Dark Hallows: 10 Halloween Haunts

by Mark Parker

  I handed her the tequila bottle. There was a lot left in it.

  Her hands shook as she took it. The clear, clean liquor swirled. The worm did a little dance. I turned away and left the room, but not fast enough to miss the gentle slosh as she tipped back the bottle.

  I knew that worm didn’t stand a chance.

  ***

  I don’t know why I went out to the garage. I had to go somewhere, and I guess that’s where a lot of men go when they want to be alone.

  I shuffled some stuff around in my toolbox. Cleaned up the workbench. Changed the oil in the truck. Knowing that I should get rid of the pumpkin mask, but just puttering around instead.

  All the time thinking. Questions spinning around in my head.

  Wondering if Helen would talk.

  Wondering if I’d really be able to pin the clerk’s murder on the Mexican girls. Not only if the charges would stick, but if I had enough left in me to go through with it.

  Wondering if my deputies would find Johnny’s corpse, or his El Camino, or if he’d left any other surprises for me that I didn’t know about.

  They were the kind of questions that had been eating at me for thirty years, and I was full up with them.

  My breaths were coming hard and fast. I leaned against the workbench, staring down at the pumpkin mask. Didn’t even know I was crying until my tears fell on oily rubber.

  It took me a while to settle down.

  I got a .45 out of my tool chest. The silencer was in another drawer. I cleaned the gun, loaded it, and attached the silencer.

  I stared at the door that led to the kitchen, and Helen. Those same old questions started spinning again. I closed my eyes and shut them out.

  And suddenly I pictured Johnny Halloween down in Mexico, imagined all the fun he’d had over the years with his pretty boys and his money. Not my kind of fun, sure. But it must have been something.

  I guess the other guy’s life always seems easier. Sometimes I think even Willie’s life was easier. I didn’t want to start thinking that way with a gun in my hands.

  I opened my eyes.

  I unwrapped a Snickers bar, opened the garage door. The air held the sweet night like a sponge. The sky was going from black to purple, and soon it would be blue. The world smelled clean and the streets were empty. The chocolate tasted good.

  I unscrewed the silencer. Put it and the gun in the glove compartment along with the three hundred and fifteen bucks Johnny Halloween had stolen from the liquor store.

  Covered all of it with the pumpkin mask.

  I felt a little better, a little safer, just knowing it was there.

  ALL SOULS’ DAY

  Al Sarrantonio

  Orangefield seen from the air by the hawk:

  A thin ribbon of highway to the East, a shivering long snake now seen, now lost between tall stands of tight pine trees and conifers and oaks. The trees were colorful now, dressed like costumers in red, yellow, brown. To the West were mountains, a string of high hills like low jagged teeth against the landscape. The tops were dusted bare white. And then there was the town directly below.

  The hawk made a wide lazy gyre, looking down, and dropped lower. The spire of a church, white-crossed, and next to it a parking lot. Something small moved on the tarmac, and for a moment the hawk was distracted. A rodent? No, only a piece of balled-up paper, pushed by the wind. The hawk resumed his inventory. Another tall building, with a dirty flat roof but stately-looking brick on the sides. Steps leading up to it. The town hall, flanked by a long block of shops broken by side streets. The hawk knew those side streets—good hunting, there, mice and the occasional rat or treeless squirrel. A gas station across the road, next to it a small motel, its L shape squaring off its small asphalt parking lot.

  Farther down, the Orangefield Hotel, nearly as old as the town, its flat roof old and cracked, but its red-bricked façade, recently restored, as beautiful as the day it opened.

  The hawk flew on, its wing tips barely fluttering as it soared on the westerly breeze.

  More shops—a coffee shop, a toy store, a fairly new wine shop where a furniture refinisher used to be.

  A single-level Barnes and Noble bookstore on the corner, butted up against a flower shop and then a women’s dress shop.

  Directly across the street, an outdoor clothier, one of many pubs, a shop featuring gewgaws and glass pieces.

  A swoop to the right again, and then the new construction, a row of old warehouses turned into condominiums, the new clean square windows glinting in the sun.

  And then Ranier Park.

  The hawk circled, dropped even lower. What it sought was here, though it was neither rodent nor bird. The trees thickened, then spread out again to a flat expanse of fairground where even now the Pumpkin Days festival tents were being erected: new colors this year, a huge green-and-white striper flanked by two red-and-white striped tents. Gone were the orange-and-white tents of other years.

  The hawk had no opinion, but caught at the moment a slight updraft, drifting upward as the workers below stopped to look up at his passage.

  The trees thickened again, a stand of pines giving way to sturdy oaks.

  The hawk dropped suddenly, folding his wings sleekly against his body as if in attack.

  The ground, he noted with disinterest, was covered in this spot with fallen acorns.

  He landed in a bare spot, folded his wings, and waited.

  Not for long: almost immediately the black cape swirled into his razor-sharp vision and settled in front of him.

  The paste-white face with its black hollows where eyes should be, regarded him with amusement, and the red slit of a mouth smiled thinly.

  “Of all the creatures on Earth,” Samhain, the Lord of the Dead, said, his thin voice filled with a kind of mirth, “I enjoy the company of your own species only next to that of the humans. Like them you kill with impunity, but yours is a pure lust for death. It is as built into your little brain as if you were a machine.”

  The hawk’s black eyes stared unblinking, and he rustled his feathers—perhaps in pleasure at the remark?

  “Here,” Samhain said, “is who you must help me kill.”

  ***

  Tom Winters hated his name, and he hated Orangefield.

  Damned woman, he thought, if only your damned family had been born somewhere else. Anywhere else.

  He lifted his axe, pretending for the twentieth time that he was bringing it down on his wife’s skull instead of a chunk of firewood.

  The axe hit square, split the log in half. Winters immediately picked up one of the fallen halves and split it again.

  Thwwwwwack!

  Again he thought of his wife’s head.

  Damned woman

  Something blotted out the sun and he looked up, dropping the axe to his side and wiping at his brow with his other hand.

  A hawk?

  The thing came down at him like a bullet—and a moment later he was screaming, dropping the axe and holding both hands over his eyes, abruptly blind, and the thing was now on his face, all claws and beak, driving at him like a piston, pecking deep into his ears and tearing at his cheeks and chin and then he felt the beast’s entire head, beak-first, driving into his mouth and he was suddenly choking and the thing, the beak, was down into his throat and he fought for breath which he no longer had—

  ***

  Cathy Berrins was looking forward to the Pumpkin Days festival. Her fifth grade class had done a banner: WELCOME AUTUMN! outlined in orange crepe paper, and she herself had painted, at home, a beautiful pumpkin in finger paints, swirls of black and of course orange, with glowing yellow in the triangular eye holes and, for a change, a round nose and straight mouth with no teeth. She thought it looked grand.

  I wish I’d always lived in Orangefield! She thought, as she closed the front door of her home, adjusting the rolled-up poster board with the painted pumpkin on it under the crook of her left arm. The day was bright steel blue, a perfect autumn morning, with no clouds ex
cept for the clouds of breath that came out of her mouth when she breathed.

  She turned right, waving to her friend Pat Wiggins, who had lived here all her life and was already standing at the bus stop, a half block ahead.

  There came a sound and Cathy turned to see the bus, a little early, just braking with a squeal around the corner behind her.

  She broke into a run, ducking beneath the branches of the low-hanging oaks that lined the street.

  “Hurry! You’ll miss the bus!” Pat shouted in encouragement.

  There was a sudden sharp sting at the back of Cathy’s head.

  She turned to see something large and covered in feathers just alighting on her shoulder.

  Its claws felt like knives driving into her.

  “Ohhh!” she breathed, dropping her poster board, which opened, face-up, on the sidewalk.

  She fell on her back, and saw the huge bird hovering above her, its black, blank eyes unreadable.

  There were screams in her ears, perhaps her own.

  And then nothing.

  ***

  Jerry Reese wiped sweat from his brow, even though the day was chilly. He was thinking not of Halloween or Orangefield or anything else, just getting to his next beer.

  The cooler next to him was empty, had been for a half hour. But he had another fourteen fence posts to put up before he could take a break, and knew old man Matheson was watching him, one way or another.

  Old fucker’s got radar in his head, Jerry thought.

  Good day, for the middle of autumn. Sun was warm, and the wash of air through the trees made it much more pleasant than August.

  Not a bad place to be, for an itinerant worker who hated to be anyplace very long.

  Beer, he thought.

  He could almost taste the Budweiser on his lips, down his throat.

  That’s what I do, live from Bud to Bud.

  He laughed, rammed the fence post digger into the ground, striking a rock.

  Shit.

  Then the ground shifted slightly to the left, freed the digger, and his hole was complete.

  Good day! He thought.

  A shadow passed over the sun—he looked up and saw nothing but a black streak in his peripheral vision.

  There was a thumping sound to his right, and he looked down.

  Holy shit!

  A huge bird was sitting on his empty cooler, regarding him with cold black eyes.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Jerry said, the first words he had uttered out loud all day.

  The gigantic bird folded its wings tight against its flanks, continuing to look at him.

  Without thinking, half-drunk, Jerry swung his post hole digger at the creature, miraculously catching it on the side of the head.

  The bird fell off the cooler and lay inert.

  Jerry hit it again, a high arcing shot from above.

  “One dead bird!” Jerry said out loud, and barked a short laugh. “Teach you to fuck with my beer cooler.”

  The hawk’s crushed head looked up at him with one ebony eye, popped from its socket, still cold.

  Jerry slid the toe of his boot under the carcass, and flipped the dead creature away from the cooler.

  He opened the cooler, reached into the cold ice water, and drew out a last beer, miraculously hidden under the ice, popped the top and drank half of it down.

  He belched.

  He picked up the post hole digger and continued working.

  Like I said: one dead bird.

  ***

  Samhain waited impatiently in his woods. Overhead, through a gap in the nude-fingered branches, the October moon, nearly full, danced whitely among scudding clouds. A breeze had risen, and the air was colder, just as it should be on Halloween.

  Samhain’s cape moved open, closed, as his black eyes stared unblinking at the spot where the bird should have returned by now with its prizes.

  He knew, suddenly, that letting the hawk do his work was a mistake.

  After all, he thought, it’s only an animal. A mostly sentient and interesting one—but, still, not human.

  And now it was too late to recruit a human to finish the job.

  He would have to do it himself.

  He nearly sighed with displeasure—he had long since hoped to relinquish this part of his job to others.

  As if reading his mind, the Dark One’s thoughts entered his own.

  “Where is my tribute?” the Dark One said. “Three lives every Halloween?”

  “Soon,” Samhain answered.

  “Lazy, are we?” the Dark One replied. There was no humor in the voice, only an immensity of cold emptiness.

  “There are two, and one yet to go,” Samhain said.

  “Before midnight, Samhain. Don’t disappoint me.”

  “Have I ever?”

  In answer, there was instant, frigid silence, and Samhain smiled grimly.

  ***

  The beer cooler was now completely empty.

  Jerry hadn’t even remembered passing out—he was supposed to be in Finnegan’s Bar by now, continuing the evening’s drinking. He angled his watch up at the moon—and at that point, it went behind a cloud. But he thought he saw the small hand pointed between the eleven and twelve.

  Late, he thought. Dammit. The bastards’ll drink up all the beer without me.

  He dropped the lid of the cooler and something freezing brushed across his face—the fabric of a coat.

  A cape.

  Someone was standing there in front of him.

  “What the f—?” Jerry said.

  “You killed the hawk?” a low voice said. It sounded hollow, like it was not used to speaking.

  “You bet your ass I did,” Jerry said, backing away from the caped thing, which had a funny pale face and thin lips that looked like they were a red line of lipstick. “Got in my way, and was fucking with my beer.”

  And the eyes looked hollow.

  He kept backing away, and tripped over something—the post hole digger. He went down but moved his hand around and took hold of the tool.

  The cape moved up and over him, and he brandished the digger like a weapon in front of him.

  “I killed that goddamned bird, and I’ll kill you too!”

  The cape moved up and over him, and drew very close.

  It became the night, the world.

  Jerry dropped the post hole digger and gave a single muffled scream.

  This time, Samhain did sigh.

  The night moved quietly from October 31st to November 1st.

  All Saints’ Day, Samhain considered. Followed by All Souls’ Day. The day of the faithful departed.

  The moon was clear of clouds suddenly, and gave a silver-white sheen to the field, which was dotted with a neat line of empty fence post holes.

  Samhain hovered over the dead hawk, and something like pity rose in his hollow breast.

  He reached a pale, long-fingered white hand down and cradled the bird.

  It felt light, insubstantial.

  He sought to lift it, then let it drop.

  “Faithful departed,” he whispered.

  STARTING EARLY

  Adam Cesare

  The feeling peaked at age twelve and it’s been a case of diminishing returns every year since.

  I still chase the high, though.

  And I begin to chase it early in the season.

  The checkout girl is more dead-eyed than usual as she swipes the barcodes on my bags of candy corn and individually wrapped Reese’s.

  Supermarkets are one of the first places to start putting out their Halloween supplies, beginning with candy. Pharmacies are a close second, and they usually put out decorations and candy at the same time.

  All that’s true unless you count party stores, a few of which keep a dedicated costume and decorations aisle year-round.

  There’s a Party City not far from where I live, but I haven’t owned a working car in years, and the bus lines going out there don’t seem worth the effort. So I settle for the supermarket,
at least until the CVS up the block starts putting out their masks, window clings, and singing candy bowls.