“Look at this shit,” Dozelle said, standing above a little pyramid of flat stones surmounted with a small animal skull.
“Eww,” Ashley said. “Is that a cat skull on top?”
“That’s fucking weird,” Adam said.
Sean joined them, grinning. “See? This might be good after all.”
The driveway took them behind the house, where a shallow backyard opened onto a wide vista of tall corn, the stalks fading from green to gold. An old woman sat in a folding chair beside an entrance into the corn. She had a cigar box and a small stack of cards in her lap. She sat in silence as they approached, but her eyes—clear, green, strangely youthful—locked on Sean, making him uncomfortable.
“One, please,” Ashley said, thrusting a five-dollar-bill at the woman. Dozelle and Adam also held out cash. Sean fumbled in his wallet, counting out ones, still sensing her gaze on him.
Ashley took a card from the woman and said, “We read about this place in the paper. You’re Miss Mackenzie, right?”
The old woman squinted up at Ashley, giving Sean a chance to look her over. He realized she wasn’t really that old—she might have been no more than sixty. Her face held few lines, her hands were steady, but her long silver hair made her look older. She wore a simple white polo shirt and baggy chinos, but the heavy gold necklace around her throat was unusual—it was a solid band of gold, not a chain, and had no decoration. “Is that a torque?” Sean asked.
The woman smiled at him. “So it is. Not many folks know that.”
He heard Dozelle and Adam snickering, but ignored them. “I like history. In fact, I just read a book about Halloween, and it talked about the ancient Celts. That’s where I read about torques.”
“You’re a smart boy,” she said. “So you know what tonight is really all about, then.”
After a second of thought, Sean answered, “The night when the border between our world and the next is at its thinnest, and the sidh could come through, right?” He hoped he’d pronounced sidh correctly—“shee”.
Evidently he had, because the old woman nodded. “Or so the Celts believed.” She laughed, a sound that was strangely unnerving.
Sean passed his money to her, anxious to be out of her presence. She hesitated before taking it, then said, “You’ll be my last guests this year, looks like.”
Sean realized the sun was about to dip below the horizon, leaving the muddy paths between the corn stalks already deep in shadow. “Are we too late? Will we need flashlights or something?”
“Shouldn’t take you that long in there. It’ll still be light enough to see.”
Sean took the card she offered, saw it was a little hand-drawn and Xeroxed map of the maze. “Well, okay, then. Let’s get lost.”
Dozelle and Adam were already well into the maze as Ashley and Sean approached the entrance. Ashley leaned into Sean and whispered, “What are the sidh?”
“Evil fairies that the ancient Celts believed would come out on Samhain—their Halloween night.”
Ashley said, “How do you know that?”
“I was just reading this book about the history of Halloween, and about how it goes all the way back to the Celts.”
They were on the verge of stepping into the maze when Sean heard the old woman call after him, “Thank you for your sacrifice.”
Again, Ashley leaned in to ask, softly, “What did that mean?”
“Bad joke about my costume, I guess.” Something nagged at the back of Sean’s consciousness, however, and it took him a few seconds to pin it down. Halloween… history… Samhain… “That’s weird…”
Ashley asked, “What is?”
“That crack about sacrifice. Sometimes the Celts sacrificed humans on Samhain.”
Ashley mimicked gagging before saying, “Nice.”
“Actually, it was supposed to be a great honor to be chosen for the sacrifice.”
Stopping at the entrance to the maze, Ashley asked, “You mean they just went willingly? That’s crazy.”
“It is, but…yeah, I don’t get it, either.” And he didn’t; in fact, he’d rolled it around in his head for a while, and just couldn’t see how anyone could accept such a useless death. Even if you believed in all the old gods and that sacrificial deaths would appease them, why would you offer yourself? It didn’t make sense.
Adam and Dozelle were already at the first turn in the maze, peering down at the maps, shoving each other, snickering. They vanished around the turn, leaving Sean and Ashley to catch up. “I love the smell in here,” Ashley said.
Sean inhaled deeply and nodded. The smell of corn husks mixed with yesterday’s rain and fertilized earth. The corn, still mostly green this far into the season, was tall and thick, obscuring their view in all directions except the three-foot-wide path before and behind them. The sky was the blue of autumn, so deep it almost hurt to look at.
“This way,” Ashley said, tugging at his arm as they reached the turn.
Adam and Dozelle were thirty feet ahead, standing at a fork, comparing it to the map. “Which way?” Adam asked.
“Shit, man, I don’t know.”
Adam considered and then said, “Left.” They wandered off that way.
Ashley and Sean reached the branching pathways. Ashley
looked at the map, said, “I’m pretty sure it’s to the right here.”
Sean looked at his own map and agreed. “Let’s go right, then.”
“What about Doze and Adam?”
“They’ll figure it out. C’mon.”
They veered to the right. On the map, the design looked like a series of branching spirals—not the usual farm scene or logo of most corn mazes. “I wonder if this design means something,” Sean asked.
Ashley paused, her head cocked. “You know what’s weird? I can’t hear Doze and Adam at all.”
