The Halloween Children

by Brian James Freeman

  Nothing there. The front door was closed, as I’d left it.

  No more footsteps. But the voices continued.

  “Two things. Do you want me to open them for you?”

  “I’ll do it later.” Joanne, as I’d been hearing all along. The second voice was…

  “Oh. Three things, really. This is for you, too. From the office.”

  Yeah, the second voice was mine. I was having a bizarre out-of-body experience. Of course! I’d actually fallen down the steps and broken my neck earlier today, and was too stupid to realize I’d become a ghost. I’ve returned to the scene of my death, to relive the accident again and again for all eternity.

  Or, if I could rescue myself from the horror-movie atmosphere I’d spooked myself into, I’d figure out the more plausible scenario.

  “I don’t like this at all,” Joanne said. Her voice came from behind me. The second bedroom.

  The door was shut. A faint gray flicker appeared along the bottom of the door. I heard more of the familiar conversation as I reached for the knob.

  More of the taped conversation.

  Once I figured that piece out, the room didn’t offer too much of a surprise. A folding chair and a card table with surveillance equipment on top. Two black-and-white monitors, a computer, and keypad. An unplugged set of headphones and small speakers. A dish antenna angled to pick up sounds from the next apartment. A power strip loaded with cords and another wire along the wall and out the window.

  On the lit monitor, I saw Joanne’s living room as if I was spying through her third-floor window. Our conversation played out and I noticed my on-screen posture shift as I tried to pull away from her. I remembered that weird moment of revulsion I had when I imagined kissing her dry lips.

  Those perverse notions seemed inexplicable at the time, but a theory occurred to me. Some guy recorded her through the spy cam, listened to her voice, stared constantly at her frail, ever-still body. He wasn’t attracted to her—nothing could ever get me to believe that desire was the reason behind his surveillance. But he’d be bored out of his mind, practically begging for some movement to relieve the tedium. That kind of attention, minute by minute, trying to catch her at something, anything—after a while, it would approximate obsession, wouldn’t it?

  Move, damn you. Be interesting.

  And for a split second, the transmission shifted direction. In a strange alchemy of surveillance, I’d picked up some of that guy’s twisted thoughts.

  I turned down the speakers. On the monitor, my earlier self walked out of the frame, leaving Joanne alone in her apartment. For a lark, I moved the mouse arrow to the controls beneath the image, clicked on fast forward. Joanne stayed in her chair, barely shifting her posture. I held down the speed-up button a little longer, but got bored after a while and quit.

  Well, I thought I’d pretty much solved the mystery. Joanne wasn’t so paranoid after all, since there really was somebody using the vacant apartment. He made all the noises she’d heard: banging around in the bedroom at all hours, playing back recordings at high volumes.

  Except you’d think somebody doing surveillance would be a little quieter at his job.

  Why would somebody want to spy on Joanne, anyhow? She sure didn’t seem the type to have a jealous ex-spouse checking up on her. The government wouldn’t have profiled her as a likely terrorist threat: Yeah, let’s focus our efforts on frail stay-at-home ladies in cheap suburban apartments. Best thing I could come up with was her mysterious source of income. Maybe an insurance company really was checking up on her.

  I wondered what she was doing now. I clicked off the review button to bring the image up to date. Joanne sat in basically the same position. The only change was that she’d turned her head toward the window, where the hidden camera was placed. Her lips moved, but I’d turned the sound down and couldn’t hear. I hoped she wasn’t saying my name again.

  Then I felt really stupid. A gooseneck lamp sat next to the keyboard, its cord plugged into the power strip beneath the table. I flipped a switch and the lamp came on bright as day. I’d been sneaking around in the dark, but the apartment actually had electricity the whole time.

  With the brighter view, I noticed more items next to the table: an open carton of Diet Cokes, a grocery sack full of chips and beef jerky, and a plastic travel kit with toothbrush and disposable shaver. The guy obviously stayed there for long stretches—a fact confirmed by the rolled-out sleeping bag beneath the opposite wall.

  He slept there? If so, I wondered why he wasn’t there tonight.

  Why hadn’t he snuck up behind me to pistol-whip the back of my head?

  That’s when I heard a thump, followed by a heavy crash. I glanced at the computer speakers first, half forgetting that I’d turned the volume down. On the monitor, Joanne continued to stare from the screen.

  The sound definitely came from within this apartment. There’d been a hollow, ceramic tone to the crash, which told me where to look.

  “I know you’re here,” I said, stating the obvious. I stepped outside the bedroom, flipped the wall switch, and the ceiling light came on. Around the corner, the bathroom door was closed. “I’m coming in now. Just the maintenance man for the building.” My plan was to calm the guy down a bit, make sure he knew I wasn’t a police officer or something. That way, he’d be less likely to lash out with that hypothetical gun those surveillance guys always carried on TV.

  I lowered the Maglite to a nonthreatening position, then reached for the doorknob. “Neighbor complained about the noise, is all.” I turned the knob, pushed the door inward. No sudden movements—careful not to startle the guy.

  Turns out I needn’t have bothered. This guy wouldn’t ever be startled again.

  He was faceup in the bathtub, his clothes dark against the white porcelain. The guy had a medium build, though his cramped horizontal position made it hard for me to judge his height. Instead of lying lengthwise, his body lay stuffed into the middle—head beneath the soap dish on the wall, one leg tucked inside and bent beneath him, and the other hanging limp over the edge of the tub.

  He had short straight hair and a Vandyke beard peppered with gray. A wadded piece of cloth filled his mouth; a rope hung around his neck.

  When I turned on the bathroom light, I corrected my first impression. The rope was a stained blue-and-white necktie, with an amateur’s looping knot cutting off his circulation. His face had a horrible bruised pallor, eyes bulged wide. The cloth in his mouth turned out to be his swollen tongue.

  I’ve seen enough TV cop shows to know you’re not supposed to touch a dead body. And who’d want to anyway, right? Sometimes they press two fingers against the neck to check for a pulse, but from his posture and expression, the guy was obviously dead.

  My best guess: The other end of that tie had been knotted over the metal curtain rod. Over time the knot loosened, the dead body swung and shifted, the knot loosened further. Eventually the body fell with that loud crash I’d heard from the other room.

  I’ll tell you what it sounds like, Joanne had said. It sounds like pleasure.

  The whole time she listened next door, Joanne heard his dangling feet kick against the tub like a workman’s hammer. She heard a protracted gurgle from the strangled man’s throat, trying to cry for help, because whatever happened—he’d been attacked, maybe, or tried to kill himself—in the horrible aftermath he’d fought for life, as we all would.

  The wrong kind of pleasure.

  No. I couldn’t get my mind around that possibility. The man’s trousers were closed, the belt fastened. His arms had fallen to his sides, hands twisted in agony rather than pleasure.

  Yet I found the strangest thing next to him in the tub. A fresh wedge of lemon. It bothered me, why it was there, so bright and yellow and clean, next to that bruised, strangled corpse. It just seemed wrong.

  Now, I can guess your gross little theory about that, but I don’t think that’s what happened here. Not at all.

  Regardless, it bothered me, l
ike I said. And there was nobody around to ask so late at night, and nobody I wanted to call, either—certainly not the police. Not yet. Not till I figured this out.

  Before I go on, let me digress for a moment to say I’ll never understand why people make such a fuss if someone doesn’t call the cops right away. That’s an honest reaction, okay, not a sign of guilt. I was in shock. I’d never seen anything like this, and it was taking me a long time to process.

  Anyway, there was nobody around for me to ask except for, well…him. And, yeah, I knew he couldn’t talk—I was in shock, not stupid—but I found myself looking in his face for some sign of what he might say, you know? Maybe the way you’d look at a dog and say, Hey, what’s bothering you, boy? never really expecting an answer.

  I stared into that face. That strangle-bloated face, with the swollen tongue. I looked too closely, and it’s like one or both of us changed. I started out clinical, playing amateur sleuth or coroner; next thing you knew, I was a scared kid staring at a hideous corpse.

  What bothered me most were the eyes. That’s where you look when you’re talking to somebody, usually, so I’d focused there without meaning to. They bulged out so horribly. Unblinking. Still surprised, still expressing agony or shame.

  That’s another cop show thing, isn’t it? People close the eyes of a corpse—to respect the dead person’s dignity maybe, or to make their faces appear less disturbing to the living.

  Don’t touch a corpse, except the eyelids are okay. Right? It seemed like the proper thing to do.

  I spread my fore- and middle fingers in a wide V and stretched my right arm toward the dead man’s face. I had to hover over the tub, lean down a bit to reach. As my fingertips grew close, a shiver of dread tensed through me. The face seemed too large, the eyes even larger, and I started to chicken out.

  Dignity. Give the corpse its dignity.

  I stretched my fingertips closer. But I felt too queasy. I turned my head away at the last second, gently laid my fingertips against the eyelids.

  I pressed against the lids to lower them, but they wouldn’t slide. The skin felt strangely firm and my fingertips couldn’t get traction. I pressed harder. The eyelids were slick and springy to the touch.

  Despite my queasiness, I had to look. I turned my head back toward the corpse’s face.

  My aim had slipped too low. My fingers pressed directly into the open, bulging eyes.

  That was when I completely freaked out. I had to get out of there. I ran from that bathroom, crossed the dark empty living room and den, threw open the apartment door, and rushed into the hall.

  Then I tripped over the tool chest I’d left outside the door, and my momentum carried me forward and I fell headfirst into the stairwell.

  Lynn

  I’m supposed to be honest with you, right?

  Can you be honest with me, Mr. Therapist?

  If you can, ask yourself this: How far would you go to save your family?

  What would you be willing to do?

  What kind of horrible things?

  If you stumbled upon your husband in a situation where he was in over his head, mixed up in some crazy mess, how far would you go to fix the problems he had made for your family?

  Maybe no one knows the answers to those questions until they face them down in real life.

  I certainly know my answers now.

  A marriage will do that to you, if you’re really committed to it.

  Like most husbands, Harris creates a lot of messes for me to clean up. I don’t have time to list them all.

  But let me tell you what I do with our kids. Maybe you’ll appreciate it, since Harris never seems to notice.

  While he gets to roam around the complex all day doing his handyman stuff, I have to take tech support phone calls from our apartment, which means I can’t leave.

  In the morning, I make the kids their school lunches.

  When my shift is over for the day, I drive the kids to after-school games, events, rehearsals, and any other time-killing stuff the school makes up.

  The kids take sick days from school when they have the sniffles, but guess who takes care of them?

  That’s right, me. And I’m not even supposed to be taking care of them when I’m on duty for work, as I may have mentioned before.

  When the kids need to go shopping, which parent is the chauffeur and banker?

  Me again.

  I play with them whenever they crave parental interaction instead of when a whim strikes me, as Harris does.

  I know you told me I’d feel better writing all these things down. It’s supposed to help, like an angry email to your boss that you write and never send.

  But if you never send it, the boss will never LEARN.

  You don’t confront him, and your husband never learns to pick his dirty clothes up off the floor, for example.

  I don’t want to be the suffer-in-silence kind of wife.

  Not after some of the messes I’ve had to clean up.

  I’m going to have to take action to fix some of the problems that have developed around here.

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  From: Jessica Shepard

  To: Jacob Grant

  Jacob,

  Classes are a lot harder than I thought they’d be. I’m wondering if I made the right choice to move all the way out here. If I don’t pass ALL of my classes, my parents will be PISSED.

  Also, have you ever considered how much fun it might be to kill a man?

  Hugs and kisses,

  Jess

  Harris

  I lost count of how many steps my skull bonked against during my tumble to the second floor. Pretty sure I dozed off a bit, curled up next to a welcome mat and hugging my knees.

  My head pounded. I dreamed of footsteps all around me, imagined a pound of raw steak dragged across a wooden cutting board. Someone placed a wedge of lemon into my mouth, squeezed it. The juice tasted bitter and coppery and rotten.

  A series of phone numbers raced through my mind. Home. The leasing office. 911. I heard beeps as my fingertips pressed at buttons.

  The buttons felt firm and wet. They burst, and my fingers pressed deep into jellied sockets.

  More footsteps. A clock alarm, muffled behind a series of doors. The clatter of pipes, the distant hiss and spray of a shower nozzle. The hideous squawk of a pet bird.

  I was a drunk passed out on a stranger’s stoop, waking to the bustle of morning activity. I sat up where I’d landed, tried to shake off the throbbing headache. One side of my face was scuffed by the burlap “Go Away” welcome mat I’d used as a pillow, and my legs and shoulders ached.

  When I stood, a bout of dizziness almost knocked me back to the floor. After a few unsteady steps, I managed to stumble down the stairs, past the apartment entryway, and then zombie-walked into the gray October dawn.

  Body. I couldn’t forget I’d discovered a dead body. The to-do list began to generate itself, an Excel sheet filling up with new, queasy responsibilities. In my mind I clicked in the top-priority cells, erased their contents, and typed in: Warm Bed. Comfortable Pillow. More Sleep.

  —

  Lynn’s alarm woke me. I rarely heard it, since I was typically up and out of the house before she needed to get moving for her call-center job. The insistent beep exactly matched the pounding in my head, adding an electrical twinge I felt in my tooth fillings. I bit down in a grimace, actually chomping on my fingers.

  Two fingers in my mouth. The same ones I’d touched the corpse with.

  “Calling in sick today?”

  My wife was cheery already, without the pre-coffee grumbles any normal person was typically prone to.

  “No. Just need…” Instead of finishing the thought, I made spitting noises. My mouth tasted rancid.

  “Matt’s already awake, banging stuff in the kitchen. Your phone kept vibrating. Hope it’s nothing important. Hey, you really don’t look so good.”

  I didn’t need a mirror to know she was right, since I felt dizzy
again when I tried to sit up. I had this notion that if Lynn stopped talking, maybe the room would hold still.

  “There’s a cut on your cheek. How’d you manage that? I’ll get you a Band-Aid, but I can’t promise it won’t have SpongeBob or Hello Kitty on it. Harris, you went on a call last night, didn’t you?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Gimme a minute. Check’n see if your Amber’s awake.”

  —

  As soon as I heard my wife in the kids’ room, practically singing Amber awake, I checked the messages on my work cell. Four from Joanne Huff, exactly at the top of each hour. The most recent was from Shawna.

  I deleted Joanne’s, then pressed play for Shawna’s. Her message was quick, delivered with false, customer-service sincerity: Stop by the office first thing, would you, Harris?

  Judging from her tone, she hadn’t yet learned about the mess in the supposedly vacant apartment. Her request seemed unnecessary, though. I was planning to visit the office anyway, as I did every weekday morning—but this time I wouldn’t simply be picking up my spreadsheet of repair assignments. We’d need to consult about the situation in 6E. I had a pretty good idea how she’d want to handle it.

  Of all her cautionary anecdotes about apartment management, her most detailed involved a horrible occurrence at the Stillbrook complex. Except nobody at Stillbrook knew it ever happened.

  In 2004, a couple of years before I took the job and moved here with Lynn and the kids, a renter killed himself in his apartment. A middle-aged guy, he kept to himself most of the time. His application was fine: good credit history and salary; no criminal record or anything to indicate mental illness. Would never guess this guy would even own a shotgun, let alone be the type who’d jam the metal barrel in his mouth and pull the trigger with his right toe.

  He’d only removed the shoe and sock from that one foot, Shawna told me. I’ll never forget that.

  It was a prime-time blast, right after people had finished their suppers and settled down for evening sitcoms. Everybody heard it.