The Halloween Children

by Brian James Freeman

  Once, Matt joined in. He’d been around his sister so much, I guess “Amber’s Greatest Hits” got stuck in his head.

  Matt’s accompaniment sounded more like lyrics, but the recording wasn’t strong enough for me to distinguish any words.

  Maybe they made up their own language, just to sing in. Wouldn’t that be funny?

  Anyway, I found the audio feed mostly useless.

  Plus, if I listened during the day, it would interfere with my work headset.

  After the first thirty seconds of a call, I could ninety-nine percent predict what customers would say, but I still had to listen to them while I was on the clock.

  That said, in one of my random checks of the audio from the hidden camera, I got lucky and overheard Matt make a comment about me and about school tomorrow.

  I had forgotten that the classes always do something to acknowledge Halloween.

  The teacher reads a scary story and gives out candy. Some of the teachers even wear a costume and they encourage kids to do the same.

  Last year Ms. Linder dressed as Dumbledore from Harry Potter and the kids all laughed at a thirty-five-year-old woman with a long gray beard hanging from her chin.

  “Mother forgot about that,” Matt said to Amber. “We’ll still get to celebrate Halloween at school.”

  Bingo.

  A fairly memorable detail from last year, and they’d never guess I needed a hidden microphone to recall it.

  As I tucked my children in at bedtime, I announced that they were staying home from school tomorrow.

  “No Halloween,” I said. “Here or there.”

  Actions have consequences, after all.

  That would teach Matt for thinking he’d outsmarted me.

  Plus, it would give me a whole day at home to watch over them.

  I’m starting to think I can’t trust them out of my sight anymore.

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  From: Jessica Shepard

  To: Jacob Grant

  Don’t toy with the Halloween Children, Jacob. They know you tried to call me. Don’t come here, please, just don’t. I told you it’s too late for me.

  The Halloween Children are EVERYWHERE.

  Don’t contact me again. PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE.

  —Jess

  P.S. Plans have changed, and I hope you have a costume ready. If not, I have something you can borrow. Click below for a special ecard invitation. Remember, you should NEVER click on an attachment unless it’s from someone you know and trust. You’re safe with me, of course! ;)

  <>

  Harris

  Halloween morning, my task list from Shawna was ridiculous. Two pages of ridiculous. If I’d actually planned to finish everything, I wouldn’t have a spare minute to myself.

  I decided to complete what I could at my own pace. More important, I promised myself I’d stop in at the apartment periodically to check on our kids. Lynn had been acting so strange lately, obsessed with Halloween, denying the holiday as her idea of punishment, consequence, whatever she called it. In my experience, if you put a lid on something, you actually create a pressure cooker—which explained all the blowups I had with my parents growing up and also explained why I tried to be so easygoing with Mattie and Amber. Kids need their parents to be calm, and Lynn was having trouble meeting that need.

  I hoped to provide a normal parent’s kind of surveillance. You know, not the twenty-four-hour, Big Brother hidden-camera type Lynn was currently experimenting with,but the healthy way parents have always watched over their kids: making sure they don’t hurt themselves, that they’re kind to each other, maybe that they learn a thing or two about history or about other people or how the world works. Or just hang around with them and goof off once in a while—exercise a sense of humor, instead of being so serious all the time. That was the main thing I hoped to pass along to my children.

  That was my plan, at least. Somehow the time got away from me.

  Every task was frustrating. The way Shawna filled the list, I suspected she’d been saving the worst to dump on me the last day of the month, almost like she was trying to get me to quit. Dreaded shelf replacements in not one but three units—each board a non-standard size that needed to be measured, cut, placed, adjusted, then placed again. Some clogged sinks just on the edge of needing professional plumbing, and in the first job I broke a rusted pipe and had to keep the family’s water turned off. The other sink had the most disgusting hair clog I’d ever seen: I snaked the drain and pulled back a slick wet thing like the arm of a drowned dog. In that case, the newly cleared drain unclogged with a spray of black gunk, and I had to repaint part of the wall above the sink. As the eggshell paint began to dry, the black gunk started to fade through, and I had to promise another layer the next day before the resident would let me leave.

  Honestly, I felt like I was building things merely to take them back apart. Lots of fruitless labor, with no improved results.

  Then there were the pest traps. For some reason, Shawna decided it was time to inventory them. All of them. I’d labeled the traps on the bottom—for good reason, since it kept tenants from spotting the dates and querying if they’d expired. But that meant I’d have to lift each trap from the dark corner where I’d set it to check underneath. Well, there was something on most of the traps—and not the critters we were trying to catch. Some kind of glue or syrup drizzled out of the opening or overtop the plastic casing, and it got on my hands or, when I moved the trap with a screwdriver or pliers or a wooden dowel, it stuck to that, too, and then to my foot as I tried to separate the pieces. A real nuisance, and after a few encounters I sniffed my fingertips and the chemical odor made me worry it was some leaked poison, applied by an exasperated tenant hoping to make these cosmetic traps into something more effective. Had I rubbed the poison beneath an itching eye, or pressed some of it into my hair or dragged it along my lower lip?

  In the midst of this paranoid freak-out, in a dark spider-webby nook beneath the basement stairwell of building ten, my work cell rang. On instinct I reached for it, my fingers sticking to the lining of my pocket as I dug into it and closed around the buzzing, vibrating phone. I swiped my finger over the unlock screen. The glass felt like sandpaper, and I imagined a layer of my skin shredding off with the aggressive swipe.

  If I’d seen the caller ID in time, I wouldn’t have answered it.

  Joanne Huff’s voice rose shrill from the speaker. “Harris, there’s a smell in the building. Like a mouse crawled between the walls and died. I can’t tell you where it’s coming from, but it’s there. Do you hear me?”

  “Yeah.” Initially I’d held the phone away from my ear to keep it from sticking to my face, but I brought it closer to speak. My lips brushed against the mouthpiece. Closer to my nostrils, the chemical smell grew stronger. “Busy.”

  “Come and see for yourself. Smell for yourself, I mean. Right away.”

  “Can’t. At the other end of the property.” A new odor seemed to waft from the phone, an awful concoction of poison and rot.

  Her illness. Joanne’s mystery illness, transmitted through the phone. It occurred to me then that Joanne was smelling her own decay.

  “Right away, Harris. It’s not bad yet, but I know it will get worse.”

  “Seems like that’s always the way, doesn’t it?”

  “What? What did you say?”

  I hung up. Joanne would call the office next, which was fine with me. Let Shawna deal with her for a change.

  —

  Like I said, I planned to stop home periodically and check on Lynn and the kids, but I felt like my work tasks sabotaged me. The way Shawna prioritized the items took me to the opposite edge of the community, too out-of-the-way for me to visit my family.

  I thought about them, though. I wondered what my kids were doing. Perhaps they fantasized about Halloween and all the candy and the fun scares they could be enjoying. Or perhaps they treated the day like a punishment, as Lynn expected from th
em.

  At the very least, I hope they enjoyed the time home from school—treated it like a snow day, a gift of freedom, the hours suddenly and gloriously all their own.

  I’d like to think that. A snow day is much better than a sick day. Bored and napping and waiting for a dose of cough syrup or clear broth—the hours falling into dismal patterns.

  At one point I was certain I’d heard Mattie’s laugh. I was getting fresh bulbs from the storage closet in building four and the laugh seemed to carry in the wind, as might happen in fall and winter when the leaves didn’t dampen sound; and midday, with few cars roaring past, the televisions and stereos mostly silent. Probably it wasn’t Mattie, but it sounded so much like him.

  Later, when I crossed the parking lot to building eight, I saw Amber out of the corner of my eye. She ran behind the building toward the gap in the fence that led off our property. My eyes played tricks on me, though. It must have been another of the neighborhood girls, in a blue dress similar to one of Amber’s—though, come to think of it now, any girl Amber’s age should have been in school at the time.

  But the kids were home being punished. Their mother never would have allowed either of them outside to play.

  My phone buzzed again, and I pressed through my pocket to mute it. Cold wind whistled through barren branches. The phone continued to vibrate in my pocket.

  Joanne’s voice came through anyway.

  “The smell is worse now. It’s so bad I can almost notice it on my own clothing. It’s everywhere, Harris.”

  I pressed the heel of my hand against my pocket, trying to muffle the phone, strangle it into silence.

  Lynn

  Halloween, finally. Or not Halloween, as I’ve decreed it.

  The kids seemed content to play in their room all day.

  I tried to encourage them to watch TV in the den, for at least a little while, but they wouldn’t budge.

  Amber told me: “I don’t want to bother you while you’re working.”

  She sat at the edge of her unmade bed, surrounded by plush animals of all sizes. She talked mostly to a large stuffed bear rather than to me.

  “You won’t,” I told her. “As long as you stay quiet.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that.” Amber lifted the bear’s front paws, making him dance in the air.

  I laughed with her. “It’s not healthy to stay cooped up in this room all day.”

  “We’re fine,” Matt said. “We’re being punished.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I stepped away, certain they’d get bored eventually and beg for a short reprieve from their prison.

  As I headed back to my desk, I heard Matt’s quick footsteps as he rushed to shut and lock their bedroom door.

  I had a reason for wanting them to leave the room.

  I wanted to do a quick search.

  From watching the camera feeds, I had a pretty good idea where Matt hid the key to his locked drawer.

  I was determined to get inside that drawer, even if it killed me.

  That’s just a figure of speech, as I’m sure you know. Not worth making a big Freudian deal over.

  It was getting on ten-fifteen, which may not seem that long, but considering Amber wakes up at six-thirty, it’s quite a stretch.

  Factor in “kid time” where unoccupied minutes tick by extra slowly and I figured they were getting really stir-crazy.

  On the video feed, they barely moved at all. They remained motionless for so long that I almost thought the recording had frozen, but the time in the corner of the screen kept moving. If I hit the side of the monitor, I wondered if that would make them move.

  I get a fifteen-minute break midway through my morning shift, and another fifteen minutes in the afternoon.

  I took off my headset for the morning break and headed to the kids’ room.

  “Open up.” I beat an authoritarian knock on their closed door. “Fire drill.”

  Amber opened the door instantly. She must have been standing on the other side of it, waiting for my knock.

  “We didn’t hear a siren,” she said.

  Matt sat at his desk, back to me, in the same position he maintained on the recent video feed.

  “No siren,” I explained. “This is your mom’s version of a fire drill. It’s more of a ‘nice day’ drill. What that means is that you, both of you, need to play outside for a while. Until I call you back in.”

  Matt turned around in his chair. “I’m drawing,” he said. “I’d rather stay here.”

  “Take your pad and markers outside if you want. You kids need some fresh air. That’s an order.”

  “Yay, an order!” Amber was already past me and headed for the hallway.

  “Don’t forget your jacket,” I called after her. “Bundle up.”

  Matt followed, dragging his feet to reinforce how unfair it was that I’d interrupted his punishment.

  Once they were out the front door and on their way to the stairs, I returned to their bedroom, where I discovered that Matt had left his current sketchbook behind after all.

  I flipped through the pages.

  They were typical boy drawings: dinosaurs and airplanes and fire trucks, a few superheroes.

  He was at the usual skill level for his age group, which is a nice way of saying they weren’t very good. Okay to put under a refrigerator magnet but a long way from hanging in a museum.

  The colors were effective, though.

  He used all kinds of markers and pencils and did a decent job with shading.

  Flowers appeared in a few places and unexpected bright colors.

  I thought it was nice that Matt allowed his sister to add her contributions to some of his drawings.

  That showed a new maturity on his part.

  I returned the sketchpad, careful to align the binding with the left edge of the desk, exactly how I found it.

  Next I took Matt’s paint set from the hutch over his desk.

  I unlatched the set and lifted the top layer.

  I found a small silver key at the bottom of the brush compartment.

  The hairs at the back of my neck seemed to stand up at that moment, the way they do when it feels like someone’s watching.

  I realized I was in direct view of the camera I’d hidden in their room.

  And, yes, I felt a little guilty then.

  As a parent, I was perfectly within my rights to search through my son’s things, but I would have felt terrible if I’d been caught in the act.

  This seemed more serious than watching through a camera lens from a safe distance.

  Harris talked about “crossing the line.”

  I didn’t agree with him about the camera, but maybe this was my idea of the line.

  Maybe I was going too far. I could have just walked away. Left Matt his privacy.

  But the key shone bright in my hand and it slid easily into the locked drawer.

  Because it was only a drawer.

  What could be so terrible in such a small space?

  Matt was simply a child. He was small, too, with a small range of experiences.

  What could be so terrible?

  I pulled open the drawer.

  I found more drawings in there, crafted with different skill. And depravity.

  I was looking into my son’s mind and I was horrified at what I saw.

  Play outside for a while. Until I call you back in.

  I didn’t want to call my children back inside.

  I was afraid of what I might have to do.

  Harris

  Late afternoon, I needed supplies from our main storage area in six—the building connected to my own. I definitely planned to visit Mattie and Amber after I’d retrieved the boards and brackets I needed.

  When I stepped down to the basement, the supply room was locked. Not the individual storage units but the door to the entire room. Shawna had done this, I guessed—and forgot to give me the key. I remember thinking Shawna might be playing a sick joke. She overloaded me with tasks,
all leading up to my discovery that the locks have been changed. That’s how you tell somebody he’s been fired, right? Lock him out of his own workspace.

  I rattled the knob. I considered breaking down the door, but if I wasn’t fired, I’d just end up having to fix it again. The way my day had been going, creating additional useless work was the last thing I needed.

  I considered what to do next. This was Joanne Huff’s building. If I wanted, I could have gone upstairs and checked for the smell that bothered her.

  Nothing odorous down here except for the usual basement mildew and the sickly sweet detergent and softeners from the nearby laundry room.

  I held still, my hand on the locked door that wouldn’t budge. The building remained quiet, lacking the explosive squawks from behind the Durkinses’ door. They still didn’t know what happened to their pet.

  They also didn’t know how I used to stand outside their door and whisper obscenities through the wood, hoping to teach the bird colorful phrases that would interrupt the family’s evening calm. A harmless trick, if it ever worked.

  Those phrases might have found an appropriate context as the animal screamed its worst, gagged and burning to death in our oven.

  I felt a strange onrush of guilt then. About the bird but also about the other tenants and how I often spoke about them. My dislike of Shawna and her rules; the recent tension with Lynn. And our kids. I thought about our kids and I suddenly felt like I’d been whispering at them through a door, teaching them the wrong things to say, the worst ways to act.

  Isn’t that funny, for me to think that way, at that particular moment?

  Maybe I got a little light-headed after working so hard the whole day. That poison I imagined had dripped off our mouse and roach traps, the smell of death Joanne Huff detected in the building. Paint fumes can also have that kind of effect. And maybe an odorless gas, too, like carbon monoxide or radon, a barely detectable hiss through some loose valve.

  When people get carbon-monoxide poisoning, they don’t even notice it. They just feel tired, drift off to sleep, and never wake.

  If I slept, in that moment, what would I have dreamt?