The Halloween Children

by Brian James Freeman

  My dreams would be of construction work. Hammering nails into wood. Tying ropes, painting backdrops. Cutting bizarre shapes with a hacksaw. Reaching into tight, sticky spaces, grabbing a hank of hair, and pulling with all my might.

  —

  The basement was already dark, so I hadn’t realized there’d been a power outage. The whole building was dark.

  It was after six o’clock when I stepped outside. Twilight drifted toward a dark, moonless night.

  Amber sometimes got scared in the dark. I hurried to our building next door, raced blindly up the stairs to our apartment.

  The apartment was nearly pitch-black. I called out for them.

  No answer.

  Lynn and the kids were gone.

  —

  If you’ve ever woken in the middle of the night in a sudden panic—grabbing for a lamp switch, the warm comfort of your wife’s shoulder, a knife hidden under the mattress for protection—and before you move, you’re overcome with fear that your fingers will close instead around the wet jaws of a wild animal, the tail of a rat, the limber bristled legs of a large spider…or maybe worst of all, you’d grab at nothing, because you’re not in your room anymore, like that college prank where your hallmates carry your bed outside with you passed out on it, drop the bed in the middle of a baseball field, and abandon you.

  If that late-night panic has ever happened to you, then you understand how I felt entering my home. That small familiar apartment now seemed alien. I bumped into a table that shouldn’t have been inside the door, heard a wobble, then the drop and crash of a glass vase. I shouted for Lynn and Mattie and Amber but no answer. Since I’d left my toolkit outside the storage room, I didn’t have my flashlight with me. I patted at the living room wall, found the light switch in what seemed a slightly different place, and flipped it to no effect.

  The electricity was out. Of course I knew that, but it’s still an odd sensation when these switches don’t work as you expect. I tried it a few times anyway, maybe even mouthed “Huh?” to the apartment.

  Perhaps I spoke aloud to fill the void. We always left a box fan running in the bedroom for background noise; our refrigerator made a constant low rattle, like the idling of an old car. The absence of these typical sounds unnerved me almost as much as the dark.

  And obviously, a house with kids should never be completely silent. Amber’s chatter and singsong, the scratch of Mattie’s pencil on his sketchpad, the quick footsteps that stop just before I warn them not to run in the house. Faucets on and off, cereal poured into a bowl, soda into a glass. And Lynn, too, clicking at her computer keyboard, turning magazine pages, clearing her throat before she asks me a question.

  Where could they have gone? If they left me a note, it was too dark to read it.

  My wife should at least have phoned me.

  Then I thought, Maybe she did, at the same time I also realized the screen of my phone could provide some reasonable light.

  The phone seemed stuck in my pocket. When I pulled it out, only a faint glow rose from the front, white text on a black background, spelling out Joanne Huff on the ID screen. Random lines hatched through the faint letters, and as I slid my finger across in an attempt to wake the screen, I felt tiny ridges of cracked glass.

  When Joanne called me the second time, I pressed down on my pocket to muffle her voice and I must have pressed too hard, breaking the phone.

  The cracked white letters on the ID screen didn’t help much, but I angled the phone ahead of me and squinted. In our kitchen we maintained an “emergency drawer” with candles and matches, so I headed that way.

  My memory of the kitchen layout helped me avoid our table and chairs at the center, and I felt for the counter on the left side of the sink. Lynn’s latest “As Seen on TV” contraption sat on the counter. She had a habit of ordering gimmick appliances, then using them only once—tortilla makers, mini-donut fryers, hash brown choppers. I couldn’t remember the latest unnecessary purchase, but the hint of light outlined an appliance with a large glass dome at the top. I touched the glass and it was still warm. A hiss of steam shot up through some crack or nozzle, spraying a hot breath along the underside of my wrist. It smelled like cabbage and brussels sprouts.

  I felt beneath the counter for the drawer handle and pulled. The drawer was stuck on its roller-track, so I had to jiggle and force it open. The contents rattled—not wax candles but metal clicking against metal. When I reached in, I cut my finger on the sharp tip of a steak knife.

  Why had Lynn moved knives into this easy-access drawer, facing the blades the wrong direction, where Mattie or Lynn might hurt themselves?

  I spun the phone around the room again, hoping my eyes had adjusted better to the faint illumination. Shadows swayed on the counters, a dance of unfamiliar shapes. The kitchen chairs appeared to have taller backs than usual, and one of the chairs seemed to have a person sitting in it. In a flicker of movement, the person began to rise.

  I shifted my light source again and the person sat back down.

  Apparently my mind was doing its best to make sense of limited and conflicting input, matching dark shapes with what I expected to be there. In that moment, I latched onto the only possible explanation: Somehow I’d stumbled into the wrong apartment. The similar floor plan tricked me into recognizing my own home, even when the furniture and appliances didn’t match. No wonder I knocked over a vase. No wonder Lynn and the kids weren’t here.

  Although there wasn’t anybody sitting in the dark kitchen, I spoke to the chair anyway—excused myself, apologized for the intrusion.

  I moved back toward the entryway, my hand against the wall to guide me. The apartment didn’t smell like home. I noticed baby powder and the fake fruity odor of those lip balms popular with teenage girls. Nearing the front door, I stepped carefully to avoid the shards of broken vase.

  Then I heard a loud thumping on the ceiling. An unmistakable, heavy tread across the floor upstairs.

  Mr. Stompy.

  I guess that inconsiderate jerk finally did me a favor, helping me realize I was in the right apartment after all. It all came back to me. Lynn had ordered an imitation jade vase to place on an accent table next to the entryway closet. She’d mentioned last week how she planned to reorganize the kitchen drawers. And the latest kitchen contraption—a yogurt maker or egg boiler, wasn’t it?

  No doubt about it now, I was home. But still, where had my family gone? I tried to think where they might wander in a crisis. What neighbors did Lynn mention as friends? Would she have headed to the leasing office? Or to our car, to drive somewhere nearby?

  I needed to figure out the quickest way to find them. I needed—

  Thump, thump, thump.

  I don’t quite know how to explain, but I had this overwhelming need to find my family. It’s not like I feared they were in danger—at least not yet. It was more like the sensation that I might be in danger if I didn’t find them soon. But it was so dark, and I didn’t know which way to—

  Thump, thump, thump.

  And goddamn, it was like a switch flipped in my brain. I was trying to think, but I couldn’t concentrate with all that angry stomping overhead. So intrusive, disturbing my peace at any hour of the day, and this was the last time, the last time I was going to put up with it. Sure, I know what I just said, how my concern for my wife and kids was everything, so logically I shouldn’t have let him distract me. Priorities, right? But maybe that’s why I got so mad—crisis time, you know, and there he was being his usual inconsiderate self. A nuclear bomb could go off in the next town, shock waves of radiation headed our way, and he’d keep stomping from one room to the next.

  So yeah, I decided to go upstairs and give him a piece of my mind. I’d bang on his door louder than his stupid elephant tread, scream at him when he answered, maybe even punch him—if he wasn’t too old and feeble, like Lynn said. But he couldn’t be that frail and have such malicious strength in his legs.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  Right.
I’ll give him something to stomp about.

  I stepped outside our apartment, went to the dark stairs, grabbed the rail for guidance, and headed to the floor above.

  —

  The stairs crunched beneath my feet. I knelt down in the dark to figure out what I was stepping on and found a layer of dried leaves. Someone must have opened the window on the landing and the leaves had blown through.

  I crunched up the rest of the steps and felt my way to Stompy’s door. Before I could bang on it, I noticed an odd ripple in the wood. I held the phone steady and brought its light close to the door, but nothing reflected back. When I reached out to knock, my hand went right through. The door was open and a thin, dark curtain enclosed the entrance.

  Black crepe streamers, taped to the top of the doorframe.

  When I walked through, the streamers parted and brushed against me. It felt like the air itself reached for me with gentle black tentacles.

  A flickering light greeted me from the main room. Candles placed on tables and windowsills cast an unsteady glow.

  The first thing I noticed was the carpet underfoot. Brown thin carpet like the kind you find in a library or a school. No padding underneath, so nothing to muffle footsteps.

  A dark pattern stained a large portion of the carpet.

  Thump, thump, thump.

  At the center of the stain, a man sat in a chair. He seemed like the same man I’d imagined in the kitchen chair in our own apartment—a kind of rounded body, poised to stand but frozen in position.

  “I need you to give me some peace.” I walked toward him, my feet landing gently on his carpet as if to prove a reasonable step was possible. “We can hear you downstairs, always stomping around. It’s like having a marching band living above us.”

  The candles flickered. The man’s head turned toward me.

  Thump, thump.

  A balding head, but he didn’t seem as old as the man Lynn described to me earlier. His jaw jutted out in a strange shap,e and a metal-gray fabric glimmered in the candlelight.

  Duct tape. A rag stuffed in his mouth, then covered and the tape wrapped around his head several times. Whoever taped his mouth must have also tied him to the chair.

  Thump, thump.

  Then the shape of his huddled body resolved itself. He wasn’t sitting in a chair. He was a short, stocky man, stooped over in agony.

  His bare feet were nailed to the floor.

  He lifted one of his arms slightly. The effort was an incredible strain to him and his hand looked swollen and heavy like a bowling ball.

  It dropped to the carpet and I heard the familiar thump-stomp. The other arm lifted and fell. The pattern repeated.

  His large, round hands were orange and they grinned at me with wide jagged teeth.

  Plastic jack-o’-lanterns for collecting Halloween candy. His hands have been placed in them, the containers filled with plaster or cement to weigh them down.

  When did the sounds change? How long ago did they shift from an inconsiderate bounding across the floor into an agonized drumbeat for help?

  “I’ll get you some help. Mister, uh…” I didn’t slip and call him by the nickname. “I’ll get help.”

  I moved closer and he thumped his pumpkin hands on the thin carpet, and his eyes pleaded with me. He looked like he wanted to back away. As if he thought I was going to hurt him.

  “Hey, no, I’m not going to hit you or anything. You mind if I borrow this? I’m going to get help.”

  I’d lifted a white candle from the nearby end table. The same kind of generic emergency candle we used to keep in our kitchen drawer, set in a tea saucer to keep the wax from dripping everywhere.

  “Be back soon. Promise.”

  —

  I held my free hand to protect the candle flame as I stepped through the streamers hanging from his doorframe. I couldn’t help but think of old black-and-white movies as I headed toward the stairs—you know, those ones where rain-soaked travelers explore an empty mansion at night and later discover it’s not so empty? They head down a spiral staircase, candelabra in one hand, brushing away cobwebs with the other. A rat scurries across their path and an owl hoots through the window.

  No rat or owl here, but a rubber bat hung suspended from the ceiling. It bounced on an elastic string as I ducked under it, then I stepped through the dead leaves and dry twigs that someone had scattered along the stairs.

  On the next level, the door to our apartment was wide open. I’d probably left it that way when I ran out but couldn’t quite remember. Maybe my wife and kids had returned? I called their names and my voice echoed, the way sounds always seem to do in the dark.

  No response.

  In my mind’s eye, I pictured them with duct tape around their mouths. They were locked in closets, tied in chairs. Their feet were nailed to the floor, their hands nailed to the wall or bound by chains or heavy plaster. They were crying and I knew I was close. If only I could hear them.

  “Tap the wall,” I said. “Kick something. Help me find you.”

  Nothing.

  Then, to my relief, a muffled laugh. The sound carried from the ground-floor entrance, somewhere from the other side of the front door. Hard to pinpoint, but I knew it was my kid. Funny that I can’t say if it was Mattie or Amber, but a parent knows the sounds his own kid makes. And I say laugh, because it had that kind of sputtering sound, like a hand over the mouth at church, maybe even during a funeral, where you’re supposed to stay serious and can’t help yourself. That kind of laugh.

  In a rush of adrenaline, keeping the candle steady, I hurried downstairs and outside.

  —

  You’re saying, “Why didn’t you this, why didn’t you that?”

  Right?

  You’re thinking I should have searched my own apartment more thoroughly, now that I had the candle. Or I should have banged on neighbors’ doors asking for their phone, at the top of my voice shouting, “Nine-one-one, somebody call nine-one-one!” Or even earlier, I should have taken the gag off the old guy’s mouth to let him explain what happened.

  These are easy questions to ask now. I wonder the same things myself sometimes.

  Here’s what I can tell you: In the moment, I was deep in the logic of dreams. Whatever happens, wherever it leads, you just have to go with it. It’s like you’re on rails.

  I was on a child’s funhouse rail car. The car was shaped like a coffin.

  Which is not to say I was actually dreaming, although that’s how it still feels to me now. This is simply how I remember what happened to me that Halloween night. You guys are supposed to understand things about dreams, so I’ll let you be the judge.

  All I can do is describe the rest of the ride.

  Lynn

  This is goodbye for now, Mr. Therapist.

  Things are much worse than I could ever have expected.

  I’m beginning to think that Matt’s been playing me the whole time.

  Him and Amber, too.

  Everything he’s tried to hide from me and from Harris?

  Well, let’s just say I don’t think he’s tried to hide them from his sister.

  And the fact that Amber never thought to break his confidence?

  That she never got frightened enough to tell her mother or father?

  And that she still loves her brother, despite what she must know?

  That makes her just as bad.

  I fear I’ve done exactly what they wanted all along. It’s like they knew I was watching them, and they tricked me.

  They wanted to stay home on Halloween day.

  They wanted me to chase them outside.

  So they’d have more time to prepare.

  Now I have to go searching for them and try to stop them, and I’m not sure what to do with this file.

  It was supposed to help me work through problems in my marriage.

  Turns out I had bigger problems, right under my nose the whole time.

  Maybe things will work out.

  Therapy. It�
��s helped me, so maybe it can help my kids.

  I’m not going to say that they’re too far gone.

  A mother can’t ever admit that, can she? She definitely can’t type it in a document for all the world to see.

  I won’t delete this file just yet, since I may need to come back and tell you more, but I’ll password-encrypt it.

  I always knew I couldn’t trust Harris.

  Maybe I haven’t been the best parent in the world, either.

  I should never have let those kids out of my sight.

  I’m going to find them now.

  Harris

  Outside, cool air rippled through my hair and shook the candle flame into violent contortions. The late evening seemed, for lack of a better description, more Halloween than before. The moon emerged from the cover of clouds to cast a blue-gray glow on the surroundings. No other light, either from streetlamps or from apartment windows. No signs of life. A quiet, expectant calm—as if, any moment, a sinister evensong would rise and hooded monks would emerge between buildings, the leader cradling a small wrapped bundle in one arm, while his assistant prepared the ritualistic dagger.

  Across the street, strips of orange crepe paper hung from an oak tree—tossed through the dry limbs the way tricksters might toss rolls of toilet paper to decorate a treatless home. The streamers rustled in the wind like flames.

  The building I just left seemed older in this light, its bricks more like the illusion of stonework, crumbling toward ruin. The building next door, slightly larger, loomed over with the impression I’d always had: a big brother, one protective arm around his sibling. The buildings were stone golems, now. The bigger building looked ready to push the weaker one over, then trample it into the ground.

  I ignored the sidewalk and crossed the grass to the concrete porch of the neighboring building. I pushed open the door and walked into the common lobby.

  A grinning jack-o’-lantern sat atop each newel post at the bottom of the main stairway and a candle in each hollowed gourd supplemented my own light source. The notice board next to the mailboxes had been vandalized. Someone had broken off the Plexiglas front and placed rubber spiders and a giant rubber rat inside. Shawna’s latest flyer hung where I’d pinned it—but someone had crossed out most of the rules. In heavy black marker, a ^NOT was added to THIS YEAR’S HALLOWEEN PARTY IS ^ CANCELED.