Halloweenland

by Al Sarrantonio

  Riley’s weigh station—a hand-built square booth that had once held a huge scale, long stolen, with a chair beside it, still, miraculously, in place—stood forlorn at the edge of the field. Grant went to it and sat down in the chair. He faced the lowering sun, shook out a cigarette from its pack, lit it, and waited.

  TWENTY

  “Hello, Detective Grant.”

  Grant came awake with a start. For a moment he was disoriented in the darkness, then he remembered where he was. There was something in front of him, moving in and out of vision, a deeper darkness than the night. It had turned colder, and Grant felt a chill. The sky had clouded over, and it felt like it might rain.

  Grant sat up, pulled his raincoat closed and shivered. His hand went to his pocket and pulled out the remains of a pint of Dewar’s.

  “Still imbibing, I see,” the shape in front of him said.

  “Any reason not to?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Not long enough for me.”

  The thing was silent for a moment. Grant felt a deeper chill, catching a glimpse of that white face, that cruel red line of a mouth.

  “I hoped I’d never see you again,” Grant said.

  Samhain’s smile widened perceptibly. His surrounding black cloak hung almost lifeless, swirling slightly at the bottom. “I’m sure. But I rather enjoy your company. And it seems we have mutual business—again.”

  With every ounce of his courage, Grant fought to stay under control in front of this . . . thing.

  “Oh, come now, you’re not afraid of me anymore, are you, Detective?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “What is there to fear? You already know who I am, and what I represent. All men face me eventually. Don’t you consider it a privilege to . . . shall we say, interact with me now and again, before your time?”

  “It’s a privilege I could pass up.”

  Samhain threw back his head and gave something like a laugh. It sounded hollow and cold. “I have been studying your kind for thousands of years, and still you puzzle and interest me.”

  “What is it you want, Samhain?”

  “Ah.” The blackness swirled, the Lord of Death came closer. Grant felt the temperature drop, a dry cold that belied the weather.

  “I merely want you to leave Marianne Carlin alone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she has something I’m . . . interested in. Mr. Ganley was going to bother her, so I had to dissuade him.”

  “I thought so.”

  Samhain turned back to Grant and came even closer. “I cannot scare you off, Detective, like I did the doctor and the sister. We both know that.”

  “You tried once before.”

  “I did. And I failed.”

  “You’ll fail again. I won’t let anything happen to Marianne.”

  “You think I want to harm her, Detective? You don’t understand at all. That’s the last thing I want.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I’m not ready to tell you, Detective. But I will tell you this. Tomorrow is Halloween. Please leave her alone until the day is over.”

  “I won’t let you near her.”

  Samhain gave something like a sigh. “We both know that I can only bring direct harm to those who can be influenced. I cannot influence you. You know many of my tricks, but not all of them. I would prefer that we discuss this reasonably.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  After a pause, the shape said, “I thought we understood each other.”

  “I doubt it.”

  The thing swooped up very close, its surrounding black form snapping and moving in the cold breeze. Grant felt the deeper cold of its breath on him, and the white face was very close to his own.

  “Don’t. Interfere.”

  Grant held that empty gaze, felt bile rise in the back of his throat, felt a black cold charge run up his back and make his teeth chatter. Samhain reached out a spectral hand, long white vaporous fingers ending in short, sharp silver claws, and held it in check in front of Grant’s face.

  “Listen to me, Detective.”

  “I won’t let you near her.”

  The figure receded to its former position. The face was half-hidden again, the shadowy folds of its surrounding darkness part of the night itself.

  “We’ll see.”

  All at once the thing was gone, leaving only the cool night and a few stars peeking from behind scattering clouds.

  His hand trembling, Grant brought the last of his whiskey up to his mouth and drank it.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Wake up, Petee.”

  Petee Wilkins was having the only good dream he ever had. He had it every once in a while and always enjoyed it. In it he and his best friend Bud were in the house they broke into on Sagett River Road, eating from a huge box of chocolates they had found in the kitchen. Petee had never seen a candy box so big, covered in gold foil and tied with a silky red ribbon. The card had said, “To Bonny, Please, please forgive me! Signed, Paul.” They had gotten a good laugh over that.

  “Wonder what the old poop did!” Bud laughed, stuffing his face with what turned out to be chocolate-covered cherries. After a moment of bliss he cried, “Ugh!” and spat them out onto the kitchen table, which was huge and marble topped. “I hate chocolate-covered cherries!”

  Petee laughed and then gagged, spitting out his own mouthful of candy, which he had actually been enjoying.

  Bud started laughing, holding his stomach, and then Petee began to laugh, too.

  “Funny!” Petee said.

  Bud took the box of chocolates and dumped it out on the floor. Then he began to stomp on the candy, making chocolate mud.

  After a moment Petee joined in, and then Bud said, “Come on!” and they tramped into the living room, leaving chocolate sneaker prints on the white rug.

  There was much more to the dream, trashing the living room, throwing a side chair through the large screen TV—

  But now Petee abruptly woke up.

  “Oh, no—” he said, looking at the hovering, flapping, black thing above him with the oval white face.

  “Now how can you say that, Petee?” Samhain asked.

  “I thought you were gone for good,” Petee whimpered.

  “Didn’t I tell you I might need you someday?”

  “Sure. But I didn’t think . . .”

  “That’s right, Petee, you didn’t think. But you don’t have to. I did you that favor back in . . . what was it? Junior high school?”

  Petee nodded, wiping the back of his hand across his running nose. He sat up in bed and looked down at the covers, not at the thing.

  “That’s right,” Samhain said, “I kept you from getting into big trouble when you and that idiot Ganley drowned the Manhauser’s cat. Oh, your father would have beat you to death if the police had been involved in that one, don’t you think?”

  Petee would not look up. “Yeah,” he said, grudgingly.

  “And what did you promise at the time? Didn’t you promise to do me a favor if I ever needed one?”

  Eyes downcast, Petee nodded.

  “Good. And now it’s time. Here’s what I want you to do, Petee . . .”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Another Halloween.

  The day dawned gray and bloodshot. Grant woke up in his lounge chair in the basement with a sour taste in his mouth. A finger of scotch lay pooled in the bottom of the Dewar’s bottle on the table next to the chair. The glass next to it was empty. The television volume was low, the movie on Turner Classic Movies a film noir with too much talking.

  Grant got up, walked to the casement window and pushed the partially open short curtain all the way open. A mist of rainwater covered the storm window, and the sky through it was battleship gray–colored and low.

  He could just make out a row of pumpkins, already carved into faces, frowns on one end slowly turning into smiles by the other, on the rail of his back neighbor’s deck. It was a yearly t
radition.

  He turned off the television, oddly missing the sound after it was off, and trudged up the stairs to the kitchen. He checked the back door, which was locked and bolted, and then the front.

  Back in the kitchen, he made eggs and toast and a pot of coffee, then dialed into work from his cell phone.

  “Chip? This is Grant. Captain Farrow knows I’m not coming in today, right? You told him, like I asked?”

  The desk sergeant said something, and Grant snapped, “Then tell him now, you dimwit. I won’t be in.”

  Grant pushed the off button on the phone and tossed it onto the kitchen table.

  From upstairs there came a sound, and Grant froze in place, listening. Then it came again, bedsprings creaking. The detective relaxed, turning back to his eggs, which were bubbling and snapping in the frying pan now.

  After breakfast he cleaned up the kitchen, poured a second cup of coffee and went back down to the basement. A sour rising sun was trying to fight its way through the scudding clouds.

  Maybe it would clear after all.

  Grant settled himself back in his chair, turned the television back on and watched two westerns back-to-back, muting the sound every once in a while to listen for sounds upstairs.

  At eleven A.M. he went back upstairs and pulled a fresh bottle of Dewar’s from its bag, which he had placed on the dining room hutch the day before. He brought the bottle downstairs. He emptied the last finger of scotch from the old bottle into the glass, twisted open the new bottle and added another finger.

  A sound from upstairs, a moan, and Grant set the bottle of scotch on the TV table, took his glass, and went up to the kitchen.

  “Shit.”

  Another moan followed, and Grant slowly trudged up the stairs to the second floor of the house. There was a short hallway with two bedrooms and a bath off it. He passed the bath and his own bedroom and stood in the doorway of the other, sipping scotch.

  Marianne Carlin lay on her back on the guest bed, the covers kicked aside, half-asleep.

  Her belly under her nightgown was huge.

  As Grant watched, she moved her head from side to side, eyes closed, and moaned again.

  Grant went to the bed, put his glass down on the bedside table and picked up the washcloth that lay folded on the edge of the water bowl there and dipped it into the water. He wrung it out and patted the young woman’s forehead with the cloth.

  Marianne mumbled something in her sleep, the name, “Jack,” then wrenched herself over onto her side away from him and began to softly snore.

  Grant rearranged the covers over her, folded the washcloth back on the edge of the bowl, retrieved his alcohol and left.

  Another movie brought him to lunchtime—a grilled cheese sandwich—and then two more short old westerns got him to four o’clock in the afternoon. The schools were out by now, and the younger trick-or-treaters would start soon. He went upstairs to check his candy bowl by the front door, and for good measure added another bag to it, which made it overflow. He picked up the fallen Snickers bars and put them in his pocket.

  He glanced outside and saw that the sun had lost its all-day fight with the gray clouds and was dropping, a pallid orange ball, toward the western horizon.

  A porch light flicked on at the house across the street, which seemed to trigger a relay—two more houses lit up, one of them with tiny pumpkin lights strung across its gutter from end to end, the other with a huge spotlight next to the drive illuminating a motor-driven, wriggling spider in a rope web arranged in the lower branches of a white birch.

  Back in the basement, Grant noted that the pumpkins on his back neighbor’s deck railing were now lit, flickering frowns to smiles.

  He tried to watch another movie, but his palms had begun to sweat.

  Upstairs, the doorbell rang. He went up to answer it. Two diminutive sailors, one with a pirate’s eye patch, looked up at him and shouted, “Trick or treat!” They thrust their near-empty bags up in a no-nonsense manner, glaring balefully at him.

  He gave them each two candy bars, and they turned immediately and fled sideways across his lawn to the next house. Grant was closing the door as a mother, parked watchfully in a Dodge Caravan at the curb, began to shout, “Use the sidewalk, Douglas . . . !”

  The van crept up the street, following Douglas and his fellow pirate.

  As Grant was stepping back downstairs the doorbell rang again, and soon he was sitting in the living room with the lights out, smoking his second cigarette, waiting for the bell to ring.

  It did, again and again: hobos, men from Mars, ballerinas followed by more hobos.

  There was a lull, and Grant went into the kitchen, made another grilled cheese sandwich for dinner.

  The doorbell rang again.

  Abandoning the grilled cheese sandwich, Grant grabbed a handful of candy bars, yanked open the door—

  Petee Wilkins was standing there, snuffling, looking at the ground. There was something in his right hand, which he jerked up—

  Instinctively, Grant twisted aside as Petee’s eyes briefly met his and the gun went off. It sounded very far away and not very loud. But it must have been a better handgun than Grant assumed, because the slug hit him in the side like a hard punch. As Grant kept twisting, falling into the candy basket and to the ground, he heard Petee hitch a sob and cry, “I’m sorry!”

  Then Petee was gone.

  Grant lay stunned, and waited for pain to follow the burning sensation of the bullet.

  It came, but it wasn’t as bad as he feared.

  As he sat up, a lone trick-or-treater, dressed in some indeterminate costume that may have represented Mr. Moneybags from the board game Monopoly, stood in the doorway looking down at him. He said the required words and Grant fumbled on the ground around him and threw a handful of candy bars his way.

  “Gee, thanks, mister!” Mr. Moneybags said, and ran off.

  Grant scooped as much of the candy around him as possible out through the doorway, then stood up with an “Oooof” and, holding his side, kicked closed the door.

  He limped into the kitchen and had a look.

  There was blood on his hand, which was not a good sign, but there wasn’t a lot soaked into his shirt, which was. He pulled his shirt out of his pants, took a deep breath, and studied the wound.

  Just under the skin, left side, in and out, looking clean. He knew he would find the slug somewhere in the front hallway.

  “Thank you, Petee, you incompetent asshole,” he whispered, and cleaned the wound at the kitchen sink as best he could. He tied three clean dish towels together and girded his middle.

  The blood flow had nearly stopped already.

  The front doorbell rang, but he ignored it.

  He called the police dispatcher, whose name was Maggie Pheifer, identified himself, told her to have a patrol car visit Petee Wilkins’ father’s house, where they would probably find Petee Wilkins hiding under his own bed. “Consider him armed and dangerous, just in case. I’ll call back in later.”

  From upstairs came a moan, louder than the others.

  “Shit,” Grant said and, taking a deep, painful breath, hobbled to the stairs and limped his way up.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Marianne Carlin’s eyes were wide open. She lay pushed back on the bed, knees apart. She was breathing in short little gasps.

  “Hello, Detective,” Samhain said calmly from the foot of the bed, where he floated like a wraith. “I see Petee didn’t do his job, which is just as well. I really didn’t want you dead, only . . . incapacitated.”

  Grant felt suddenly short of breath, leaned against the doorjamb. He slid down to the floor, staring at Samhain.

  “My, my,” Samhain said, “Petee seems to have done a fine job at that.”

  “What do you want, Samhain?” Grant said, gasping. There was a growing pain in his left side, which wasn’t going to go away.

  Samhain said nothing, staring at Marianne Carlin, who gave a moan and arched her back.

  �
��You want the baby,” Grant said.

  “Yes,” Samhain said simply.

  “Why?”

  Again the wraith was silent as Marianne threw her head back in pain. Grant wanted to help her but felt as if his body was filled with lead. He could barely lift his left arm.

  “Do you know what ghosts are, Detective?” Samhain said, quietly. “It happens now and then that someone on the way to my realm from yours gets . . . caught in the middle. These are usually very strong personalities. Often, there is something very important that they are leaving behind. Unfinished business, if you will.

  “Jack Carlin got . . . away from me, you might say. At the moment he was to be mine, he broke away and reached his wife. This has never happened quite like this before. He was neither of this Earth when this happened, nor completely in my own place. He was dead, Detective. And yet . . .”

  Samhain stood silent vigil at the foot of the bed, staring at Marianne Carlin in a kind of wonder.

  Grant said, “The baby is from your world.”

  “Yes. The child is of . . . death. It is mine, in a way. Do you understand now? It is . . . life from death. This . . . has never happened.”

  Grant gasped, gathered his strength. “You sound almost proud.”

  Samhain turned a mild, almost fond, look on Grant. “You give me too much credit for cruelty, Detective. I serve, nothing more. And after eons of death, to see something born from it like this . . .”

  His attention was brought back to Marianne, whose cries were coming more closely together. Her stomach was taut with effort, her legs spread impossibly wide.