The Halloween Children

by Brian James Freeman

  Stephens: No. But you mentioned coercion before. A voice in your head. Some form of possession, maybe?

  Naylor: Out of the question. I’d have known.

  Stephens: You had access to all the storage rooms. A master key that opened every apartment.

  Naylor: Shawna had that, too. Keys can be borrowed. Copied.

  Stephens: Okay, then. How do you explain this? So many of the rooms contained references to things only you would know about. In-jokes with your family, like Mr. Stompy or Para-tweet.

  Naylor: I’ve wondered about that, too.

  Stephens: The ideas and images all came from your mind, to some extent. If you weren’t responsible for the murders, for the changes to each apartment, then it was someone else hoping to cast suspicion your way. Or trying to send you a message. Someone who knew you best. Someone in your family.

  —

  Stephens: Which brings us to the second theory: that your wife was responsible.

  Naylor: As a parent? We both were.

  Stephens: No, I meant that she committed the murders herself.

  Naylor: In my darkest moments, I might have believed that. I don’t anymore.

  Stephens: And yet, you mentioned how much she changed in those days leading up to Halloween. Setting up surveillance cameras, spying on her own kids. Her attitude toward you was different as well.

  Naylor: Any relationship goes through rough patches. She was a good wife, and an even better mother. Really conscientious. Hard worker, too. They loved her at ComQues.

  Stephens: Actually, she was fired.

  Naylor: That’s not true.

  Stephens: October twenty-seventh. Immediate termination, including cutoff of her account access.

  Naylor: But I overheard her using the headset, interacting with customers. She’d tell me about some of the calls in the evening, how she solved their network or software problems.

  Stephens: I’m afraid that was a show, put on for your benefit.

  Naylor: I can’t believe it. She took such pride in her work…

  Stephens: Your wife kept a kind of diary on her computer. We’ve been able to recover parts of the encrypted file. Look, uh. Is there any reason she might have been seeing a marriage counselor?

  Naylor: What? Of course not. I’ve said we had a rough patch or two, like any couple. We were fine. We were always fine.

  Stephens: I’m not exactly sure if she really did see a counselor. It’s just that…

  Naylor: Those printouts. Can I read them?

  Stephens: I’ll show you excerpts. They’re written to a marriage counselor, presumably at the counselor’s request. We can’t locate the actual therapist, however.

  [Stephens passes some pages. Pause while Naylor looks them over.]

  Naylor [finished reading]: Look, this doesn’t seem like her at all. Calling those kids “assholes.” Yeah, that’s a word I’d use, but Lynn? Never. And the way she threatens them?

  Stephens: It doesn’t fit your image of her.

  Naylor: Not her at all. It couldn’t be.

  Stephens: Let me tell you why your wife was fired from her job. She used inappropriate language with customers. ComQues records their customer service calls, and they provided some examples.

  [Click:]

  Lynn Naylor (recording): I’m not going to put up with your shit much longer, understand? I know where you live. I have all the information I need to ruin your life.

  [Click:]

  Lynn Naylor (recording): Oh, you’re crying like a baby now? You’re one of those assholes who dish it out but can’t take it. Well, fuck you.

  [Click:]

  Lynn Naylor (recording): To fix this problem, I need your permission to access your computer remotely. Can you click on “Yes” when the dialog window pops up? Great. But, oh, maybe you shouldn’t have done that. I’m opening your image viewer. Here’s a picture of a woman’s throat being slit. It could be your wife. Let me increase the resolution for you. That’s what will happen if you ever talk to me again like you did a few minutes earlier. Don’t dare complain to my supervisor. I’ll know if you do.

  Naylor [stunned]: That’s her. That’s really her. She sounds like she’s out of her mind.

  Stephens: Your wife had access to your keys. She knew about all the other tenants. From conversations with you, she knew the in-jokes about Mr. Stompy and Joanne Huff and even the Durkinses’ pet bird, and she could have altered each apartment accordingly.

  Naylor: So you’re saying it was Lynn. My wife was responsible for all of it.

  Stephens: That’s not what I’m saying at all. Your own account provides enough information to make your wife a plausible suspect. In the final gathering, you imply your wife is the hooded figure at the front of the crowd, a leader of some ominous ceremony. The situation with her employer adds further suspicion. That Mrs. Naylor was seeing a marriage therapist, or pretending to—either way—points to some imbalance in the household. All combined to push her over the edge. You’re in the institution, but she was the crazy one.

  Naylor: That’s…[pause] I think that’s right.

  Stephens: You needed your wife as a plausible suspect. It’s better than believing the alternative.

  Better than suspecting your own children.

  Naylor: No. Listen, I’ve covered this ground. I’m not afraid to face the possibility. It just never made sense. They’re little kids. Good kids.

  Stephens: You taught Mattie about Halloween. About hanging witches, versus burning them. About making your own Halloween displays, like you and your friends did at boarding school, decorating the dormitory despite the headmaster’s wishes. Mattie and Amber grew close. They shared things you’d told them, and they overheard a good bit more. They learned things from…other sources. Let’s consider the hanging man you found in the empty apartment. The private detective. I think he represented a kind of test run. To adopt your metaphor, it was an early attempt at the “first stop” of a haunted-house ride. That’s why it didn’t make sense. The lemon.

  Naylor: I know what you’re going to say. Again, they were little kids.

  Stephens: The tableau was set to mimic autoerotic asphyxiation. Strangulation during self-pleasure, to heighten sensation. Those who practice it might put a lemon or lime in their mouth, and if they start to pass out, the main danger during this solitary practice, they’ll bite down on the fruit wedge and the bitter taste will jolt them awake. In the bathroom of that empty apartment: A strangled body. A lemon nearby, as if some textbook mentioned it was necessary. But the rest of the scene’s botched, since the man’s trousers are fastened. It’s like whoever put it together knew some of the ingredients but missed the big picture. Too young to understand what the man would actually be doing…

  Naylor: Absurd.

  Stephens: You just don’t want to believe it. Obviously they put the bird in your oven. Mattie and Amber together, I’m guessing. Your wife was right to punish them equally. But she had another reason. She kept the children home on Halloween day, not—

  Naylor: I explained that.

  Stephens: —not from her choice, but because the kids had been suspended. In our post-Columbine culture, schools can’t be too careful, even with little kids. Nobody knows where they got it, but Mattie and Amber brought an antique book to school. It described lurid rituals, featured photographs and diagrams of people being tortured or sacrificed. The main argument of the book was that violent deaths brought power—the more imaginative the deaths, the better. And for these to happen on Halloween…

  Naylor: Where is this book?

  Stephens: I hope it’s been destroyed.

  Naylor: All inference. You’ve got no real proof.

  Stephens: Mattie’s drawer. The locked drawer you set up for him. In your wife’s diary, she mentions opening it. Being horrified at what she discovered. [Rustling of papers.] We found these drawings.

  Naylor [unbelieving]: These are…These are…

  Stephens: Blueprints, essentially. The man on the stairs. A
bare foot, with an X marked where the nail should go. A partial list of chemicals that may have contributed to the liquefaction of Joanne Huff’s body.

  Naylor: These are…in Mattie’s handwriting. His drawings, too, with help from Amber.

  And these letters here…

  Stephens: Not letters. They match the symbols painted over the Tammisimo’s wallpaper.

  Naylor: I still can’t…It’s impossible.

  Stephens: It makes sense now, doesn’t it? Despite your protests and excuses?

  Naylor: No.

  Stephens: The different apartments, your kids’ fingerprints were all over them. And the way the knots were tied, as if by smaller hands. The knife cuts slanted at an upward angle, indicating someone standing low to the ground.

  Naylor: I refuse to—

  Stephens: Before the basement fire, two small robed figures stood at the front of the room, on either side of your wife. When they turned around…I know what you saw.

  Naylor: You couldn’t.

  Stephens: Yes, I can. I’ve seen them, too.

  —end of recording—

  —

  I turn off the recorder myself. I see how agitated Naylor was getting and I’m afraid of what might happen next.

  He surprises me.

  This man I’d come to know so well through studying his case, listening to his voice over and over, his confidence and cleverness and self-deception. So much bluster and personality, striving for an ironic detachment even at the edge of the most horrific discoveries.

  Now, his eyes well up with tears.

  “Mattie? Amber? You saw them?”

  I nod in the affirmative. “Last Halloween.”

  “Oh.” The catch in Naylor’s voice really gets to me. It reminds me how much I love my own children. “They’re alive.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Then I explain what happened in my own gated community last year. Out of concern for our children’s safety, we’d also decided to curtail holiday celebrations. No exchanges of candy, no door-to-door trick-or-treating. We all agreed.

  After dark, our doorbell rang.

  I answered it. Two children stood on our front porch. They wore black robes, hoods pulled over their heads.

  I began to explain the rules to them, when my wife came up behind me. “Oh, what’s the harm,” she said. She’d bought several bags of “fun-size” candy before the community’s collective decision to cancel Halloween. She pulled open a sealed bag, then dropped small boxes of Runts and Bottle Caps into each of their plastic pumpkins. “Let’s see your masks,” she said.

  The children pulled back their hoods.

  The Halloween Children.

  That night, so many of my neighbors died in their houses in ways too elaborate and horrible to explain. Yet a few families, like my own, were spared. I assume because we’d been the only ones to give them candy.

  “I know what you saw,” I tell Naylor. “Their masks. So realistic, like children with adult faces. Your own faces. Harris and Lynn Naylor.”

  I will never forgot how sinister they looked on our porch, at the threshold of our home. Adult expressions staring up from smaller robed figures, the angle wrong as if they stood in a deep pit, as if part of their bodies fell through the earth into a darker realm.

  If Naylor revealed this detail to his therapists, they might have told him it was a displacement, a projection. He saw his own face on Mattie, Lynn’s face on Amber, and that “dream image” represented how parents often feel responsible for their children’s actions. You shape your children’s view of the world, and you see yourself in them. In what they do.

  You’re all guilty. You’re all the Halloween Children.

  What created them? The tension in the home, the corrupting ideas that swarmed thick in the air, horrors disguised as entertainment. Distrust, competition, favoritism. Surveillance that expects to uncover the most vile behavior. Combine that with an ancient holiday, a strange isolated community, whatever ghosts and demons—literal or otherwise—linger in various rooms.

  I don’t tell him all these theories. I have a more important question.

  “Assuming it is your children,” I say, “do you know how we might stop them from coming back again next Halloween?”

  He considers my question, his mind seeming to drift back over everything he described in his narrative, revising each section in light of what I’ve explained. He’s calm now. He has accepted the truth.

  His voice drops into that whisper now, the one he’d use on the tapes when his hand reached into uneasy darkness.

  “You know how I treated my family,” he says. “The favoritism I had for Mattie, which I couldn’t help…but maybe I could have hidden it better. You probably know about my past, too, what I did to my parents before I left home, and why I was sent away to a special school. I remember it as an accident, and the police records support my version.” He’s actively crying as he continues. “Maybe if the bad stuff can just stay buried. If we could manage not to bring it forward, not to pass it along to our kids like poison, and they pass it to their kids, and on and on.”

  I’m genuinely moved. My own eyes well with tears, and I cross to his side of the table. Strange as he is, crazy as he is, I like this man.

  “Maybe if we could just love our children,” he said. “Love them.”

  I’m crying now, too. He stands and I give him a reassuring hug.

  I feel a strange rub along my neck, the drag of a warm wet rag over my throat and a scratch like dry husks.

  His scabbed-over hands, attempting to strangle me.

  They have no grip, but he pushes them against my windpipe. I can feel several scabs pop and a warm thick liquid runs over my neck and down my collar.

  I shove him away, scramble backward, and push the red emergency button on the wall. Harris Naylor begins to laugh.

  “The Halloween Children,” he says, and there’s fear in his voice, and a parent’s admiration, too.

  He continues to laugh as the attendants rush into the room to subdue him.

  We each dedicate this book to our coauthor, and to our respective spouses who put up with us while we collaborated.

  We offer grateful acknowledgment to early readers Robert Brouhard and Victor Cypert, and to Earthling’s Paul Miller for the original print edition, with special thanks to Sarah Peed, Matt Schwartz, and the entire Hydra team for giving our Halloween Children a new life.

  About the Authors

  BRIAN JAMES FREEMAN is the general manager of Cemetery Dance Publications and the author of several novels and novellas, including The Painted Darkness and Blue November Storms, along with his new short story collection Walking with Ghosts. He is the co-editor of the Dark Screams ebook anthology series and the editor of Detours and Reading Stephen King. He is also the founder of Books to Benefit, a specialty press that works with bestselling authors to publish collectible limited-edition books to raise funds and awareness for good causes.

  NORMAN PRENTISS won a Bram Stoker Award for his first book, Invisible Fences. Other publications include Odd Adventures with Your Other Father, The Book of Baby Names, Four Legs in the Morning, The Fleshless Man, and The Narrator (with Michael McBride), with story appearances in Dark Screams, Postscripts, Black Static, Four Halloweens, Blood Lite 3, Best Horror of the Year, The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and four editions of the Shivers anthology series.

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