The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Page 6

  HALLOWEEN, 1989

  “IT’S SO DARK now,” Andrew said, breaking a silence the other children hadn’t noticed setting in. “It’s so dark,” he repeated, “and I need to get home.”

  “We can’t stop now,” Elliot replied.

  “Yeah, there’s one more house. Let’s do that first,” Carly said, her mouth full of gummy bears.

  “Nobody lives there,” Takiyah said.

  “Then why is there music coming from it?” Heather asked.

  “I don’t hear any music,” Andrew mumbled from behind his rubber mask.

  The children argued, shouting over each other. Carly said it wasn’t fair that they all had to go home because Andrew’s parents were such hard-asses. As she spoke, she flung her arms around wildly, candy spilling all over the damp pavement.

  Elliot turned away from the group, and looked to that final house at the end of the lane. It was a thin, crooked building. Victorian-style, the pale facade shrouded in a green veil of Camperdown Elm.

  He walked down the weed-covered cobble path in the front yard. He didn’t care about winning some argument with his friends. He didn’t care about the candy. He just felt an urge, the tug of an impulse to get closer to this building, to listen to its secrets.

  The wooden stairs creaked beneath his feet. The paint on the porch was peeling. Termites crawled. The smell of wood-rot and mildew filled his nostrils, blocking out the chocolate aroma of the night’s haul.

  For all the disrepair of the rest of the deck, the front door was perfect, and shining red with a fresh coat of paint. There was no doorbell. Only a brass knocker that felt heavy and cold in Elliot’s hands.

  The knock reverberated like a drum. And there was some other noise as well, from beyond the door. Was it music? Elliot wasn’t sure.

  The floorboards creaked beneath his feet as he inched away from the door, which loomed blindingly red before him. He looked back to his friends in the street, still disputing their next move, unaware of his absence from their ranks. He was contemplating returning to them.

  And then the red door opened.

  Elliot turned to face an empty doorway. The light from the street outside illuminated a few inches of wooden floor at the threshold, crooked and carved with swirling symbols.

  “Hello?” Elliot called into the darkness.

  A flickering bulb switched on. The shadowed figure of a man stood at the far end of the hall. He walked toward Elliot, his fists opening and closing around the dusty air.

  The man wore a wrinkled blue blazer and track pants. Silver stubble framed a pale mouth, a thick mustache dangling over his dry lips like moss. He was oldish, but in the “older than parents and younger than grandparents” sort of way that was hard for Elliot to really understand.

  “Trick-or-treat,” Elliot said, holding out his candy bag.

  The man squinted out into the street, where Elliot’s friends were. “Halloween. Right. I’ve slept in again.” He scratched at his stubbled cheek with jagged, discolored fingernails. “Where are my manners? Would you like to come in for a cup of tea? Wait. No. That’s not it. Not tea. Candy. I must offer candy. Yes. Candy.” The man looked around the empty hallway. “I’m afraid I don’t have any candy.”

  Elliot heard the stairs creak behind him. His friends had joined him on the front porch, just as he was thinking it was time to leave.

  The man in the doorway shuddered and grinned. His teeth were nearly perfect, all but one—a rotten and shriveled canine that looked as if decay had filed it to a needle-sharp point.

  The man must have seen Elliot staring at his mouth. But he only grinned wider.

  “I have just the thing. Five treats for five tricksters, yes.”

  The man went down the hall, moving much faster than before. He disappeared around the corner, out of sight. The noise that may have been music resumed, and it didn’t sound any less strange than before.

  “We should go,” Elliot said to the others.

  “What? You were the one who said we had to stay out,” Takiyah reminded him.

  “Yeah, but what about Andrew? He’s late.”

  Andrew shrugged. “I’m already late either way. May as well add to the loot.”

  “What, are you scared?” Heather asked.

  “No. It’s just, the guy who lives here is really weird. He said he didn’t have any candy.”

  “He just said he had a treat for us.”

  “Maybe he’ll give us money. Even better.”

  The music abruptly stopped. The man reappeared at the end of the hall, a tattered leather briefcase in his hands. He held it away from his body, as if whatever was inside would do him harm if it got too close. He moved toward the children with trudging steps, then knelt down at the threshold, placing the briefcase on the floor. He craned his neck and grinned at the children, his rotten tooth gleaming purple-green in the moonlight.

  The briefcase had a six-digit combination lock.

  The man’s knotty hands spun the numbers around, until they read:

  1 0 2 9 1 8

  Elliot felt a twinge of familiarity at the number. Like he had seen it before. And not just familiar like a phone number you dial often enough, but like it should mean something big.

  The lock clicked open. The man undid the clasps with a dramatic flourish of fingers. The lid popped open, revealing five objects nestled in the moth-bitten lining that looked sort of like old pinwheels, or lollipops made of wood and stiff paper.

  It appeared that there were markings painted on the discs, but Elliot couldn’t quite see what they were.

  “Do you kids like cartoons?” the man asked.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Andrew mumbled.

  “But not the shit for babies,” Takiyah added.

  Elliot grimaced, expecting the man to scold Takiyah, but he didn’t seem to mind the swearing.

  “These are the original cartoons, you could say. Well, not these particular ones, though they are still very old. Older than me. Older than any of you for sure.”

  “What? How does it work?” Carly asked.

  “Hold it up, to a mirror, facing this way, so the images are reflected. Look through here, this notch. Spin it, like this. That’s all—you’ll see the beauty of movement revealing itself. So simple. No batteries required.”

  He passed the objects out to the children as he spoke.

  “But this part is very important. Do not look at the mirror itself. When you are finished, please leave the room for two hours at least, and do not, do not, do not look at the mirror.”

  Elliot was only half-listening to this warning. Instead, he was looking down the hall, toward where the music came from. His eyes had, by that point, adjusted to the dark interior of the house. He saw a staircase, and beside the staircase, a gray-metal door. The door rattled, as if reverberating from some unheard sound on the other side.

  “Come on, Elliot, let’s get out of here,” Heather said, tugging on his shirtsleeve.

  Had they seen it too? he wondered, as he was practically dragged down the creaking front steps of the house. If they did, none of them gave any indication. They all seemed bored, tired, ready to go home.

  They were already halfway out of the dead-end street when Elliot realized the sack of candy wasn’t the only thing he was carrying.

  He had no recollection of taking the object from the man, but there it was, in his hand. He inspected it by streetlight as he walked. He saw painted on the disk a progression of cartoon skeletons, positioned like the numbers of a clock, each one standing in a slightly different position.

  “Do you think what he was saying about the mirror is real?” Heather asked.

  “Don’t be stupid. He was just trying to scare us,” Carly replied.

  It started to rain, and the children picked up the pace.

  Andrew’s house was the first they passed. His mom was waiting for him on the porch, her arms crossed beneath the rain poncho draped over her shoulders.

  “Busted,” he whispered, as he lef
t their ranks.

  Takiyah’s place was next, then Carly’s. By then, the rain had let up a little. Elliot and Heather walked in silence for two whole blocks. The streets were empty, quiet.

  Elliot thought it was strange that there was no one else out, now that the rain was over. It was dark, sure, but not that late.

  When they got to his house, Elliot mumbled goodbye.

  “Happy Halloween,” Heather whispered back. She hesitated, as if she wanted to say something else to him. “You too,” he said back to her, and turned away, walking toward the jack-o’-lanterns that lined his front porch.

  Up in his bedroom, he began to sort out his candy, but was quickly bored by the task. The skeleton disc sat on the floor, and as much as he didn’t like the thing, he was tempted to see what its story was.

  He took it to the shared bathroom in the hall, and locked the door behind him. He held it up to the mirror, and with a flick of his hand, the disc began to spin.

  The image was of a skeleton, dancing with a cane and top hat, its movements harsh and jerky, like a puppet’s. The whole effect reminded Elliot immediately of a flip-book, except, with its circular motion, it never ended. The image repeated itself, the same dance, over and over. It was hypnotic.

  Then, there was a change in the figure. Skin began to fill out over the bones, blooming like a peach-colored fungus. The cane transformed into a rope. The rope came into focus, coiling into a noose, slithering up the skeleton-man’s arm, around his neck. The man kicked once, and stopped dancing. His hat fell off, his skin fell with it, and he was a skeleton again, dangling in the squiggly lines of a paper-wind.

  Elliot turned away from the image, and tried not to look in the mirror as he left the room. He went straight to bed, but slept fitfully, dreaming of the trembling gray door.

  “November,” he mouthed into the dim morning light of his room. “November,” he repeated. He didn’t know why, but it was his favorite word ever. It just sounded like so much magic.

  But he hated the month itself.

  It was cold out in the park. He sat on the swing set, waiting for the school bus to come. He hated going to school the day after Halloween.

  He just wanted a Saturday morning candy-breakfast in front of the TV, but the weekend was still so far away.

  A breeze picked up, swirling the fallen leaves around his feet. The swing next to him creaked in metallic song. Somewhere behind him, something else creaked—it was the sound of the strained fibers of a rope.

  He turned to look.

  A man was hanging from the oak tree where the tire swing used to be, a man he didn’t know but who looked familiar all the same.

  Maybe it was the top hat that gave him away.

  He was hanging there, feet kicking, a noose around his neck. His eyes turned down to look at Elliot. They were wide with fright, or confusion, seeming to ask, “How did I get here?” The top hat fell from his head, obscuring his face as it drifted down. As the hat passed, the eyes followed it until the man’s stare remained fixed to the ground. The mouth hung open, limp, breathless.

  And though the face went still, the feet seemed to dance in the breeze.

  Elliot ran all the way back home. He passed Andrew and Carly, walking on the other side of the street. They stared at him in confusion as he ignored their waves.

  His parents were still at the breakfast table drinking coffee when he got home. He told them he was sick, and they didn’t believe him until he threw up all over the floor.

  He didn’t tell his parents about what he had seen. He couldn’t find the words. He went up to his room with nervous footsteps. He felt light-headed.

  The object was still sitting on the bathroom shelf where he had left it. He reached for it with his head turned away, not daring to look at what gruesome image it might show him this time. He took it and hid it deep under his bed, way past his stack of board games and shoeboxes full of trinkets and treasures.

  He went back to school the next day, and tried to tell his friends what had happened. But he couldn’t find the words. They didn’t have many words for him either. Everything seemed changed. None of them talked about the things they received on Halloween night, and the images they contained.

  Halloween 1990 was the last time Elliot ever trick-or-treated. That year, everything was different. Where once five children walked the cold upstate streets, now there were only four of them.

  Over summer vacation, Carly and her entire family disappeared. The children discovered this when school started, and she never showed up. None of the adults would tell them where she went. Soon they stopped asking and just accepted it—that she had simply vanished from their lives.

  But they all agreed to stay well away from the creepy man in the crumbling Victorian house.

  The years passed, like the herky-jerky movements of a cartoon skeleton in a mirror.

  HALLOWEEN, 2018

  Elliot left New York City the morning after a sleepless night. The bus was full at first, but by the time he arrived at the Trailways Bus terminal, he was the last person on board. As soon as he stepped off the bus, the doors shut and the driver pulled away, leaving him standing among the autumn leaves and broken glass of a small lot tucked behind Main Street.

  He stopped for lunch at the Yellow Deli. It was crowded, with children running around in papier-mâché masks. He had to remind himself it was Halloween. That this was normal. But then, this place had always seemed a bit odd to him any day of the year. And all the things he’d seen in the big city didn’t change that one bit.

  After four cups of black coffee, he knew he couldn’t stall any longer. He left the desolate Main Street, where so many of his teenage haunts were now boarded-up, and made his way through the quiet residential back streets. As he walked, the clouds occasionally parted to blinding sunlight. A cat stared out at him from an abandoned field. The cat’s mouth parted in a muted meow, and a pair of worms fell out, writhing to the dirt, entwined in some slithering dance.

  The house was just as he remembered it. The Halloween decorations were up in the yard. The same cardboard gravestones, the same scarecrow he and his mom made when he was nine. The mailbox was full of junk mail that would never be read by its intended recipient. He let himself in with the hide-a-key under the welcome mat. The plastic mummy candy bowl sat empty on the kitchen counter. He looked through the pantry, but couldn’t find candy to fill the bowl anywhere. It seemed Mom and Dad never made it to the store for that. He had found the cooking sherry, the only alcohol his parents ever kept in the house, and poured some into one of Mom’s tea saucers. He took a long pull. It tasted dusty and harsh.

  He went up to his childhood bedroom. Mom and Dad said they had converted it into an office, but he was surprised to see that, other than the addition of Grandpa’s antique roll-top desk and a filing cabinet from IKEA, the room was very much how he had left it in a previous millennium.

  He noticed a foul, acidic scent tingling his nostrils. He raised the sherry to his nose, but no, that wasn’t it at all. It smelled like something fermenting, something rotting. It was coming from under the bed. He lifted the duvet, bracing himself for what he’d see.

  It was still there. Right where he had stashed it. The phénakisticope. Over the years, he had convinced himself he had dreamt the whole thing up, that he had never seen that terrible thing in the park.

  But no, the object that foretold that horror was in his hand now.

  And the image was different.

  Where once there was one dancing skeleton, now there were two. They seemed to be beckoning to him, urging him to set them in motion, to witness their horrible dance.

  He would do no such thing. He threw the object onto the bed, and went down to the kitchen to pull out his laptop.

  The others. He had to talk to them, to the ones that remained. Of the four friends who were with him that night, two were still alive. At least, he assumed Carly wasn’t alive at this point. Sometimes, late at night, he would try to Google her name, to search p
ages and pages of results for any hint of what had happened to her. But there was no obituary, nothing. She had really just disappeared, back when the Internet was in its infancy. Andrew’s demise was more recent, more definite—a heroin overdose at that cursed age of twenty-seven. His funeral was the closest Elliot ever got to returning to his hometown, but a job interview at the last minute kept him in Manhattan (he never got that job anyway).

  He drank the last of the sherry he had poured earlier, and called the number he had listed in his contacts for Heather. It rang and rang and rang. No voice mail or anything. He finally gave up, and focused his attention on his laptop. He pulled up an old email thread with Takiyah. It was from three years ago, when she was working on some Off-Broadway production and wanted to meet up with him for a drink (they never did). Her email signature contained her contact information from that time. He knew for certain the mailing address was no good anymore, but he tried the phone number anyway.

  It went straight to voice mail: Takiyah’s voice, stating she was out of the country for the foreseeable future, and that she could be reached at… .

  He typed the number into an international calling service on his laptop, and received the connecting call on his cell phone.

  “Hello?” Takiyah answered.

  “Hi. Takiyah. It’s me, Elliot.”

  “Oh shit. Hey, what’s up?”

  “I’m at my parents’ place. In Oneonta.” He didn’t explain why he was there. It felt too hard. He was relieved when she didn’t ask him how his parents were, and instead talked about herself, informing him that she was living in Thailand now, teaching English, and that she was currently at a bonfire party on the beach and that, she was sorry, but she really couldn’t hear him very well.

  “Do you remember that Halloween before Carly disappeared?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Do you remem—”

  “Hello?”

  The call dropped.

  He started to type the number in again, when his phone rang.