The low scratchy voice scuttled like a spider along gossamer sound waves, with a sinister sincerity.
Aloysius rose from the table and crept up the stairs. Mamalee held the baby close as she followed at a distance that almost felt safe.
Aloysius lunged to open the door to Everett’s room, and froze. Mamalee kept her eyes closed as she cleared the distance.
Everett sat naked on the floor, blood smeared all over his face.
Seeing his parents, he smiled. “Mommy ‘n’ Daddy!” he pronounced in the raspy voice.
Just a few feet away, Father Wemble lay on his back, eyes glazed, blood spurting up from his open zipper, where his penis once had been.
Father Scalia was pantsless and on his knees, face pitched forward, blood pooling at his knees, senseless gibberish wandering from his mouth.
Mamalee saw her good roast knife, the one Everett liked because it reminded him of the plastic accessories at the costume shop, the one that had gone missing. It was just under the bed, where he apparently kept it hidden along with the scary drawings he knew his father wouldn’t like.
Everett coughed as he pointed at something in the corner. “Very, very bad things!” said the boy in the kind of hoarse rasp that comes not from demonic possession as it turned out but from having one’s throat violated.
The priests’s crucifixes lay piled on top of two tubular red fleshy messes.
Scalia fell to his side, his face twisted by shock that could not be deep enough to block pain.
Everett made an inverted sign of the cross as he whispered, “Trick.”
* * * *
For Candace the first understanding that something was wrong came on a Halloween night. Mamalee and Daddy had spent the weeks before packing.
Candace would recall Mamalee begging her father to take Everett trick-or-treating. It was the only thing Everett talked about, the only thing that made him happy. Mamalee made him a mummy costume, and he wore it every day until the big night arrived.
Aloysius told the boy over and over what he was to do. ”I will choose a house. You just knock on the door, play with your toy knife for the count of ten, hold out your bag until they put some candy in it, then run back to me.” Everett promised he would.
Candace was not allowed to go. She was to stay home with Mamalee, playing Halloween games on the bare mattress until Daddy and Everett returned, when they would leave in the big truck Daddy had rented.
Candace knew what Daddy meant by “play with your toy knife,” but pretended not to. The year before, Daddy had taken Everett to a neighborhood where no one knew them and had let him join a group of kids. Everett did, and Aloysius followed them at a distance to watch. He saw them walk up to a house. When the door opened, the man who answered screamed, and all the kids ran away.
Aloysius ran to see what had happened and found Everett walking across the yard. Looking into his son’s goodie bag, he saw one of Mamalee’s good steak knives covered in blood. He realized that the man’s scream was not a joke on the kids; it was a roar of pain and fear.
The addled father took Everett home and scrambled the family for a quick departure. As they hit the highway,Mamalee’s crying alarmed Candace. “They will take him away!” she wailed. “Oh, my Lord they will take him far away, Aloysius!”
For once, Aloysius was kind and caring. “I’ll never let anyone take Everett away, no matter what,” he assured her.
Depriving Everett of Halloween was not an option. Mamalee could not take that from him, any more than she could let him be taken away. But on the following year’s Halloween, the boy ran away in the neighborhood where Father took him. He found a garden spade. This time, kids were the victims. The boy’s urge to kill was as strong as the family bond. There was nothing to be done except repeat the pattern, year after year.
Aloysius bought the truck, and moving every year on November 1st became a part of the Geelens family’s lives.
Chapter 31
Slumped over in fitful sleep in the closet of her parents’ bedroom, Candace slid to her side, bumping into several shoeboxes and raising a clatter.
Jarred awake, she remembered where she was, and why. She shrank against the wall, expecting Everett to tear open the door, meat cleaver in hand, and yell, “Trick or treat, Canniss!”
But beyond the closet door was only silence.
She peeked through the crack in the door. In her limited range of sight, her father’s corpse still sat slumped beside the window, his construction paper smile glowing bright in the otherwise dim room.
Her head and limbs felt weary but manageable. She was lucid enough to realize she had hallucinated, and had maybe been drugged somehow. She hoped that whatever had caused the torturous visions had abated.
Which meant her father was dead.
For now, mourning was a luxury. She mustered a measure of courage and eased the door open, just an inch.
Everett was not in sight. His pillowcase was gone as well, if the wake of smeared blood leading from the room was any indication. She rose and took two tentative steps.
Fighting tears, she turned to the wall behind her to face another one of Everett’s gruesome decorations.
Two mud-speckled severed arms nailed to the wall, dead hands holding either end of a construction paper banner that read, hapepiy halloween!
Everett had lovingly centered the banner above Mamalee’s head and articulated the bloody wreckage of her corpse as a linen-winged seraph, her tiny calloused hands nailed up in eternal expectation of toddling little boy hugs—or perhaps he had upgraded her to a ghost of herself, in fitting the theme of Halloween.
Candace stepped backward, stumbling over the mess of ceiling debris caused by Everett’s descent. She fell, but got back to her feet and ran to the living room, where she lunged for the old black phone with the tangled cord. She held it to her ear, but heard only a silence as dead as her parents.
She ran for the front door and then outside, despair growing like a thirsty weed under the fickle autumn sun. She called for Bravo as she dashed to his doghouse, but he was gone.
Her breath hitched, reminding her not to cry as she wished for him to be safe, insisted to herself he was, and ran, ran, ran down her driveway, not with exhilaration this time but in desperation, knowing Everett’s apocalyptic potential.
* * * *
Reverend McGlazer looked around one last time for Ruth before raising his megaphone to address the waiting crowd. “Thank you, everyone. The time is here! Any questions regarding parade route or responsibilities?”
The participants stood silent like monks.
When the sound of a familiar motor puttered onto the field behind McGlazer he brightened, recognizing it as Ruth’s. “Just a minute please, everyone!”
Ruth stepped from her car, haggard and leery as she pulled her khaki raincoat around her, not knowing she had costumed herself as Barbara from Night of the Living Dead. McGlazer suppressed a smile at the irony as he went to meet her. “Ruth! I was worried about you! And Hudson Lott is looking for you.”
He tried to hug her, but was met with a cool recoil. “You know how I feel about this,” she said with a low and imperious tone. “How God above feels about it. I only came to give you one last chance to call off this demonic affront.”
He motioned toward the waiting paraders. “Ruth, you know it’s far too late for that.”
“Well, then.” Ruth sniffed. “You’ve made your choice.” She turned to walk away.
“Wait! Ruth, I could really use your help today. I’ll pay you if you like.”
“My soul is not for sale, Reverend. Goodbye.”
“What about Hudson?” McGlazer asked.
She ignored the question and stalked back to her car, leaving McGlazer pawing at his inner pocket for the long-gone flask.
Just as Ruth left, another familiar car arrived, answering a pray
er he hadn’t prayed. It was Stella, appearing even more exhausted than he felt.
* * * *
Guiding his BMW out of the airport parking lot, Kerwin was all smiles. He regarded his passenger, record company executive Cordelia Cantor, with all his usual subtlety.
Corporate and sensible in a tailored blouse, yet utterly stunning with Botoxed lips and an enhanced bust, she spoke with a high-end British accent that might have occasionally dropped a notch toward Cockney.
As the Outlines’ demo played from the stereo, Cordelia studied the passing landscape with a condescending wistfulness. “So many fields and farms. It’s beautiful out here. If perhaps a bit lonesome.”
“Yeah!” bellowed Kerwin. “Well, a guy like me, used to the big city, I find it a little square. Was a case of right place, right time with these kids.”
“I’m not surprised.” Cordelia turned to show him an elegant smile. “Many great performers rise from humble and isolated settings. Nothing to do but create, I suppose!”
“Oh yeah! My guys can create!” Kerwin shouted over the stereo. “They create the hell out of this shit! I mean, it’s an odd kind of music I know, but…”
“The world needs a fresh sound. And I wouldn’t have agreed to come all the way down here if I didn’t see their potential.”
“Yeah, yeah! Right on!” Kerwin spun toward her, almost tossing off his glasses. “I told ’em that!”
As Cordelia flipped through her folder on the Outlines, Kerwin looked over her shoulder. “So…” he tried. “How does your husband or boyfriend feel about you taking this trip?”
She tossed a strawberry strand away from her left eye. “I rarely have time for my dog, much less a love interest, these days.”
“Oh? Well, gee, that’s a shame. Maybe I could take you arou—”
“This chap Pedro,” she interrupted, holding up the band’s publicity picture, her manicured nail jabbing the bassist’s chest. “Is he attached?”
“Oh. Him.” Kerwin’s expression soured. “I don’t know. I always thought he was, you know, in the closet.”
“Of course.” Cordelia put the photo down. “I could never become involved with a client in any case.”
“No?” Kerwin had found his smile again. “By ‘client’ do you mean, like, strictly the musicians?”
“Actually, I mean anyone. Period.” She made a dismissive wave of her pampered hand. “Married to my work.”
Kerwin tried to hide his disappointment.
“Then again, I have my carefree moments,” she said, prompting Kerwin to laugh with her, almost convincingly.
* * * *
“With the crowd they’re expecting, I’ll need someone to stay here at the church to man it as a sort of emergency station,” McGlazer told Stella, his hand on her shoulder as a subtle convincer. “After all, you’re a trained EMT.”
“But don’t you think you’ll need me to help with the parade?”
“We have so many volunteers now I’m not sure what I’ll do with all of them. Up here on the hill, you’ll have almost a bird’s-eye view, as the parade makes its way back toward the staging field.” McGlazer took his hand away, but she didn’t feel any less pressured. “It’ll be hard to hear down there while Dennis is playing. You might be needed to make a phone call or something. Who knows?”
She was already feeling apprehensive, far above and beyond her disappointment with being disinvited from the parade.
“I know it’s a sacrifice on your part,” he admitted. “Believe me, it will be much appreciated.”
“Just me? Can’t somebody else stay too?” Bernard, busy with a contract deadline, would never agree to keep her company. She never would have imagined speaking her next words. “Ruth maybe?”
McGlazer’s frown was her answer. “I all but begged her to help. She wouldn’t budge. You know how she is.” He gave her that tithes-and-offering-time look. “I…hope it’s not about your…the…” McGlazer struggled.
“Ghost,” Stella said. “I thought you believed me.” She wasn’t inclined to share her experience from the cemetery just a few dark hours ago.
“I never didn’t believe you,” McGlazer defended. “The parade is, well, overwhelming…”
“I understand,” relented Stella. “I’ll be fine.”
Chapter 32
Candace found the door of her nearest neighbor’s house hanging open. Her despair growing, she stopped in the front yard, staring into the doorway, at furniture and dust motes that were quiet beyond silence.
“Mister Fullbright?”
No answer. She scanned down the street and didn’t see a soul. No music played, no leaf blowers buzzed, no dogs barked.
She turned back to the Fullbrights’ front door and peeked her head in, seeing no one. But the phone sat on an end table beside the couch.
Candace dashed for it, lifted it, and moaned in despair. Then she caught sight of something outside that made her heart sink deeper.
The telephone pole that bordered the Fullbrights’ property had been chopped down.
Mr. Fullbright, having tried to stop the perpetrator, lay dead nearby, his upper half separated by several bloody, gut-strewn feet from his lower, his shotgun still in his cold dead hands, a construction paper mask of a sad moose stapled to his face.
Candace dropped the phone. She backed toward the door, then turned to run, stopping at the edge of the next yard, where the windows of the house were splashed with blood.
Another house: a wrecked body lying on the walkway, the conical hat of a garden gnome driven through his or her stomach, another custom mask.
Next house: a woman’s face pierced by the pointy teeth of the picket fence it lay on, a chicken mask flapping around the wound. A broken body lay across a front porch rail, Halloween lights wrapped around its neck.
“No…” Candace imagined mile upon mile of corpses, perhaps the world over, all sporting construction paper masks, all part of Everett’s fevered Halloween celebration. “Everett, no…”
She realized that Everett would—and maybe even could—remake the world as a vast Halloween mural.
She hid both sides of her periphery as she ran, crying, into the road’s horizon. “Not the parade! Not the parade! Not Stuart!”
She ran till her breath was ragged, trying not to see the unending crime scene on both sides.
In her periphery, she glimpsed a pair of older kids, Omar Lindstrom and Peggy Pike, pre-pre-engaged as of last Thursday, posed in an embrace, their entrails twined like a pigtail braid. They shared a single mask: a buck-toothed, bright-eyed chipmunk.
She screamed, falling to the ground, scraping and twisting her knee, turning her face away from the grotesque tableau.
As she crawled toward the other side of the road, she spotted a bicycle parked at the edge of a driveway.
Her resolve renewed, she stood and limped toward it.
* * * *
Under the demon dusk, a 1965 Chevy C-10 pickup, its bed filled with pumpkins, puttered toward the tunnel of high treetops just beyond the bullet-holed sign announcing Ember Hollow town proper, dead ahead.
Everett, in his senselessly composed costume of vampire’s cape, executioner’s hood, and shark grin, ambled in the middle of the road on a direct course toward the tree tunnel.
The C-10 pulled alongside him and stopped. Everett was set to raise the fondue fork hidden up the sleeve of his father’s coat—until he saw the dead man in the passenger seat.
Enrique, farmhand by trade, theater artist by hobby, was the truck’s passenger, dressed like a fresh corpse. The rubber scar across his neck glistened with fake blood. It was a two-for-one getup, celebrating both Halloween and Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead.
“Hola señor! Habla Español?” Enrique asked.
Everett beamed at him, entranced by the fantastic makeup.
Enrique looked at the driver, Guillermo, whose costume, a sinister diablo, bore the same exquisite artistry. No less than four months ago, Enrique had glued real goat horns onto a plastic mask, cast from a gelatin mold of the ever-patient Guillermo’s face.
The devil mask was made with separate teeth from a high-end costume supplier. A heavy flowing crimson cape, plastic trident, and sharp black glue-on nails completed the look. Everett was awestruck.
Despite his mask’s sinister grin, Guillermo was friendly. “Eh, do you go to parade?” He popped a thumb toward the pumpkins piled in the truck bed.
Everett admired the mound of orange beauties.
“Need a lift, amigo?”
Everett climbed into the back and settled in with joy in his heart, hugging a pumpkin in each arm as Guillermo accelerated.
* * * *
The young mother canoodled her daughter’s nose, forgetting that she had on blue makeup till she saw it smeared on the little girl. She smiled at Elaine Barcroft, taking a tissue from her purse to wipe the mess.
“Oh, leave it,” Elaine said. “We’re going to be painting faces anyway.”
“Oh, that’s right.” The mom stood. “You be a good girl for Mrs. Barcroft and Mrs. Lott, okay, Tina?”
The little girl nodded, though signs of separation anxiety were blooming on her little face.
“Come here, Tina!” Leticia chimed, grabbing Tina’s hand and leading her away before the tears could come. “Wait till you see all the fun stuff we’re going to do tonight!”
As a babysitting team, Elaine and Leticia were as tight as the Outlines were as musicians. They handled temperamental children and picky parents with equal aplomb, one reassuring where the other had to be firm, and vice versa. They had spoken of opening a day care but decided that their own families were far too important—and needy.
For Ma, losing a husband had made her cling to her two boys. She could not consider anything that might distract her from them, no matter how independent they became.
As for Leticia, Mr. Barcroft’s death had shaken her as well. Her husband was a law enforcement officer after all, and operating under an umbrella of controversy thanks to the incident with Naples. She took the role of mother seriously.
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