by J. W. Ocker
“Thank you.” Tell her.
Suddenly, the phone in her hand buzzed hard enough that she almost dropped it into the grease-stained cardboard bucket that held the rest of the dismembered chicken. Douglas ignored the half of the conversation he could hear and stared at the pieces of chicken, picking at some of the crinkled skin half-heartedly. He should tell her. He wanted to tell her. Mom, I think I was chased by a monster last night.
“Okay. It’ll take me a little bit of time.” Mrs. Mortimer pushed a button on the phone, then turned to Douglas. “I’ve got to go do a removal in Singsburg. Will you be all right here by yourself for a little while?”
“Yes. I’ll be fine.” I won’t be fine. “Where’s Chris?”
“He’s off tonight. Not sure where he is.” She walked over and put a hand on her son’s forehead. Douglas felt the metal of her rings pressing cold into the thin skin of his skull. “You don’t feel hot. But maybe you should come with me.”
“No. That’s okay. Is Eddie downstairs?’
“I don’t think so. I can call and ask him to come over. Or maybe Lowell.”
“No, I’ll watch some TV or something. I’ll be fine.” The monster will come back to get me in this big, old, empty house.
She tousled his hair and left to get ready. He automatically brushed it back into place, the three strands assuming their usual positions like dutiful soldiers. He didn’t know why he didn’t tell her. In the kitchen, with a plateful of fried chicken, the rooster-dragon place mats, and the familiar jangle of his mother’s jewelry, the events of last night didn’t seem real. Maybe the whole thing had just been a nightmare. Maybe it all happened after he was safely in bed. He certainly had heard enough on that Woodsman’s stump to inspire a few pillowcases full of nightmares.
No. Something had happened. He could walk up to his room, look out the window, and see a cane and a flashlight on the lawn like the used-up artifacts of some mysterious ceremony. He wanted it all to go away. The murderer, death, the coffins downstairs, the whole entire funeral business. He sighed and bit a mouthful of dead fowl. He’d feel better tomorrow. He would tell his mom then. And deal with everything else later.
Twenty minutes after his mother had left for the removal, Douglas was still in the kitchen with his cold chicken and colder thoughts. He’d just decided to shine the comforting light of a television screen into the darker corners of his brain when the back door’s bell rang. It was a harsh buzz, distinct from the comforting chimes of the funeral home’s downstairs.
A sickeningly familiar feeling bloomed in the pit of his stomach. It was a sharp reminder of how not-dream last night was. The doorbell rang again. Wait. Do murderers ring doorbells? That didn’t seem right. The doorbell rang again. And again. Then it starting buzzing in a weird, random pattern. If there was a most annoying way to ring a doorbell, this was it. And that thought is what finally made him realize who was at the back door. It wasn’t the monster.
“Hi, Low.”
“Whoa, Doug. It looks like you left most of yourself in bed,” Lowell said as he breezed into the house, followed closely by Audrey.
Douglas immediately wished that he’d put on fresh clothes and cleaned up so that he didn’t look like a pre-Eddie corpse. “What are you guys doing here?”
“Your mom called and asked me to come over. Figured I’d get the Ghastlies together while I’m at it. Is that fried chicken?” Lowell liberated a thigh and a leg from the waxed cardboard bucket, keeping the thigh for himself and throwing the leg at Audrey’s head. She caught it with one hand and took a massive bite out of the meat. Lowell leaned against the counter, gnawing on the thigh like he’d grown up during a famine.
“Is it okay that we came? I mean, if you’re sick …” Audrey spoke between mouthfuls of chicken.
“No, it’s fine. I’m glad you came.” Douglas looked around quickly. “I’m glad you guys are here. I need to tell you something.”
“Is that where the funeral home part is? Right under us? Can we go down and see it?” Audrey was standing at the top of the stairs that led down to the family business.
“Uh … ” started Douglas before Lowell quickly cut in.
“Definitely. It’s awesome down there. You should see the coffin room.”
“Coffin room? Let’s go.”
Lowell and Audrey threw their chicken bones onto a rooster place mat and took off pounding down the stairs. It took a few more beats for Douglas to follow.
As he hit the bottom, he heard Audrey blurt out, “That is a lot of coffins. Crazy. And he sleeps upstairs?”
Audrey and Lowell were chest-deep in floating coffins, smudging brass and wood with fingers greased from chicken, peering into the depths of the boxes like they were looking for future occupants.
Audrey saw Douglas come around the corner. “Hey, Doug, what’s the difference between a coffin and a casket anyway?”
“Coffins are thinner at the feet than at the shoulders and caskets are more rectangular. We use the words the same way here, because we mostly sell caskets, but don’t want to confuse the bereaved.”
“Coffin is a much cooler word,” said Lowell.
“Look at this one,” Audrey continued as if she hadn’t even heard his answer. She was placing both her hands on a massive coffin that seemed big enough to fit two people. The dark exotic wood glowed with gold dust and was ornamented by a luxurious array of gold fittings and ivory inlays in the shapes of birds and sunbursts.
“That’s the Splendor 4000. It’s pretty expensive. I don’t think anybody’s ever bought one before.”
Lowell piped up. “I’ve always told Doug that he should convince his dad to stick some wheels on it and let Doug drive it around.”
“I suppose if you have to go, you might as well go out like this,” she said, running her fingers along an ivory flock of birds.
“Ha. No way. Not for me,” Lowell said. “See those pretty vases on the wall? That’s how I want to go. Burn me to ashes. Shove me in a vase. Stick flowers in me. Set me in the middle of the dining room table every Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
Audrey moved to a cherry wood coffin and pressed the silk lining with the flat of her hand like she was feeling for a pea. “These are all pretty cool, even the plain ones. It’s a shame they get buried.” She paused. “Can I get in one?”
“No way,” answered Lowell. “Me and Doug tried that once when we were kids. Knocked it onto the floor. Smashed one of its corners. We got in so much trouble.” He paused. “Then again, there’s three of us now, and we’re much older. We could totally …”
“I think the murderer almost got me last night.”
The room full of empty coffins suddenly seemed a lot more dead.
Lowell turned slowly toward him. “What?”
“The monster. The serial killer. After we split up, I think he chased me.”
There was another long pause as Lowell and Audrey seemed to be adjusting their realities to fit this horrifying, overwhelming new piece of information. Lowell finally broke the silence.
“You think?”
“Yeah. I mean, I heard something, so I ran and I think I was chased. I got into my room and then peeked out and thought I saw somebody, but I’m not sure. It was really dark.” Douglas cringed as he realized how uncertain it all sounded out loud.
“That’s all pretty vague,” replied Lowell. “Besides, that’s impossible. It’s Saturday.”
“Maybe you’re wrong about the whole days of the week thing.”
“I heard my father …”
“Maybe he’s wrong.”
“Maybe we have our S days confused,” offered Audrey. “Maybe the second victim was a Sunday and he needed his Saturday.”
Douglas looked at Lowell. Lowell slowly responded. “No. No. That Marvin guy was killed on a Saturday, and we didn’t leave Doug’s house until after midnight on Saturday morning. I made sure of that.”
“Doug, have you told anybody?” asked Audrey.
“Not yet. I had a r
ough night and slept all morning. Plus …”
“Plus, he’s not sure it happened,” finished Lowell.
“Still, he should at least tell his parents.”
Suddenly, a coffin door slammed shut. It was a startling sound to Douglas. Coffin lids were always gently lowered. But Lowell had done just that. He stood there beside the closed coffin, his eyes set in a hard stare. “Doug, did you see his face?”
“No.”
“Is there anything you can tell the police? What was he wearing? Was he carrying anything? Did he say something?”
“I don’t know.” Douglas paused as if having a rapid conversation with himself before continuing, “I might have heard him say something, though.”
“What?” asked Lowell.
“Maybe it was nothing.”
Lowell grunted, then tried again. “Well, what do you think you heard?”
“Something about the sun, I think. Maybe ‘sick of sun’? I’m really not sure.”
“Sick of sun,” repeated Lowell, looking around the coffin room as if he could find some kind of context for the phrase within all that merchandise of death.
“It could still be a calendar thing,” said Audrey.
“What do you mean?” asked Douglas.
“Well, if he really is killing according to the days of the week, the sun could be some kind of reference to daytime. He might even have been saying, Sunday.”
“All right,” said Lowell, “Let’s keep thinking about that. But, most important, we have no evidence we can take to your parents or my dad, right?”
“No … no.” Douglas could barely contain a shiver at the memory of what little he could remember.
Lowell nodded. “In that case, we can’t tell anybody. Not parents. Not police. We have to keep this to ourselves.”
“What? Low, that’s ridiculous,” said Audrey, crossing her arms tightly in front of her, her ring catching light and flickering like purple fire. “We have to tell someone. To protect Doug and to let the police know that they might be wrong about this whole day of the week idea. They have to know.”
“Listen,” Lowell said. “We don’t even know if he saw anything. Sorry, Doug, we just don’t. It was a spooky night. We all get the creeps. Remember that night in the cemetery I saw a UFO?”
“Thought you saw a UFO,” said Douglas.
“Exactly. And if you tell a coffee-drinker, the police will be no closer to finding this monster than they are if you don’t tell them. We don’t have anything new. Not a description of his face, nothing about his clothes, not a single piece of evidence that will help the investigation. And this day of the week thing …” Lowell stopped and looked down at the carpet. “I think maybe we timed it too tight. Or I did, anyway. It was only an hour from Friday. Maybe the killer doesn’t care about being exact.” He turned back to Douglas. “That was completely my fault. I didn’t think about that. I’m sorry, man.”
Douglas barely made eye contact with him—with either Ghastly, in fact. The whole conversation was making him uncomfortable.
“What about the ‘sick of sun’ clue?” interjected Audrey. “That’s got to be worth something to the police.”
Lowell shook his head. “I doubt it. If it is a day of the week reference, it’s nothing we don’t already know. It’s not enough. Not enough to risk the consequences.”
“Consequences?” asked Audrey.
“Thanks to this monster on the loose, all the coffee-drinkers are already overprotective of us. I mean, for goodness sake, my dad is working the night shift tonight, and he hired a babysitter to stay with me and my brother. He’s never done that. I’m almost fourteen! It made it really hard to sneak out last night. If the coffee-drinkers hear about us poking around in this, it’ll be worse than an entire summer of grounding.
“More important, we won’t be able to help catch the monster. He might get away. Kill even more people. There are five more days in this killer’s week. Five more people who could die. We can’t let that happen. So we mistimed last night. It’s not a mistake we’ll make again.” He turned to Douglas. “I mean it, Doug. Nothing good will come of telling the coffee-drinkers. I mean, wish I would have stayed with you last night until you got inside, but from now on, we’ll be a whole lot more careful. Never leave each other alone. And we can always tell my dad later if we have to. But for now, we can’t … tell … anybody.”
The three friends looked at one another in silence, surrounded by coffins in a town tainted by murder. Douglas looked up at the urns and imagined his grandmother’s photo glaring down in disapproval.
The sudden sound of a door slamming and keys landing loudly on a countertop told them one of Douglas’s parents had returned.
OCTOBER 1
SATURDAY
“The killer is definitely here.” Lowell shaded his eyes with his hand in the late morning sunlight as he surveyed the tableau in front of him. Behind him, the large jaws of a monster threatened to devour him in a single bite.
“Yeah, everybody’s here,” said Douglas.
The Ghastlies stood on a rise at one end of the fairgrounds. As far as they could see, the world was covered in golden tents that looked as if they had sprung up wherever a falling leaf had hit the ground. Where there wasn’t a tent, there were massive machines spinning and shaking, moving up and down, swinging back and forth. The rides looked as if they had been put together yesterday, but also like they had been standing there making those same movements for eons. People filled the spaces in between like they were the first modern humans allowed to visit a newly discovered jungle city or some ancient metropolis dug out from millennia of dry lava or pulled fresh from the ocean where it had sunk.
The sounds that gave the new and ancient tent city life were terrible: barn animal brays and snorts and bleats; clangs and clatters and bells and screams and yells from rides and games; tinny, repetitive music forced out of beat-up speakers. Horrible noises, one and all, that together swelled into mysterious harmonies so invigorating that nature and town both shut up and deferred to it.
As giddy as the sights and sounds were, it was the smells that really defined the carnival. Had the mythical sirens been bakers instead of singers, this is the aroma that would have driven sailors mad: fresh, sugared dough and cotton candy so thick and sweet it confused the bees into trying to help pollinate the fluffy pink flowers on their white stems. Sausages so savory and greasy they needed no mustard, no bun, just a coat of aluminum foil to keep them warm and keep fingers clean. Heaping lobster rolls so buttery, bright, and delicious that it was inconceivable that they came from some mere bottom-feeder out of the dark ocean. Spiced apple cider and pumpkin pies and onion rings like Saturn’s own, and turkey legs the size of dinosaur bones. It was all enough to pull a grown man nose-first through the air like a cartoon character.
The Cowlmouth Fall Carnival was like an aligning of the planets. Everything was right about it.
Except for the murderer that some unsuspecting ticket taker had allowed onto the grounds.
Douglas, Lowell, and Audrey had met about half an hour earlier, at the monster with the wide-open maw. Its face was black, with spiral eyes, long red horns that almost touched at the top, and a red and pointy nose. Its mouth was large enough to swallow all three Ghastlies without having to wash them down. Tattooed on the tractor trailer body of the monster was a chaos of evil creatures in faded comic book colors that would have tested the bounds of the collected knowledge of Moss and Feaster. Pale letters like ghosts drifted through the fangs and claws and scales and scowls, dubbing the dark ride THE SOUL TAKER.
The three friends had to squeeze into a tiny metal car that clack-clacked them along a track, past the teeth of the demon, and into the total darkness of its gullet. First came the sounds: the driving music, the screams of victims and howls of their victimizers. The rain and thunder. The random bits of dialogue and maniacal laughter of long-dead black-and-white horror movie actors. Every jerky turn meant a sore neck and the revelation of some dim
ly lit piece of papier-mâché or cardboard monster that jumped out with a pneumatic hiss and a caterwaul. Every once in a while, fake lightning flashes revealed more intricate scenes, like plastic skeletons manacled to the wall or a decapitated mannequin in a cape pulling his own head from a magician’s hat or a cannibal feast of rubber body parts. It took two minutes to get through the whole thing, and it was incredibly cheesy. They’d ridden it three times so far.
“What does a killer look like in the daylight?” asked Douglas.
“He probably has a mustache. Black and waxy and curled at the tips. He’ll be twirling it,” said Audrey.
“We’re looking for somebody who’s really scrutinizing the crowds, sizing everybody up,” Lowell replied.
“Like we’re doing,” said Douglas.
“On the other hand, the killer could be in Dr. Jekyll mode. He could be somebody we’re all familiar with, someone friendly, chatting everybody up and having a good time.”
“Like we should be doing,” said Douglas.
“Whoever he is,” said Lowell, “There’s a lot of carnival down there. We better get searching.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open, but I’m going to have to catch up with you guys later,” said Audrey. “I have to meet my folks for pictures.”
“Pictures?”
“Yeah, some booth is doing weird family photos or something. You know, everybody in cowboy hats or hula skirts in front of a green screen. Real dumb, so of course Dad and Mom want to do it.”
“Well, that’s a picture you should hope never gets around school, so don’t let me get my hands on it. You want to meet up in, say, two hours over by the Ferris wheel?” asked Lowell.
As Audrey disappeared into the crowd, Douglas turned to Lowell. “Where should we start?”
“First things first.” Lowell marched down the hill and into a corridor of food stands. Lining both sides of the wide, hard-packed dirt path were endless rows of vendors selling everything a person needed to both love and hate life. Lowell seemed to show little interest in the offerings as he strutted determinedly down the center of the path. Neither the soft pretzel seller nor the funnel cake vendor nor the popcorn stand snagged so much as a sniff from the lanky boy. At one point, they passed a small plywood booth advertising hot dogs. It was manned by a human-sized cardboard cutout of a familiar hot dog with arms, legs, and a creepy-happy face. A sign on the booth read, IN MEMORY OF IRWIN STAUFFER. This was the first Cowlmouth Fall Carnival that the hot dog vendor had missed in more than half a century.
