13 Days of Halloween

by Jerry eBooks

  “What are you staring at?” Derek said.

  “You. Your eye.”

  And before he knew what he was doing, Mark shot across the aisle and was smashing Philip Dawkins in the face, driving his fist in again and again and growling as Philip’s friends tried to drag him off.

  “I’ll kill you,” Philip was saying, but now everyone was staring at him, then looking away, embarrassed for him because blood was coming from his lip and he was crying, even his ears red.

  Mark sat rigid in his seat, ready to hit him again if he didn’t shut up. He wouldn’t say anything, he’d just hit him. And when Philip said it again, Mark did. And then no one would look at him.

  “What are you doing?” Derek asked.

  “He was looking at you.”

  “Yeah, so? People are gonna look.”

  “I didn’t like what he said either.”

  “You didn’t have to hit him again,” Derek said, and the rest of the way they didn’t talk.

  “What’s this I hear about a fight on the bus?” his mom said when he got home.

  “Nothing,” Mark said. “Someone was making fun of Derek.”

  “So you split his lip, is that right?”

  “We got in a fight.”

  “That’s not the way I heard it. The way I heard it it sounds like you attacked him.”

  “It was a fight,” Mark said.

  “You make it sound like you’ve been in fights before. Have you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” his mom said, “why don’t you go up to your room and think about it, and I’ll think about whether you should do your haunted house tonight.”

  He didn’t argue, he just went up and closed the door. It was starting to get dark, the sun behind the trees, turning the sky orange. He thought of the gun in pieces in Derek’s basement, in a plastic bag. He still wanted to hit Philip Dawkins, and he would tomorrow if he said anything, he didn’t care.

  “Well, have you thought about it?” his mom said when she looked in.

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m sorry,” he said, and this really was a lie.

  “You should be,” his mom said, “and if you think you’re sorry now, you just wait till your father hears about this.” She told him to get ready, they were leaving in five minutes.

  Derek must have told on him, but on the way over neither of them mentioned the fight. They talked about the Ghost Mine at Kennywood and all the things that jumped out at you, the hiss of air that made your hair stand up just before the end. This was going to be better, Derek said, because there it was the same ride every time; here things could jump out at you from anywhere. Mark was on the side with his good eye but couldn’t stop thinking of the other, the wall of black there, not even blue stars, just nothing.

  The haunted house used to be the main building of the old hospital. There was already a long line outside, teenagers and parents with little kids. The fence around the parking lot was covered with giant spiders Mark’s mom made from black garbage bags and old socks. From the trees in front hung ghosts and grinning skeletons. The porch was done up in cobwebs, and speakers on the roof blasted out eerie laughter. Mr. Jenner waved them through to the back lot with a flashlight. Father Don’s mini-van was there, and a bunch of other cars. Mark’s mom got out and came in with them to check on her work.

  The hallways were wide but the ceilings were low, and they’d crammed in as much as they could. There were bats that flittered on nylon fishing line, and zombies that peered at you from the rooms, and a mummy who swung down from the ceiling. “Whoa!” Derek said. “Man!” There was an operating room in the real operating room where the doctor cut off the patient’s head, and a torture chamber with an iron maiden and a victim stretched hideously on the rack—all his mom’s work. She bent over the displays, straightening things, touching up. Right now it looked stupid, but in the dark with the dry ice fog sliding along the floor it would be scary, or that was the idea. Last year when they went through, Mark had stayed close to his dad, hoping he wouldn’t notice. None of it was really scary, it was all fake; it was just that he didn’t like being frightened. It was stupid to be frightened of that stuff, he thought; there were real things to be afraid of.

  Father Don was putting on his costume—the lab coat and wire glasses of Dr. Frankenstein. Mark’s mom told him everything looked okay and that she’d see them later and left them with him.

  “Let me show you where you are,” Father Don said, and took them upstairs.

  They had a room of their own, made up to look like the ocean, the walls covered in wavy, mirrored paper with a blue light shining on it, an inflatable shark in one corner, fake seaweed and cardboard starfish everywhere. There were mossy papier-mâché rocks with a crack you had to squeeze through to get to the next room; that’s where they’d scare people.

  “Cool,” Derek said when he saw the suits, and Mark wished he’d stop being so stupid.

  “Okay, I’ll let you two get settled. We should be starting in about ten minutes. They’ll be an announcement on the PA.”

  “Wow,” Derek said, and looked around the room, turning in a circle. The foil and the blue light made the room seem bigger. He went to the stairs and then came back. “Check this out,” he whispered, and pulled a small white tube from his pocket and handed it to Mark.

  It was Vampire Blood, Mark had seen some in the novelty shop downtown, thin runny stuff the color of maraschino cherries.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Mark asked.

  “We’ll put it on, it’ll be scarier.”

  “You shouldn’t put it on the costumes.”

  “Look,” Derek said, and pointed to where it said DOES NOT STAIN CLOTHING. “Okay?”

  “Whatever.”

  “Whatever,” Derek echoed him.

  “Shut up,” Mark said, and threw the tube at him.

  As soon as it left his hand, he was sure it would hit him in the other eye. He didn’t mean it; he didn’t know why he was angry. Everything.

  The tube flew past Derek and skittered under the shark.

  “What was that for?” Derek said.

  “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

  “You should be,” Derek said, and retrieved it.

  They didn’t say anything while they hauled their suits on.

  “Here,” Mark said, and zipped him up, helped him settle the head.

  “It’s heavy,” Derek said. “Can you see anything?”

  “Not much.”

  The announcement came over the PA and someone’s dad ran up the stairs and left a bucket with a chunk of dry ice steaming in the corner. Derek held up the Vampire Blood.

  “You want some?”

  “Sure,” Mark said, more to be nice than anything. It would probably look cheesy; all that stuff did.

  Derek held the front of the mask and for a minute all Mark could see were his hands and the tube. The lights flickered and finally stayed on, but just barely. With the blue light it almost looked liked they were underwater.

  “How about your claws?”

  “Why not?” Mark said, and held out his arms. He waited inside the suit and then Derek let go of one hand and took the other.

  “Well,” Mark said, “how’s it look?”

  “See for yourself.” Derek led him forward a few steps and then turned him toward the wall.

  There in the wavy mirror stood the Creature from the Black Lagoon, its lips bright with blood. Mark raised his claws and growled, then did it again, leaning closer, and again, till he was inches from it, his breath coming back off the wall. The foil distorted his face, made the Creature’s eyes bulge and slither, his fangs grow. Mark tilted his chin until he could see himself inside the mouth, his eyes looking back at the monster that had devoured him. In the mirror, in the dim light, with the fog rolling all around him, Mark thought it looked very real.

  It was a joke, of course. It
had to be. Nobody Greg knew sent out invitations to orgies. Nobody he knew planned orgies. Things like that happened, of course, but always spontaneously and with the help of alcohol and drugs, and even then, not everyone wanted to participate. Not wanting to didn’t always keep them from participating, of course—unplanned and unwanted described some of the best sex he’d ever had—but if the orgy had been planned, they wouldn’t have shown up in the first place. It seemed to Greg that planning a thing like that would take all the fun out of it.

  But this was interesting because the orgy was being held in a graveyard. That’s what the invitation had said, anyway. It had been emailed to him from an unfamiliar address and the text had been surrounded by animated pumpkins and bats.

  INVITATION-ONLY HALLOWEEN ORGY

  and YOU are invited!

  Come join your friends in the

  GRAVEYARD!

  Which friends? You’ll have to come to find out.

  And you may be surprised!

  Green Glen Cemetery

  Action starts at

  11:45

  EXACTLY!

  COME FUCK THE WITCHING HOUR AWAY!

  If you were going to hold an orgy in a cemetery, Greg supposed you’d pretty much have to plan ahead. But who the hell would want to?

  The invitation had been bothering him since he’d received it two days ago. He wasn’t sure why, aside from the obvious weirdness of holding an orgy in a graveyard, but it gave him a bad feeling.

  As he waited for Kurt, Greg sat at the bar in the dining room trying to read a battered old copy of The Vault of Horror. Comic books were a weakness of his and since he’d started making so much money, he had spent a lot of it on a large and expensive collection; one of the best parts of it was the entire EC Comics horror line in pristine condition. He was too distracted to read, though, and got up and left the dining room, leaving the comic book still open on the bar.

  He went into the kitchen, leaned his hips against the edge of the counter and rubbed his hands slowly down his face. Eyes tightly closed, he went down a mental list of all his friends, trying to figure out who might have sent him such an email. Most of his friends couldn’t correctly spell Halloween. Greg was the one everyone asked when they didn’t know how to spell a word. He was a high school dropout, but he loved to read, anything and everything, and he’d always been a good speller. Of everyone he knew, he was the only one who owned books that did not have a celebrity or serial killer on the cover. Most of them owned none.

  Early on, he had fallen in with the kind of “wrong crowd” his mother had fanatically warned him about, and he knew that her warnings were probably the reason he’d fallen in with them.

  Greg never would have considered attending the orgy if Kurt hadn’t gotten an invitation, too.

  “It’s gotta be someone we both know,” Kurt had said that day. “Who y’think it is? And who of our friends do you think would be there?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “Oh, shit, I hope one of ’em’s that blonde who works at the 7-Eleven across from the firehouse. You seen her tits? She’s pretty young, but, hey, she shows up for an orgy, I don’t think anybody’s gonna send her home ’cause she’s got school tomorrow.”

  Kurt was his oldest friend and now his business partner, and business was fanfuckingtastic. His parents had always hated Kurt. Mom didn’t trust him and sensed he was “wicked,” and Dad automatically hated anyone or anything that Greg liked.

  When he and Kurt were teenagers, Greg’s mother frequently had tantrums of self-pity when she would tell everyone how sorry they would be about everything after she died. She’d been the type to make some phony attempt at suicide to get attention, and he was surprised she hadn’t. She never would have made a serious attempt, of course, out of fear of succeeding, because suicide was an unpardonable sin that would earn her eternity in hell with Joseph Stalin and Liberace. Anyway, one day Kurt dropped by to see Greg about something, and they’d stood in the front yard talking because Mom wouldn’t let Kurt in the house. When Greg went back inside after Kurt left, she was having one of those tantrums. She told Greg if she died early, it would be because he insisted on hanging out with that boy!

  She’d had no idea how right she was about that. Greg could not remember her ever being that right about anything else in his entire life. She’d been consistently wrong about everything.

  Another favorite of hers, always shouted at them from the front porch as they got into a car and drove away, was, “You boys are gonna burn! You hear me? You’re gonna burn!” She would actually shake a fist in the air.

  He went to the front window and looked outside. The porch light was still off and the front half of the house was dark. He didn’t want trick-or-treaters, but he seldom got them, anyway. The house in which Greg had grown up was at the end of a long dirt road, almost smack in the middle of his family’s twelve acres, and had no neighbors. That was the only reason he still lived there.

  After Mom was killed in what was made to look like a fall down the back steps, he’d been tempted to burn the house to the ground. It was filled with all the beatings he’d ever received from his dad, all the angry lectures and condemnations and humiliation sessions from his mom, and he didn’t think he could live in it again. But it was ideal for their work because it was so remote and isolated, his dad had built a huge workshop behind the house that had proven useful, and best of all, it was free. And although the house was large, it was modest and had never been the location of any trouble or police activity, so it wasn’t on the law’s radar. They were very careful about attracting attention, probably more careful than was really necessary because over the years, they’d made friends in the police department and mayor’s office. Even so, they didn’t make a big deal out of the fact that they made buttloads of money.

  While the outside of the house remained the same as ever, Greg had torn out a couple of walls and completely rebuilt the inside, equipping it with the best of everything in every room. It no longer resembled the house in which he’d grown up.

  He’d decided to stay there until the time was right and he had enough money to go anywhere he wanted. And every time he remembered that reasoning, he thought, You’re 32 years old. When is the time going to be right?

  Greg was beginning to wonder if they’d be late for the orgy—if there really was an orgy—when he saw headlights bobbing down the dirt road. It was riddled with deep potholes and big rocks, which discouraged visitors. And trick-or-treaters.

  Kurt’s SUV pulled up in front of the house and he came inside.

  “Ready to go?” he said, clapping his hands together once.

  “I don’t think we should.”

  “What? Why?”

  Greg frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling about it. Something’s not right.”

  “Well, a course it’s not right. People’re gonna be fuckin’ in a cemetery, there’s nothin’ right about it.”

  “No, I mean something’s not right about it in a way that might be dangerous.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I just don’t buy it.”

  “You sayin’ maybe it’s a trap?”

  “Well . . . yeah, something like that. That seems a lot more likely than an orgy.”

  “Why? Who’d wanna trap us? Everybody loves us. They should, all the fuckin’ money we spread around this county. And even if somethin’s up, I ain’t goin’ empty-handed.” He unzipped his jacket and opened it to reveal the Glock in his shoulder holster. “You should bring somethin’, too.”

  “So . . . you really want to go?”

  “Sure. We’ll take a look around and if it don’t look right, we can go to the party over at Sandy’s house. But, hey, we might get laid.” He gave his most charming grin and spread his arms wide. “Remember, our friends are gonna be there, we just don’t know which ones yet!”

  Greg put on a jacket, slipped a .38 into the pocket and they got into the SUV. Ku
rt played country music as he drove, which Greg hated. They’d made an agreement: in Kurt’s vehicles it was country, in Greg’s it was rock. Once they were on the road and headed for Green Glen Cemetery, Greg became preoccupied again with his anxiety about the orgy.

  “Have we pissed off anybody lately?” he said.

  “Only the competition.”

  “Well? What about them?”

  Kurt shook his head. “Nah. They’re too afraid of us ‘cause we’re so well connected. What’re you so worried about?”

  Still frowning, his gut in a knot, Greg shook his head. “I . . . I don’t know. It just feels . . . wrong.”

  “That’s your mother’s religion talkin’. You had that crazy shit pounded into your head so long, even if you don’t believe in it, some of it’s gotta stick. You’re always feelin’ guilty about somethin’ and that’s where it comes from.”

  Greg released a single harsh laugh. “Are you telling me you never feel guilty about anything?”

  “Why should I? Guilty about what?”

  He laughed again, but this time it was a genuine laugh. “Are you shitting me? We’re drug dealers, for Christ’s sake! And we’re—well, I mean, we—we’ve committed, um—“

  ”You can’t even say it.”

  “I’m not proud of it!”

  “Yeah. ‘Cause a your mom’s crazy fuckin’ religion. You can’t enjoy what you’ve accomplished.”

  “Accomplished?” Greg rolled his eyes. They’d had this conversation several times and it always got him worked up.

  “Yeah, accomplished. That’s how the world works, Greg. You decide what you want and then you go out and do whatever you have to do to get it, and once you got it, you’re fuckin’ accomplished. Everybody covers that up with charity and church and other shit, but that’s how the world really works. What have I got to feel guilty about? Nothin’. Neither do you.”

  Greg’s frown had deepened as he slowly turned his head back and forth. “That’s not true. And religion’s got nothing to do with it. I mean, think of all the people we’ve gotten hooked on drugs.”

  “Whoa-ho-ho, there, dude. We never got nobody addicted to nothin’. That ain’t our job. We provide a product for people who need it. Why they need it and how they got to needin’ it ain’t got nothin’ to do with us.”