Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

He finds ways to spend more and more time at school, seeking extra help he does not need, joining the Dungeons & Dragons club, any excuse to put off coming home, at least until it is time for a quiet and mirthless dinner, then bedtime, the relief of sleep, of letting everything go in exchange for a too-brief taste of oblivion.

  ###

  The plane landed at Bradley a little before noon. Gaspar had found himself unable to sleep, so he’d spent the time reading some vacuous airport novel to distract himself, half-watching the bafflingly unfunny in-flight movie, putting the SkyMall catalogue over his eyes to rest them. Now he walked bleary-eyed through the concourse, got an egg sandwich and a coffee from the Starbucks, rented a little red Civic, and found his way to the Interstate, heading northward to Leeds. Absently, staring off at the layered vistas of foliage like the leaf-peepers his parents used to joke about, he put the radio on for a semblance of company.

  ###

  “This Halloween,” boomed an antiquated sounding announcer, who sounded as though he were echoing in some great hall, “You could do worse than to gather at the Leeds Town Common! Trick-or-treats start promptly at Five! Pee! Em!, followed directly by the ceremonial presenting of this year’s Halloween Queen!”

  “What are you going to go as, Mister Ben?” asked a creaky-voiced DJ who Gaspar thought sounded rather too old to be a radio announcer.

  “Why, I’m going to go as an old buck goat,” bleated Ben, who then proceeded to affect the wavering cry of a goat. “And you, Stanton?”

  “I’m going to go as unresting death itself,” replied Stanton.

  A female voice spoke out, a familiar voice, the voice of a child.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me about my costume?” the voice said.

  “Why of course, I’m so sorry, Rangel,” said Ben. “What are you going to go as?”

  “I’m going to go as a little lost girl.”

  Gaspar started from sleep, fumbled madly for the wheel, foot jutting out in search of the brake, only to find that he was in the back seat, his jacket draped over his body. His beard was wet with saliva. To his right was a guardrail, a gully, and a long line of unchecked vegetation, to his left the cacophonous northbound traffic. He couldn’t remember having pulled over, couldn’t remember having gotten out of the car nor having climbed into the back seat. He realized he must have left the ignition switch on, as the radio was playing. There were no old men bantering, however, and certainly no Rangel, only some sort of polka music, over which someone was coughing noisily, as though the DJ had forgotten to silence the microphone.

  Gaspar got out of the car, and, buffeted by the wind from barreling tractor trailers, climbed into the driver’s seat and turned off the radio. He had been asleep for over three hours, but the car, miraculously, started without hesitation. He rubbed his stiff neck and waited for a break in the traffic.

  ###

  A half hour later he was on the main drag in Leeds. A lot had changed in the years he was gone. In the place of Dynamite Records was a shop that sold Oriental rugs, and the corner shop that used to house Gwenn and Deb’s Yogurt was now a bank, as was the former Fire & Water café. A disheartening number of storefronts now housed cell phone showcases. He was happy to see that some hardy little businesses had remained intact, in their same locations, at least superficially unchanged. Willie’s hardware store was there, with its gas grills, backs to the chain-link fence, in regimented lines like sentries. The Haymarket café still proffered coffee and fresh juice and baked goods. Anne Gare’s bookstore, which had been a Leeds institution for as long as he could remember, was squeezed in between an old laundromat and a new pizza joint, still with the little table of dollar books outside by the door.

  Gaspar parked at the Hotel Northampton where King Street met Main, checked in, hauled his bag upstairs to the room. He took a long, hot shower and put on some fresh clothes. His stomach performed a brief but jaunty aria. Clearly the egg sandwich hadn’t been enough. He left the hotel and walked up King past the supermarket and the car lots, hoping that the Bluebonnet Diner (“The Bloob,” his dad used to call it) would still be there. And so it was. The place hadn’t changed in the slightest. The dining room, to the left, was a wide, booth-lined corridor, ten shades of tan, that bee-lined for the bar area. To the right was the traditional diner car set-up, a counter lined with stools, opposite which sat six booths with a little wall-mounted jukebox in each. Gaspar took the stool across from the register. A frosted blonde waitress addressed him as “hon,” took his burger order, and disappeared around the corner.

  “Hey,” a voice called. Gaspar looked up. Grinning at him from the order window was a bearded cook in an apron over a tie-dyed Red Sox tee. Green and white guest checks hung above him like garland. “You’re Red’s kid,” he said. It sounded almost like an accusation.

  “Gaspar.”

  The man clapped his hands. “That’s right,” he said. He ducked back into the kitchen. “Hey Billy—tend to them taters,” he shouted. A mumbled reply. “Billy. Taters.”

  A moment later the man was sitting on the stool next to his. “Sammy White,” he said, offering a big pink hand. Gaspar shook it, glanced down at the man’s arms, which were dotted with burns. His face was dimpled and red, his teeth as straight and white as the pickets of a new fence. “Your dad and I went to high school together. Don’t see him here much these days. He still in town?”

  “They travel, him and mom.”

  “Ain’t that the life?” Sammy said, leaning back on his stool. “Me, I’ll be slinging potatoes and flipping pancakes right here, like, forever. Probably just pitch over onto the grill when I die. They can serve me up as a hash.”

  “Don’t take offense,” Gaspar said, “if I order something else.”

  Sammy guffawed, stopped short, seemed to consider, and then said the thing Gaspar had feared he’d get to. “Listen, terrible thing, your sister.”

  “Thank you,” said Gaspar.

  “Hell of a thing. Hell of a thing. Not the first, you know?”

  “Not the first…what?”

  “Kids in this town have a way of disappearing. Cops eat here, you know, not just at Dunkin’. I listen. The cops…they know what’s going on, do a little, you know, perfunctory inquiry, then the matter’s closed. The papers keep quiet about it. You ever hear how this buncha kids got lured away from Langford Elementary?”

  Gaspar had not. He was still wondering what exactly it is that the cops know is going on.

  “Jesus, must be twenty years gone by. I don’t remember how many kids, but some maniac just…called them into the woods. Teacher who’d been watching them, they found her flat on her back in the soccer field. She’s up in Cooley Dick now, insensible.”

  He paused, then put his hand on Gaspar’s shoulder. “Where are they, y’know?”

  “Do you think they’re still alive?” asked Gaspar. He told himself that Sammy’s answer wouldn’t matter, what does he know, but he still his nerves were vibrating.

  “Tell you what I think,” Sammy said, leaning in close. His breath was peppermint burned with booze. “I think they’re up there in those woods, with them, and one day they’re gonna…”

  “Your burger.” Frosty slammed the plate down, the burger and fries bouncing. She shot a look at Sammy. “Your potatoes are charred.”

  “BILLY!” Sammy shouted. He slapped Gaspar on the back. “Never mind what I think,” he said, and hurried back to reclaim his temporarily abandoned dominion.

  ###

  The students had returned to the women’s college whose buildings gazed upon Leeds from its promontory like vine-swaddled Arguses. Girls and beaming parents bantered happily under umbrellas at the sidewalk cafes, straining to be heard over the buskers and the occasional swarms of stuttering motorcycles, while tourists and townspeople promenaded this way and that, getting in the last bit of outdoor time before another winter snarled in and swept them back into their curtained and cushioned homes.

  One substantial change Gaspar noticed right a
way as he walked the familiar streets was the proliferation of trees. In his youth they had been slender, leafy, well-kept, spaced evenly along the walks. Now there were more, and they were thicker, untrimmed and unruly, their canopy coloring with shadow the streets and the sidewalks and the storefronts. Even though they shone with the rust and butterscotch colors of autumn, they cast a pall over the downtown, as though they were trying to deny passage to the sun’s rays.

  Gaspar walked down Center Street, which curved away from Main, passing the police station and the French restaurant, and turned right at the family market. Just beyond the commercial district, the sidewalks were carpeted in leaves like an overabundance of rose petals scattered in honor of his return. Finally he stood in front of the red Victorian cottage in which he had spent the first eighteen years of his life. The driveway was empty. The house seemed smaller now, shrunken and somehow sad, barricaded with hedgerows tight as corsets, its interiors secreted and shielded by heavy curtains. Gaspar stood on the walk and stared at it, the broad porch that bracketed the house on three sides, the bargeboarded arches, the windows, nearly floor-to-ceiling, the pots of marigolds lining the steps as though queued up for a house tour. Up to the right, his former bedroom reflected trees stippled with the blue of the sky.

  ###

  Gaspar spends hours of solitude in that eave-shadowed sanctum, afternoons playing with matchbox cars or propped up in bed with a Hardy Boys book and nights sitting up awake as his parents and their friends laugh and drink and sing downstairs. His parents’ parties frighten him: the men are obstreperous, with booming voices, and the women’s laughter sounds no different than the shrieks of terror from the Dracula movies on Channel 38. Not long after Rangel’s in absentia funeral, the parties intensify, screaming, singing, stomping, and a new feature, something that sounds like group prayer, which Gaspar finds particularly odd, as his parents have never been churchgoers. Finally, Gaspar pushes his pillows over his ears to drown out the noise.

  ###

  Feeling the coffee start to catch up with him, he headed back to town to use the men’s room at Thorne’s Marketplace. Thorne’s was Leeds’s answer to a mall: three stories of shining oak floors and open-fronted boutiques and specialty shops. He descended the small set of stairs behind Rao’s coffee and pushed open the door. There were two sinks and two stalls, no urinals. The stall on the right was occupied. Gaspar entered the other. It was a wooden, cramped little cubicle, with blue walls and a door painted industrial green. As he relieved himself, he looked out the small window at the apartments and fire escapes that backed a row of shops, over whose rooftop he could just make out the peaks of the Norman towers that topped the ancient city hall. Black birds were circling the turreted tops, landing, taking off. He was surprised to discover that he had missed old Leeds.

  Reaching for the lock to let himself out, he noticed carved into the green wood a series of initials and years: J.S. ’74, K.S. ‘76, R.B. ’82, B.V. ’87, and so on, forming a crooked vertical line down the center of the stall door. He stopped, his hand still on the latch, and read them slowly from top to bottom. R. B. ...Rangel Bantam? Gaspar’s stomach seized. Rangel had disappeared in 1982. Were the other initials those of the lost children Sammy had talked about at the Bluebonnet? Or…it could just be graffiti. Just coincidence. He should get a record of it, though. Just in case. He could head over to the Forbes library, find out the names of the missing kids. He pulled his phone from his pants pocket and snapped a picture.

  At the shutter sound, there came a rustling and a rasping groan from the stall adjacent to his. Gaspar quickly exited, as did a shambling figure from the other stall. The man was tall, thin, his head mostly obscured by the black hood of his sweatshirt, though wisps of straight blonde hair, as light and wispy as corn silk, were evident at the ears. The man carried himself oddly, as though there were a stitch in his left side. His right knee jutted out to the side as though the hinge was 90 degrees from where it ought to be. He positioned himself between Gaspar and the door out.

  “You taking pictures? You taking pictures in the bathroom? Pictures of me?” His voice was hoarse, high pitched. He took an aggressive step toward Gaspar, who stepped back, shocked, his tailbone hitting the counter. The man’s face was that of a child, maybe ten years old, twelve at the oldest. His skin was unblemished, his eyebrows slight and thin, his cheeks flushed pink. His eyes, a bright, searing blue, were dilated.

  Gaspar held up his hands, palms out, fingers splayed. “No, no!” he said. “I was taking a picture of the initials carved into the wall.”

  The man-child peered at him. “J.S. That’s me, pal,” he said, thumping his rib cage for emphasis. “I am Jeremy Scheer. I was nine years old when they took me into the woods. Nineteen seventy and four.” He said it as though reciting it from rote.

  Gaspar tried to speak and found himself without a voice.

  “They showed me everything,” said Jeremy. “The great rift, redder than the reddest valentine. Bellies of blue light. Horizons of carrion. This…”—he spread out his arms and Gaspar saw that his hands appeared to be prosthetics, plastic, or rubber, with seams down the sides -“is nothing.”

  Gaspar found his voice. “Did you…did you see my sister? She had red hair…”

  Jeremy grinned, revealing his teeth, small and white and pristine. “You don’t deserve your sister,” he said, and suddenly, before Gaspar could absorb what he’d said, he was out the door and gone.

  Gaspar ran after him. Jeremy was jerky and awkward, but he was fast, which belied his apparent infirmities. When Gaspar skidded into the corridor, Jeremy was at the exits. When he pushed his way outside, Jeremy was through the crosswalk. Gaspar kept up for as long as he could, struggling to keep him in sight. Just outside of the city center, Jeremy rounded a sharp curve, and when Gaspar got there, the man was nowhere to be found.

  Gaspar doubled back a block to the police station—if Jeremy had been abducted, if he knew the fate of those other lost children, Gaspar had to tell the police, provide a description. He entered through the front doors and found himself in a mid-sized waiting room ringed with wall-bolted chairs, with a long table in the middle. To his right was a window that spanned the length of the room. He cupped his hands and peered in. Just on the other side of the window was a counter piled with papers surrounding a desk-mounted microphone. It looked like the habitat of some disorganized disc jockey. At the far right corner were couple of desks in an “L” shape, a darkened computer monitor on each. To the left was an empty coat-rack, its small arms reaching to the ceiling as though, in the absence of any policemen, it was reacting to an impending holdup. All was lit red by an EXIT sign at the back of the room above a blackened doorway. He looked in vain for a buzzer or a bell, then he turned and spied a ragged scrap of newspaper thumbtacked to an otherwise empty corkboard.

  “LEEDS HALLOWEEN PARADE,” it read in a dripping font. “As dusk falls on the town center, venture into the fray by gathering around the Haunted Common. Follow the parade along Prospect Street in your scariest get-up! And stick around for the crowning of the Halloween Queen and King! The woods are watching!”

  Gaspar left the empty station in a daze and walked back over to State Street. Crowds of people—it looked like half the damned town—were walking north on either side of the road, turning about two blocks ahead onto Prospect Street, which bisected Leeds on the diagonal, and, further along, formed the easternmost length of the half-mile long town common. He fell in among the townsfolk, feeling conspicuously alone, disjointed, still shaken by the encounter in Thorne’s and by the empty police station. His head buzzed and he found himself unable to marshal his thoughts.

  The trees here were more profuse, as in the city, and thicker, all mammoth trunks and elongated branches, even more so the further down Prospect he got, as though the forest was in the midst of some glacially slow insurgence. At the last block, it was as though someone had superimposed a picture of an ancient forest over one of a present-day neighborhood. Many of the ho
uses had trees growing right through them, sticking out from their rooftops and carports, and those houses and all the others were lit up brightly and bursting with the noise of parties, screaming laughter, thudding music, squeals of joy and of pleasure, as though all manner of bacchanalia might be going on within their walls. It sounded like those parties back at the red Victorian cottage, all around him now, the shrieks and the prayers and the booming voices of the men.

  Gaspar emerged from the forested neighborhood into the crowded common, and all of his unease fell away. He was instantly back in his childhood, when Halloween was the province not of the malls and city centers, but of the shadowed suburban streets and cul-de-sacs. Children were marching in great, chattering bunches among the houses that ringed the common. The costumes, unfettered by winter clothing, were just as Gaspar had remembered: little black-caped vampires, fuzzy wolfmen, leaning zombies, gamely gauze-wrapped mummies, all carrying orange sacks and plastic pumpkins piled with candy. At ten foot intervals, staked into the ground, were torches, orange flames gamboling in cages of iron. As the blue of the sky darkened, the flames cast capering shadows onto the old oaks, the facades of the houses, the faces of the crowd. And like that, like the result of the flick of some celestial switch, twilight came to Leeds. The sky was blue-black and orange-veined, and the trees and the clouds were still, dead still, as though anticipating an apocalyptic storm. In the distance was the sound of drums, insistent, almost liturgical, now nearing.

  The crowd lined up on either side of the green, murmuring with anticipation. Then a sudden burst of applause as the procession rounded Prospect Street. At the front, two blonde girls in cocktail dresses, faces obscured by black veils, held aloft a banner that read HAPPY HALLOWEEN in letters composed of strung together sausages, rotting, bursting, crawling with fat, curled maggots. Below the banner capered a skeleton, bowing and crossing from left to right and back, and waving wide its bony arms, presenting the crowd to itself. The costume was a marvel: Gaspar could see between and around the bones, hear their clack as they tapped on the concrete.