The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Read online

  June’s face was thinner and more lined, and her hair was so unkempt it mightn’t have been brushed for days, although surely it couldn’t be greyer. “Please don’t make a habit of this, Joseph,” she said.

  Was she calling him that as an extra rebuke? “I’ll tell my mam,” he said, which sounded too much like a childish threat. “I’ll say June said.”

  June’s voice rose higher. “You can tell her Miss Dillard did.”

  Joe felt worse than unwelcome. He snatched the packet and blundered out of the shop. Shutting the door disturbed a mask in the window, and he could have thought the scrawny whitish face was making an effort to turn towards him. At least it would soon be Halloween, and then all the masks would be gone from the window. Presumably June would store any unsold ones for next year.

  He didn’t like to imagine them lurking somewhere nearby in the dark. He had to look out of his bedroom window to convince himself they weren’t worth any loss of sleep. He was doing his best to count them when someone out of sight behind the display took hold of a mask. It had to be June who was inserting her fingertips into the eyeholes of the sharp pale wizened face and her thumb between the thin lips. Certainly an object was poking the lips apart and squirming from side to side. Joe seemed unable to look away or move, and he couldn’t help thinking that the spectacle was meant just for him. He fell back from the window and huddled in bed, but it took him quite a while to stop seeing the mask.

  In the morning he couldn’t tell which mask he’d seen. He was glad his mother didn’t need him to go over to Dillard’s when he came home from school. That night he went to bed without looking out of the window. He wasn’t expecting to sleep too well, but exhaustion caught up with him until a sound roused him. It wasn’t the alarm, although that was imminent. The small harsh noise was somewhere outside. It reminded him of digging, but that wasn’t right; somebody was shuffling across the street, except that the sound was too hollow. Whatever was inching towards him halted close to the house.

  His mother had already left for work. Joe stayed away from the front windows while he used the bathroom and got dressed, all the while listening for activity in the street. All he could hear was traffic on the motorway and his own thumping pulse. He managed to hope that the street was deserted, and it almost was. When he ventured out to be dazzled by the lights in Dillard’s, just a face on the pavement was waiting for him.

  It was an old woman’s pinched wrinkled face. The streetlamp made it paler and stuffed the eyeholes with shadows that could have been lumps of earth. Though it was just a mask, Joe couldn’t avoid thinking it had crawled across the road like a shell with a denizen underneath, or had it humped grub-like over the kerb onto the pavement outside his house? He needn’t fancy it had any life, although weren’t the contents of the eyeholes a little too lively for shadows? Wasn’t there some movement within the white slit of a mouth? Joe made to lift the mask with his foot, but was daunted by thinking it was like turning over a stone to see what lived underneath. Instead he trampled on it. He wasn’t sure if he felt something inside it give way, but the sensation filled him with such loathing that he kicked the mask into the nearest drain and stamped on it until the last fragment had dropped through the grid.

  While he was at school it wouldn’t stay out of his mind. At least when he came home the street was empty. All the masks in Dillard’s window reminded him how many hours of Halloween were left. He was glad his mother was already home, and more grateful that she didn’t send him to the shop. But he was washing up after dinner when she said “Just go over to June’s, will you?”

  “I didn’t tell you. She doesn’t like me buying cigarettes.”

  “You shouldn’t really. I’ll get them myself in future.”

  “That’s not all,” Joe said in desperation. “She isn’t like June any more.”

  “It’ll be losing her mother, Joe. We don’t want anyone trying to scare her or trick her tonight, do we? Not when she’s in that state. Go on,” Joe’s mother said when he looked for an excuse to linger. “I’ve had a hard day at work. See how she is and stay with her for a bit if she needs company.”

  Joe couldn’t help wondering if June already had some. At least when he trudged out of the house Dillard’s was as bright as it could be. The street was empty, not even a mask to be seen except for the crowd in the window. As he opened the shop door the bell went off like a timer. He just had time to see that the shop was unoccupied before it went dark.

  Had the bell fused the lights? Joe wavered on the threshold while his eyes adjusted to the pallid dimness. The streetlamp left too much of the interior unlit, especially the doorway behind the counter. The lights were off in the rest of the premises, then, but why couldn’t he hear any reaction? “June?” he called, not very loud.

  “No.”

  The voice was piercing and yet muffled. He couldn’t tell whether the word was a denial or a warning. In a moment a thin figure darted out of the back room, jerking up its hands. It had the face he’d trampled on, as sharp and bloodless as ever. The eyes might have been no more than shadows, but a tongue was struggling to part the pinched lips. As the figure lurched forward through the shadows Joe slammed the door hard enough to crack the pane and fled across the road. “June’s, there’s something wrong with her,” he cried. “Get someone, mam. Call the police. Call an ambulance.”

  The emergency services seemed to think the call could be a Halloween prank, especially since Joe was unable to convey what was wrong at the shop. At last his mother persuaded the operator that a woman on her own had experienced some kind of breakdown, and Joe retreated upstairs to watch from the safest distance he could find. He heard worse than a commotion in the shop or in June’s flat—the voice screeching “Go away” and a smash of glass. He didn’t know if he would rather think that June was telling him and any other aid to go away or someone he preferred not to bring to mind.

  At last he heard the ambulance. The siren drowned out her cries, though not by any means immediately. The flashing lights came to rest outside Dillard’s, and two paramedics hurried in. The shop lit up almost at once, and soon the upstairs rooms did, which only made the voice rise higher. It was still repeating its plea when the man and woman ushered their charge to the ambulance, and Joe saw the hands jerk up again to drag at the stiff white dried-up face until the attendants recaptured the arms. As the vehicle sped away Joe heard a shriller sound in the midst of the siren. Soon the deserted street grew quiet, but he was left with yet another thought he didn’t want to have: that the glass he’d heard breaking had been a mirror.

  A MAN TOTALLY ALONE

  ROBERT HOOD

  Robert Hood has been writing in various genres for many years, especially in the areas of horror, crime, and weird fiction. Once described as “Aussie horror’s wicked godfather,” his work has gained him various Australian award nominations and publication worldwide, mostly for short stories.

  His epic fantasy novel, Fragments of a Broken Land: Valarl Undead, won the Australian Ditmar Award for Best Novel, and his most recent collection is the award-winning Peripheral Visions: The Collected Ghost Stories—complete, that is, except for the new story that follows. He is currently completing a supernatural crime novel entitled Scavengers.

  “Though Halloween itself is a relatively low-key event in Australia,” Hood explains, “it has picked up some momentum in recent times, spurred on by increased commercial interests.

  “It’s the traditional supernatural meaning that lies behind Halloween that interests me most—the ancient pagan celebrations of the end of summer and the harvest seasons, and the beginning of the darker half of the year, celebrations for which some find connections going as far back as the Roman Parentalia, the nine-day festival of the dead, and (more commonly) the Celtic ritual of Samhain. When Christianity reworked the ritual it became All Hallows’ Eve, and was followed by All Hallows’ Day. Yet Halloween as a supernatural celebration of the dead lives on, even if it has gradually lost its religious a
nd supernatural meanings.

  “Before I decided to write the following story, I’d read an article about the ruins of an ancient Viking village found in Australia, seeming to confirm a long-held belief that the Norsemen had ‘discovered’ the island continent long before those more traditionally recorded as doing so had arrived on the shores of the Great Southern Land. The idea of combining this with a Halloween scenario appealed to me for obvious reasons—not least of which was the title, a phrase taken from the well-known Nordic epic Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks konungs. Connecting Vikings and the theme of loneliness to this popular festival of the dead seemed to me like a perfect fit, and made for an interestingly appropriate conflation of ideas.

  “Incidentally, the Vikings had their own version of Halloween, some say—Álfablót, or the Sacrifice to the Elves—the ‘elves’ in Old Norse referring to spirits that are both earth-creatures and the souls of departed men.”

  SAND AND SCATTERED rocks crunched under the wheels. Salinger could feel heat eating its way up through the chassis as the 4WD shook and rattled. He squinted toward the outlying crags of the Coolangamar hills, the sun’s glare squeezing in through his eyeballs like a headache.

  “Is it far?” he growled.

  “Far from what?” his passenger said.

  Salinger had picked up Doogan at the main road as requested, and so far, hadn’t been able to get any sensible information out of him.

  The older man laughed. “Sorry it’s so hard on ya vehicle. Ground’s pretty rough, eh?”

  “The quake?”

  Doogan ignored his question. “The body’s over there.” He pointed. Salinger could just make out through the heat-haze what might have been a vehicle. Doogan added, “Poor bugger was in a hole opened up by the tremors, we think.”

  “Any sign how he got here?”

  “Na. There’s bugger-all for a hundred kilometers.”

  “Except the mine.”

  “And it’s twenty kays that way.” Doogan pointed toward where the sun would set in five or six hours. “Couldn’t have walked from there. Couldn’t’ve walked from anywhere. Not in his state.” He grinned. “Someone dumped him, probably. Or he was buried somewhere there and got spewed up by the quake.”

  Salinger grunted. This whole thing would have been a hell of a lot easier if HQ had let him use the chopper instead of a four-wheel drive. But the pilot wasn’t available. Salinger could fly the damn thing. Just because his license had been taken from him… .

  He felt a memory twinge and pushed it away. He didn’t need to go to bad places right now.

  “There they are. See ’em?”

  He could hardly see anything through the glare and the dust on the windscreen. The heat was fierce, despite the 4WD’s air-con. The arse-end of October was always a killer out here. At least I could’ve remembered to bring sunglasses, he thought bitterly.

  He braked to a stop near the Land Rover. It was even more battered than his own. He let the engine die.

  “Come on,” said Doogan, getting out of the vehicle. Salinger followed.

  Two men—an Aboriginal, twenty, twenty-five maybe, and a white bloke some years on from that—materialized through the haze. Doogan said, “Denny and Wal.”

  Salinger nodded toward them, but his eyes were scanning the area. The two men were standing just outside the shadow of a rock outcrop, beneath which the ground had split open to create an overhang. He could barely make out the body sprawled there.

  “You sure he’s dead?”

  Wal grunted. “Woulda called the Flying Docs if we weren’t. Instead we got you.”

  “Yeah. Lucky me.”

  Denny said nothing. Eyes bright against the darkness of his skin evaluated Salinger without comment.

  “So how’d he die?”

  “Bugger if I know. That’s your job, ain’t it?” Salinger found Wal’s antagonism annoying, but he didn’t take it personally. There’d been a fair bit of trouble at the Tyanerong mine over the past decade—what with issues of indigenous land rights, low-paid illegal immigrant workers, variable pay conditions, and environmental irresponsibility provoking all sorts of argy-bargy—and police action hadn’t always gone the way the miners wanted.

  “It’s my job to ask questions,” Salinger said flatly.

  “Don’t mind him.” Doogan shot Wal a snarly look, which Salinger wasn’t supposed to see. He did, though, and it made him wonder what was going on under the surface. Not that he cared. There was always something going on beneath Doogan’s surface. He stepped past both of them and knelt next to the body.

  As his eyes readjusted to the shadow’s comparative gloom, what he saw didn’t fill him with confidence that he’d be able to come up with answers any better than these blokes had. The corpse was that of a man whose age was as indeterminate as where he’d come from. Walking hadn’t been an issue. Even at a glance, the state of the dead man’s skin made it obvious he’d been dead for a long time. Its texture was dark—not indigenous dark, but old, dried-out dark—and wrinkled, without fat reserves so that it had shrunk around his bones like gauze. Looked singed, too. His head was more like a skull than a head. Clothes were rags, linen pants hand-sewn and coat baggy and torn. Parts of it seemed to have rotted right through. What remained was well on the way. His feet were bare.

  “Has he been moved since you found him?”

  “Na,” snapped Wal. Too quickly.

  “Didn’t touch him,” Doogan added. “Besides, just lookin’ at him you can see he’s dead.”

  Salinger placed his fingers on the man’s neck to check for an impossible pulse. The skin felt cold, totally arctic, despite the heat, with little meat or muscle underneath.

  “He’s been dead for months, I’d say.” He glanced back at Doogan. “Probably longer.”

  “Ya reckon?” Wal smirked.

  Salinger gestured toward the surrounding ground. Obvious marks in the dirt led up to where the dead man’s hands with their long, cracked fingernails and his desiccated, shoeless feet were spread out at random angles. “Who made all these tracks?”

  Doogan grunted. “Guess we did.”

  “Could any of them belong to someone who put the corpse here?”

  “Ask Denny. He’s the expert.”

  Salinger turned his gaze back toward the Aboriginal bloke, who shrugged. “Them’s ours all right,” Denny muttered. “No others. No tire marks ’round here either … ’cept the ones we made.”

  “No animal tracks?”

  “Bloody big windstorm bugger three nights ago woulda wiped ’em all.”

  Salinger nodded skeptically. “A big storm that covered all traces, yet the body’s not covered in sand or any other debris?”

  Denny shrugged. “No other fella’s trail that I can see.”

  Salinger turned his attention back to the corpse. On closer inspection, this thing had to have been dead for years, not just months. Yet here it was, ragged and dried out, but no sign of windblown exposure. Tentatively he felt the clothes it was wearing, what there was left of them. The texture was rough and brittle. Old. Very old. Rotten in places. His fingers brushed against a hard object. Not bones.

  “There’s something here.”

  He reached under the corpse, fingers closing around the object. It felt wooden—flat and round. It was the size of a Vegemite lid, slightly smaller than his palm, with a decorated surface. He pulled. The object moved a few centimeters, partly appearing from under the man’s clothing. Something held it back. He pulled harder and the corpse shifted. It took a moment for Salinger to realize the round object was held by a chain that circled the dead man’s neck.

  “He’s wearin’ a medallion,” Wal said. “Looks like snakes or somethin’.”

  Two-headed snakes. Four of them, evenly spaced around the raised outer rim of the medallion, each bent in half and crossed over themselves, their heads facing in opposite directions. The curve of their “middle” part touched the solid center of the medallion. Each head was looking at the head of another snake,
but none looked at their own “second” head.

  “It ain’t some Abo thing.” Wal glanced at Denny as though expecting him to say something.

  Denny ignored him. Salinger could tell he didn’t like either Wal or his comment. Probably both.

  Suddenly, irrationally, as he knelt there next to the desiccated cadaver, holding the medallion in his fingers and wondering at the odd feeling he was getting from these men, Salinger felt a wave of utter loneliness wash over him. Desolation ached in his chest, pounding like a second heart, one long dead but struggling to return to life, and in so doing filling him with sorrow. His mind was swept by a chilly wind that carried images of his wife, Leslie, dead now for near seven years, and his daughter, Nat, both killed in a freak storm that caused him to lose control of the chopper they were flying in that November night. If only he hadn’t brought them with him! He had survived, barely—the only remnant of his family—and the thought once again filled him with grief. Tears welled in his eyes, as hadn’t happened for years now, carrying with them a misery as potent as ever. He had never felt more alone.

  He exhaled a deep sobbing groan.

  The medallion fell from his fingers. As it tumbled back into the folds of the corpse’s clothes, the feelings of despair that throbbed in his gut diminished, leaving an emptiness filled with distant sounds echoing not just from a few years ago, but over centuries.

  A hand grabbed his shoulder. He turned, a stab of terror sweeping through him.

  “What’s up with you, mate?”

  It was only Doogan. But for a moment the man had looked like some sort of demon.

  “Nothing,” Salinger gasped out, too forcefully, as the emotions retreated. “Tomorrow. It’s the anniversary. Of when she died… .” He fumbled through his mind for a memory that had already retreated back into his subconscious.