13 Days of Halloween

by Jerry eBooks

  “It looks like Miss Penny,” she said.

  I leaned in for a closer look.

  Adeline was right. It did look like our piano teacher Miss Penny. The gourd was round in shape, like Miss Penny’s cheeks. The stem resembled her pudgy nose. The stripes were her thin-lipped mouth—the mouth always so quick to criticize my posture and tempo.

  Over the next several days, I returned to the garden again and again. It was impossible to stop looking at the gourd. And each time I inspected it, it looked even more like Miss Penny.

  She gives the most unusual treats, I thought.

  When another flower transformed on Saturday, I decided it might grow into Janitor Jenkins. He had a wart on his forehead in real life anyway.

  I turned Sunday’s gourd into Old Lady Shelby, our neighbor who always told us to hush up and pipe down, which made us want to run around screaming like banshees all the more.

  * * * *

  I charged for tours of the garden. These tours could only take place after school between three and four o’clock—prime afternoon naptime for my grandfather and thus he would be less likely to wander out and question why there were kids lined up at the back gate.

  I was a big shot. Adeline collected the money in the Aladdin coffee can and I could tell that the job made her feel important too. The tour had strict rules of conduct. Three at a time, no more. No lollygagging. And no one was to ever touch a gourd.

  In spite of my rules, on his third time through Cole Cameron kicked Janitor Jenkins. Not hard enough to knock him off the vine, but hard enough to put a dent in one side.

  Cole felt bad about doing that when the next day at school we found out that Janitor Jenkins had crashed his motorcycle, breaking a few ribs and puncturing a lung.

  * * * *

  Today the garden grew Mayor Barton. Fitting, I supposed, since it was his boring haunted house that was the reason I’d gotten the seeds in the first place.

  I increased the tour price to one dollar.

  “Highway robbery,” Tuesday Covey groused and then paid up anyway because where else was she going to see a gourd that looked exactly like Mayor Barton?

  Max Covey only had seventy-eight cents. I gave him a break and let him in for just that.

  * * * *

  Miss Penny canceled our piano lessons today. That was fine with me because I didn’t feel well either. It was a hot, Indian summer day and I felt thirsty, wilted.

  * * * *

  I forgot to water the garden.

  I got so busy yesterday with school and piano practice and a book report on France that I completely forgot to water the garden.

  As soon as I remembered I rushed over.

  Only I was too late: One of the gourds lay on the ground, turning mushy and black.

  As I stood there worrying about what to do with it, Adeline searched me out to share the news that an ambulance had pulled up next door.

  We watched as paramedics rolled Old Lady Shelby out on a stretcher, her entire body—face included—covered in a blindingly white sheet.

  “We won’t have to hush up anymore, Addie.” I couldn’t hide the sadness in my voice from my sister. “Now we can run around screaming like banshees all we want.”

  I returned to the garden to water the vines and bury the black gourd.

  Digging in the dirt, I realized, I must tend the garden. Every day, without fail. Because like it or not, if I didn’t take care of it and something else happened, it would be my fault.

  Finished, I stood, back aching, hands filthy, and surveyed the garden.

  Still growing. Every day, there were new flowers.

  Then it dawned on me: I could not allow any more gourds to grow. Otherwise, I will have to tend the garden forever.

  With my bare hands, I tore off every last flower and bud, ripping and snapping until my fingertips were raw. Next I arranged the pale flowers in the dirt where I had buried the gourd, in the shape of a wreath on top of Old Lady Shelby’s grave.

  * * * *

  The garden had visitors last night.

  All around, I found prints in the dirt. Paw prints.

  Miss Penny was gone.

  All that was left of her was a chewed-looking piece of vine where once she had hung.

  The dogs had dragged Miss Penny off to the ravine to eat her—slowly and with great relish. The paw prints left no room for doubt.

  Panic struck. How could I possibly protect the garden from that pack of wild dogs?

  It’s impossible. I can’t do it. It’s—

  “Harper, look!” Adeline called from the deepest pocket beneath the lilac. “I found another one back here.”

  “Another what?” Did I need to ask? She gives the most unusual treats.

  “Another gourd, silly.”

  My heart stopped.

  “Surprise!” Adeline squealed in delight.

  No. No more surprises, Addie—please.

  She popped out of the lilac, holding her unusual treat: “See? This one looks exactly like you!”

  She had brought it on herself. He kept telling himself that. There were so many signs, and while he pretended not to see them, he fed them and stoked them in his heart, engraved in stone the word “hate” on his introverted cerebrum.

  He was a reserved man but not shy, and while many people took his quiet nature as a form of snobbery, that snap judgment was incorrect. His brooding disposition was far more the result of untreated depression, coupled with anxiety, also untreated. His name was Ian Cain and he was thirty-two years old, average height with proportionate weight, and bland, almost forgettable features. He lived on West San Francisco Street in downtown Santa Fe in a modest one-bedroom home with his wife, Delilah. Delilah was not a particularly active woman, she was not in perfect shape, but she looked good enough to draw too much attention. They’d been married just over two years but sometimes it seemed they’d been married their whole lives.

  Were he a more forthright person, Ian would have confronted her, brought up the many signs that he pretended not to see. He may have even attempted a diplomatic discussion. Instead he drove straight from the office to Party City, where dozens of parents and screaming children raced around in a last minute frenzy to get costumes and Halloween novelties.

  The frantic parents and children became cacophonous, which made it easier for Ian to tune out. He browsed the costumes along the display wall until he found the one he wanted. A classic costume: a black jumpsuit with a printed skeleton, a skull-faced hood, and bone-printed gloves. A classic, but also generic. Every town, big or small, has thousands of skeletons.

  He waited patiently in line, tolerated the screaming children that bumped into him, or tried to get a rise out of him with their own selected Halloween outfits. He didn’t react to any of the children, and his lack of acknowledgment and enthusiasm caused them to back away. Maybe when they looked into his eyes, they saw the hate stamped onto his corneas.

  The girl at the register, maybe seventeen or so, smiled a fake and exhausted smile, scanned the barcode of his purchase, and placed it into a bag as she gave him his total. $29.99 plus tax. He paid her with a credit card, made sure to get his receipt, then took his costume and went back to his car. His purchase of the costume was not to conceal his identity. In fact, he had no intention of even taking it out of the bag. He wouldn’t need to.

  Delilah had wanted to go to a party tonight. A costume party. Ian was not big on parties. Lots of people fueled by alcohol and God-knows-what, doing unkind things in kind ways. In his experience, merriment was a mask for spite and manipulation. He didn’t go last year and Delilah was disappointed, and being more docile at that time, she didn’t go either. They stayed home and watched a movie and sporadically gave out candy to little trick-or-treaters. This year when Ian said he didn’t want to go, his wife, with a sense of empowerment she’d been discovering within herself over the last several months, said, “It’s up to you, Ian. Do what you want. Me, I’m going.”

  Then this morning she woke up
with a fever, or so she told him. He felt her forehead and she seemed fine. All the same, she called in sick to work. Ian listened to her side of the conversation that morning, which she concluded with, “I should be fine by tonight. Just need a lot of sleep. Unless I’m dead, I’ll see you at the party.” That last verse had sounded as though sung in chorus, and the choir of it sang the verse into Ian’s bones and sent distrustful currents through the wiring of his nervous system.

  But that was this morning.

  Now Delilah was dead.

  On his lunch hour he went home to check on her, told his coworkers that his wife was very ill and at home and he wished she would go to the doctor but she said she was fine, even though she was having trouble breathing. His coworkers had said they hoped she felt better soon. It was a simple plan, really. As simple as a scene in a bad movie.

  He didn’t know what he’d find when he showed up home unannounced on his lunch break. He half expected to find a man. He knew there was one. Only when a woman finds a better suitor and tires of him does she gain the empowerment Delilah had been accumulating over the last several months. It had to be this man—or men—who had made the decision for her to go to the party tonight. She knew Ian didn’t want to go, therefore chances were good that the man—or men—would be at the party, and she could hobnob and flirt and do whatever she pleased without worrying about her introverted husband.

  But there was no man in the house. The house was silent and still, and in the bedroom Delilah lay in bed, covered in blankets, snoring from congestion. There was no reason to wake her. He took the pillow from his side of the bed and pressed it down over her face. After a moment her body struggled, arms and legs flailing as lack of oxygen and the accumulation of carbon dioxide did what they were supposed to do. Then her limbs dropped. He removed the pillow and she looked almost the same as when he’d walked into the room.

  It was as simple as that. He didn’t need to worry about fingerprints, and if his pillow came into question, given she was sick, she could have easily tossed and turned and planted her face right into it.

  An hour later at his office, after telling his coworkers she really wasn’t doing well and he wished she would just go to the doctor, he phoned the house, knowing she wouldn’t answer. He left a message on the machine, told her he felt bad about the party. That he’d changed his mind, and right after work he was going to Party City to pick up a costume. Then he added that he hoped she was feeling better and hung up. Their answering machine announced the time messages were left.

  And now he had picked up the costume, corroborating the phone message. The sky was red and black with cold sunset and Cimmerian clouds. He started the engine and made his way home.

  For a time he sat in his car in the driveway, doing his best to steel his nerves. He stared at the house, looked to his right and stared at her car. The car she would never drive again. And then he found that he was trembling. Body zaps and jolts, intense tremors. His skin began to burn and sweat popped from his pores. The car felt like it was moving up and down for no reason at all, and his breathing grew fast and labored, as if he didn’t force it, he would stop breathing altogether and die.

  “Calm down, man,” he said; then without sound said, You’re jumpy. Understandable. But this isn’t the time. It’s not the time to have one of these episodes.

  He covered his face with his hands and focused on his breathing. Eventually his breaths slowed, the tremors reduced to subtle shivers, and the match heads blazing inside his skin dwindled to smoldering embers. He looked back at the house. His car had stopped undulating. With another deep breath he grabbed the skeleton costume and got out of the car.

  Now for the hard part. The front door opened right into the kitchen. He unlocked the deadbolt and stepped inside. Things weren’t quite as he’d left them. Someone had brought in the mail and placed it on the table. An empty soup bowl and an empty glass stood by the sink. He could have sworn they hadn’t been there at noon.

  Simple things, little things. Things that could have occurred before he arrived on his lunch break. Being sick didn’t mean she was incapable of getting the mail. And dishes by the sink were common. These types of things could so easily be overlooked, especially when one’s focus is on killing.

  Ian gazed across the kitchen and through the living room, where at the end stood the bedroom door, closed. He was pretty sure he’d closed it when he left.

  He set the costume bag on the edge of the counter beside the dishes, opened a cupboard and took down a glass and the first bottle he saw. Drambuie. He filled the glass with the golden 80-proof liqueur, then brought the bottle to his lips and drew as big a gulp from it as he could. The stuff was sweet as hell, almost gooey, and strong. He brought the bottle down with a sigh and when he did he knocked over the glass he’d filled. The liqueur spilled over the counter and onto the tile floor.

  “Shit!”

  He uprighted the glass with a second curse, filled it again, then returned the bottle to the cupboard. Thirty bucks a bottle, dammit. He picked up the glass and had another large gulp, then set the glass down and stepped over the mess and into the living room, bracing himself as the bedroom door grew bigger in his eyes.

  Dead, he thought. Your wife is dead on Halloween. A fitting day, really. The day when witches and demons and ghosts come out.

  As he reached for the knob, something conflicting rumbled inside him. Suddenly he didn’t know whether he should be relieved or worried, elated or sad. It was a conundrum he didn’t like. What was done was done, and now, now question marks scuttled through him. Question marks that carried other question marks.

  He turned the knob and opened the door.

  The bed was empty. The blankets and sheets were a snarled heap, but no body lay on the mattress. There was no dead Delilah, no Delilah in any state of being. But that couldn’t be. He’d killed her. He’d promoted himself to the rank of murderer. What was going on? Just what the hell happened?

  He called out her name but there was no response, not that he expected one. She’d been here. She’d been here and he’d killed her, only now she wasn’t here. He called her name again and received the same response.

  He left the bedroom, closing the door after him. That’s when he saw what he walked past before. When he’d crossed the living room, nothing had existed but the bedroom door, but now he saw the headstone on the coffee table. It was like a magnet, riveting his gaze, and slowly he crossed to it and read the epitaph:

  Delilah and Ian Cain

  Both Dead This Day

  This All Hallows’ Eve

  This Halloween Day

  His heart pounded, raced, beat fast and too hard. Then it skipped a beat, stopped and flopped in his chest, then pounded and raced again. The tremors returned in an uncontrollable surge and matches began to flare in his flesh. He struggled for breath as he read it again.

  This was a joke. This wasn’t happening. It was Halloween and this was a joke. Ian shut his eyes tight, held them closed, then opened them and saw the headstone.

  Not happening, not real. This was a joke, a joke, yes, simply a joke.

  With a quaking hand he reached out, afraid to touch it but knowing he had to. It swayed at the contact of his fingertips, and he realized that it was not stone. It was foam. Styrofoam or some equivalent. He picked it up and it weighed next to nothing.

  Ian shook all over but not with fear. Now he shook with laughter.

  A Halloween novelty. The same kind of crap he saw at Party City. On the table was a set of letter stamps. Delilah had made this. She had to have made it, which meant that Delilah wasn’t dead. Jesus Christ, what a relief. It hit him again and he laughed harder. He hadn’t killed Delilah, and now he was glad. The sight of this headstone, at first terrifying, he now interpreted as endearment, and other than relief what he felt was guilt. All that had led up to his murder attempt, he now saw for what it was. Overactive imagination based on conjecture.

  Tears slid from his eyes now and he continued to giggle
, holding the novelty headstone in his hands.

  So where was Delilah? She was probably at the party. Must have felt better, like she said this morning, and gone to the party early. The relief, the giggles and the tears rinsed away the panic attack, and with another chuckle he thought of the Drambuie on the kitchen counter. All of this insanity, and now this relief warranted a celebratory drink.

  He’d tried to smother her, but in hindsight he hadn’t held the pillow over her face very long. Probably only long enough to pull her out of sleep and knock her out again. When he’d finished with the pillow, he hadn’t even bothered to check if she was still breathing, or if her heart was beating. His foolishness followed by incompetence and now he was in the clear and Delilah was still alive. Had he been a religious man, he might have sung “Hallelujah”.

  Still laughing and staring at the phony headstone, he carried it with him into the kitchen. There had been so many signs, but they weren’t signs of infidelity or anything else. They were signs of human independence, and he couldn’t stop laughing as he thought about his twisted interpretations.

  He read the epitaph again with a smile and then everything went into a rapid blur. His left foot shot forward and out from under him. The phony headstone flew from his hands and he tried to grasp at something steadfast to keep himself upright. Nasty clattering sounds—a glass shattering, a plastic bag ruffling, a table toppling and a sickening tilt-a-whirl of motion. Ian landed hard on his back. Incredibly hard on the tile floor. There was only a blink-of-the-eye flash of pain.

  For a moment he didn’t know what had happened. He stared up at the ceiling. The kitchen table had collapsed and there was mail on him. On his left he saw the countertop, liqueur dripping off it, the Party City bag teetering at the edge, right above him.

  Then the reality set in. He couldn’t move his arms. He couldn’t move his legs. Mother of Christ, he couldn’t even turn his head. He’d slipped on the spilled Drambuie, and the impact had stabbed him in just the right place to paralyze him—to hopelessly paralyze him from head to toe.