They were sharing glasses of wine and laughing at the conversation of a nearby man who was clumsily hitting on a much younger man when a huge, gong-like sound silenced everything. At first Marcus thought it was only in his app, but when he saw the looks on all the other faces, saw their heads tilt up as chatter ceased, he knew it was something played over the speakers.
DONG … DONG … DONG …
“Oh,” Olivia said, “it’s midnight.”
Dread blossomed in Marcus’s gut.
He found himself counting the sounds—six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven …
At twelve, a handsome man in a tuxedo appeared before Marcus. It took Marcus a few minutes to identify him: he couldn’t remember the actor’s name, but he knew the character was Dr. Jekyll, from an old black-and-white movie.
“Midnight has arrived, dear friends,” Dr. Jekyll said, “and so it’s time to reveal the secret behind The Ultimate Halloween Party App. Some of you have wondered how to turn the app off or remove it. The truth is: You can’t. The app is now coded permanently into your ’plants.”
Marcus heard two hundred gasps, cries, and mutters. Beside him, he felt Olivia tense.
Dr. Jekyll continued. “Over thirty million of you downloaded and installed the app. We hope you’re enjoying it, because you’ll be living with it now for the rest of your lives. Victory to the Walden Movement!”
Dr. Jekyll shook, shimmied, doubled over—and rose up as the animalistic Mr. Hyde, who lunged at Marcus. Marcus drew back, and saw that the app had transformed everyone in the party into a monster. Nearby, Olivia cried softly, her eyes closed tightly. “No … no … no… .” she murmured.
Marcus sat by her, taking her hands. “Olivia, just remember: it’s not real. None of it is real.”
She didn’t open her eyes, or stop crying. “I know, but—I still see them even with my eyes closed.”
Marcus shut his own eyes. The room went away, but the monsters were still there, clawing and hissing and snarling at him. “Oh my God,” he said. There would be no shutting them out.
Screams sounded around them; he knew everyone else had discovered the app’s real abilities as well. Somebody shouted, “Maybe it’ll stop when we’re away from this house.” The party-goers rushed for the front entrance.
Marcus turned to Olivia. “That could be right—surely you can’t write an app that takes complete control of vision. Maybe he’s beaming something through the party. Once we get out of here—”
Olivia didn’t answer, but she did open her eyes and allow Marcus to pull her along with the crowd.
It took five minutes of pushing and elbowing, but the front door was open, the street outside was clear, and they were free of the house.
But the monsters were still there. A glowing red blob slid down over the side of the building across the street; Marcus could see half-digested bodies within it. He heard a gigantic scream resonate through the night sky, and knew that any second a giant reptilian foot might smash down beside him.
“Let’s get to the car,” he said.
They made it to the garage. Marcus found that he could at least access his other apps, so he called the car. It arrived and they fell in, numb, drained.
On the ride home, they talked. “I wonder how long your friend’s been part of the Walden Movement. I think they usually recruit pretty young.”
Marcus felt shame, as if he had committed the act of terrorism tonight. “Probably the whole time I knew him.” He reminded himself that Olivia had already preordered the app anyway, but he still felt guilty.
“Do you think he was even at the party tonight?”
Marcus started to protest, but then remembered: Jet had refused their usual handshake when they’d arrived. “God. Probably not. He’s somewhere safe, where they can’t get to him.”
Olivia stayed with Marcus that night, but they clutched at each other out of horror, not desire. The last thing Marcus said to her just before dawn was, “Don’t forget who we work for—a ’plant company. By twelve noon we can have these ’plants out of our heads.”
She gave him a half-nod, but then flinched at another gruesome offering from The Ultimate Halloween Party App.
Fuck this shit.
They told me to try writing about all this in third person, that it would help me “gain distance” and “separate truth from fantasy.” They said it would help me “process Olivia’s death” and prepare me for the next step.
It didn’t. All it did was make me remember it all over again.
After that Halloween, people all over the world tried to have their ’plants replaced. Most neuroclinics were reporting six-month-long wait times.
I did manage to pull strings at my company so that Olivia and I were among the first to get our ’plants pulled.
It didn’t work.
Jet and his team had taken the next step forward with apps: they’d figured out a way to use one to permanently rewire the brain. It was theoretical … until Halloween, when thirty million people thought they were installing an innocent party game, but the trick was that the treat was permanent.
A lot of them couldn’t take a life of monsters, or ghosts. The ones who chose Gore Factory had it the worst. Suicide rates skyrocketed.
It was ironic that Halloween became the source of so much real terror, wasn’t it?
Two weeks after Jet’s party, Olivia drove a steak knife through each of her eyes. She bled to death alone on the floor of my apartment while I was at work. I found her when I got home. Now, thanks to my new brain, I see her as a shroud-draped vampire, or a tattered, shuffling zombie. They tell me it’s not real, but it grabs my heart and hurts every time.
I don’t even know for sure who “they” are. Government, or a rival terrorist gang, it seems all the same to me.
They came a week after Olivia’s self-mercy-killing. They said they couldn’t reverse the damage the Halloween app had done to my brain, but they could put it to use. Did I want to fight terrorists?
No, not really, I told them.
Then they asked me the better question: Did I want to fight monsters?
Yes. God, yes.
So I let them give me a new ’plant. It at least lets me know if a monster is real or not, and who it is. I can now identify friend from foe, flesh from phantom. They taught me how to use weapons. They’re ready now to send me out into the field.
I may not be able to get to Jet for what he’s done, but I can take out some of his friends.
I’m coming for you, monsters. I’ve got a stake sharpened for you, Count. Igor, I’ll take that tiki torch and douse it in gasoline. Im-ho-tep, what will rockets do to your wrappings?
Let’s find out.
THE FOLDING MAN
JOE R. LANSDALE
Joe R. Lansdale has published more than forty-five novels, dozens of novellas, and over four hundred short stories and articles. He has written for Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series; his novella Bubba Ho-Tep was filmed by director Don Coscarelli and starred Bruce Campbell, and his novel Cold in July was made into a movie starring Michael C. Hall, Don Johnson, and the late Sam Shepard. More recently, his series of books about the eponymous oddball couple has been adapted for the Sundance Channel as Hap and Leonard, featuring James Purefoy and Michael Kenneth Williams.
Lansdale has been named a Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. His other awards include ten Bram Stoker Awards from the HWA, an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for his novel The Bottoms, and a Spur Award from The Western Writers of America for his novel Paradise Sky.
“Growing up,” recalls the author, “I heard the story now and again about the black car, or the old black buggy, that would come to pick people up and take them away to some place darker than here.
“I thought about that old tale, and tried to put a modern spin on it. The result was ‘The Folding Man,’ which came to me quickly and was writ
ten quickly. Once the story arrived, it had to be told.”
THEY HAD COME from a Halloween party, having long shed the masks they’d worn. No one but Harold had been drinking, and he wasn’t driving, and he wasn’t so drunk he was blind. Just drunk enough he couldn’t sit up straight and was lying on the back seat, trying, for some unknown reason, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which he didn’t accurately recall. He was mixing in verses from “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Boy Scout oath, which he vaguely remembered from his time in the organization before they drove him out for setting fires.
Even though William, who was driving, and Jim who was riding shotgun, were sober as Baptists claimed to be, they were fired up and happy and yelling and hooting, and Jim pulled down his pants and literally mooned a black bug of a car carrying a load of nuns.
The car wasn’t something that looked as if it had come off the lot. Didn’t have the look of any carmaker Jim could identify. It had a cobbled look. It reminded him of something in old movies, the ones with gangsters who were always squealing their tires around corners. Only it seemed bigger, with broader windows through which he could see the nuns, or at least glimpse them in their habits; it was a regular penguin convention inside that car.
Way it happened, when they came up on the nuns, Jim said to William at the wheel, “Man, move over close, I’m gonna show them some butt.”
“They’re nuns, man.”
“That’s what makes it funny,” Jim said.
William eased the wheel to the right, and Harold in the back said, “Grand Canyon. Grand Canyon. Show them the Grand Canyon … Oh, say can you see… .”
Jim got his pants down, swiveled on his knees in the seat, twisted so that his ass was against the glass, and just as they passed the nuns, William hit the electric window switch and slid the glass down. Jim’s ass jumped out at the night, like a vibrating moon.
“They lookin’?” Jim asked.
“Oh, yeah,” William said, “and they are not amused.”
Jim jerked his pants up, shifted in the seat, and turned for a look, and sure enough, they were not amused. Then a funny thing happened, one of the nuns shot him the finger, and then others followed. Jim said, “Man, those nuns are rowdy.”
And now he got a good look at them, even though it was night, because there was enough light from the headlights as they passed for him to see faces hard as wardens and ugly as death warmed over. The driver was especially homely, face like that could stop a clock and run it backward or make shit crawl uphill.
“Did you see that they shot me the finger?” Jim said.
“I did see it,” William said.
Harold had finally gotten “The Star-Spangled Banner” straight, and he kept singing it over and over.
“For Christ’s sake,” William said. “Shut up, Harold.”
“You know what,” Jim said, studying the rearview mirror, “I think they’re speeding up. They’re trying to catch us. Oh, hell. What if they get the license plate? Maybe they already have. They call the law, my dad will have my mooning ass.”
“Well, if they haven’t got the plate,” William said, “they won’t. This baby can get on up and get on out.”
He put his foot on the gas. The car hummed as if it had just had an orgasm, and seemed to leap. Harold was flung off the back seat, onto the floorboard. “Hey, goddammit,” he said.
“Put on your seat belt, jackass,” Jim said.
William’s car was eating up the road. It jumped over a hill and dove down the other side like a porpoise negotiating a wave, and Jim thought: Goodbye, penguins, and then he looked back. At the top of the hill were the lights from the nun’s car, and the car was gaining speed and it moved in a jerky manner, as if it were stealing space between blinks of the eye.
“Damn,” William said. “They got some juice in that thing, and the driver has her foot down.”
“What kind of car is that?” Jim said.
“Black,” William said.
“Ha! Mr. Detroit.”
“Then you name it.”
Jim couldn’t. He turned to look back. The nun’s car had already caught up—the big automotive beast was cruising in tight as a coat of varnish, the headlights making the interior of William’s machine bright as a Vegas act.
“What the hell they got under the hood?” William said. “Hyper-drive?”
“These nuns,” Jim said, “they mean business.”
“I can’t believe it, they’re riding my bumper.”
“Slam on your brakes. That’ll show them.”
“Not this close,” William said. “Do that, what it’ll show them is the inside of our butts.”
“Do nuns do this?”
“These do.”
“Oh,” Jim said. “I get it. Halloween. They aren’t real nuns.”
“Then we give them hell,” Harold said, and just as the nuns were passing on the right, he crawled out of the floorboard and onto his seat and rolled the window down. The back window of the nun’s car went down and Jim turned to get a look, and the nun, well, she was ugly all right, but uglier than he had first imagined. She looked like something dead, and the nun’s outfit she wore was not actually black and white, but purple and white, or so it appeared in the light from head-beams and moonlight. The nun’s lips pulled back from her teeth and the teeth were long and brown, as if tobacco-stained. One of her eyes looked like a spoiled meatball, and her nostrils flared like a pig’s.
Jim said, “That ain’t no mask.”
Harold leaned way out of the window and flailed his hands and said, “You are so goddamn ugly you have to creep up on your underwear.”
Harold kept on with this kind of thing, some of it almost making sense, and then one of the nuns in the back, the one closest to the window, bent over in the seat and came up and leaned out of the window, a two-by-four in her hands. Jim noted that her arms, where the nun outfit had fallen back to the elbows, were as thin as sticks and white as the underbelly of a fish, and the elbows were knotty and bent in the wrong direction.
“Get back in,” Jim said to Harold.
Harold waved his arms and made another crack, and then the nun swung the two-by-four, the oddness of her elbows causing it to arrive at a weird angle, and the board made a crack of its own, or rather Harold’s skull did, and he fell forward, the lower-half of his body hanging from the window, bouncing against the door, his knuckles losing meat on the highway, his ass hanging inside, one foot on the floorboard, the other waggling in the air.
“The nun hit him,” Jim said. “With a board.”
“What?” William said.
“You deaf? She hit him.”
Jim snapped lose his seat belt and leaned over and grabbed Harold by the back of the shirt and yanked him inside. Harold’s head looked like it had been in a vice. There was blood everywhere. Jim said, “Oh, man, I think he’s dead.”
BLAM!
The noise made Jim jump. He slid back in his seat and looked toward the nuns. They were riding close enough to slam the two-by-four into Williams’s car; the driver was pressing that black monster toward them.
Another swing of the board and the side-mirror shattered.
William tried to gun forward, but the nun’s car was even with him, pushing him to the left. They went across the highway and into a ditch and the car did an acrobatic twist and tumbled down an embankment and rolled into the woods tossing up mud and leaves and pine straw.
Jim found himself outside the car, and when he moved, everything seemed to whirl for a moment, then gathered up slowly and became solid. He had been thrown free, and so had William, who was lying nearby. The car was a wreck, lying on its roof, spinning still, steam easing out from under the hood in little cotton-white clouds. Gradually, the car quit spinning, like an old-time watch that had wound down. The windshield was gone and three of the four doors lay scattered about.
The nuns were parked up on the road, and the car doors opened and the nuns got out. Four of them. They were unusually tall, and
when they walked, like their elbows, their knees bent in the wrong direction. It was impossible to tell this for sure, because of the robes they wore, but it certainly looked that way, and considering the elbows, it fit. There in the moonlight, they were as white and pasty as pot stickers, their jaws seeming to have grown longer than when Jim had last looked at them, their noses witch-like, except for those pig-flair nostrils, their backs bent like longbows. One of them still held the two-by-four.
Jim slid over to William, who was trying to sit up.
“You okay?” Jim asked.
“I think so,” William said, patting his fingers at a blood spot on his forehead. “Just before they hit, I stupidly unsnapped my seat belt. I don’t know why. I just wanted out I guess. Brain not working right.”
“Look up there,” Jim said.
They both looked up the hill. One of the nuns was moving down from the highway, toward the wrecked car.
“If you can move,” Jim said, “I think we oughta.”
William worked himself to his feet. Jim grabbed his arm and half-pulled him into the woods, where they leaned against a tree. William said. “Everything’s spinning.”
“It stops soon enough,” Jim said.
“I got to chill, I’m about to faint.”
“A moment,” Jim said.
The nun who had gone down by herself, bent down out of sight behind William’s car, then they saw her going back up the hill, dragging Harold by his ankle, his body flopping all over as if all the bones had been broken.
“My God, see that?” William said. “We got to help.”
“He’s dead,” Jim said. “They crushed his head with a board.”
“Oh, hell, man. That can’t be. They’re nuns.”
“I don’t think they are,” Jim said. “Least not the kind of nuns you’re thinking.”
The nun dragged Harold up the hill and dropped his leg when she reached the big black car. Another of the nuns opened the trunk and reached in and got hold of something. It looked like some kind of folded-up lawn chair, only more awkward in shape. The nun jerked it out and dropped it on the ground and gave it a swift kick. The folded-up thing began to unfold with a clatter and a squeak.
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Page 23
