The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Read online

  “Hey,” he answered.

  “Hi. This is Elliot, right?” a voice that wasn’t Takiyah’s replied.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Sorry, I’m at work and saw you called. What’s up?”

  “Heather. Hey. I’m in town.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I’m at my parents’ house. I wanted—”

  “Sorry, Elliot, I’ve got to get back to it, the cashiers need help. Last minute Halloween shoppers and all.”

  “Yeah, of course. When do you get off?”

  “Four, Four-thirty. Depends. Your parents still live on Linden Avenue?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He wondered if there was a quick and painless way to say to Heather that, yes, his parents’ house was still in the same place as ever, but they no longer lived there, that they no longer lived at all.

  “Cool. I’ll stop by when I get off.”

  “Okay, I’ll be here.”

  The line went dead, and he was alone in the silence of the house again. He tried not to think about the thing upstairs. He refilled his sherry saucer and took a sip.

  He was about to try to call Takiyah back when the doorbell rang.

  He drained the saucer in one long pull and went to the door. There, a very young vampire mumbled “Trick-or-treat” through a crooked maw of baby teeth.

  He looked out past the child. Midafternoon sun filled the yard. He saw the kid’s parents standing in the street, watching somnolently with arms crossed.

  “I haven’t got any candy I’m afraid,” he said, tasting the vapor of sherry trailing out of his mouth. “Not just yet, anyway. Come back later when it’s dark out.”

  “My parents don’t let me out when it’s dark,” the child replied. Then added: “What about your parents?”

  Elliot’s hand tightened around the door handle. “My parents?”

  “Do they let you out at night?”

  Out in the street, the child’s parents turned to face each other. They raised their hands to the other’s cheeks, as if both were racing to pull the other into a kiss. But they did not kiss. Instead, with thin fingers probing at the edge of each jaw, the couple, in perfect synchronization with each another, removed their partner’s faces, like they were masks.

  The faces hit the ground with a wet smack. Underneath the skin was not the bone or muscle or blood that Elliot had anticipated. There was nothing so human as that left in their faces. The space beneath their hairlines was filled with mildewed decay, all brilliant colors and strange shapes, like bowls of fruit left in a cold, dark place for far too long. The child on the porch laughed. Hand-in-hand, the faceless lovers danced the do-si-do, their skin falling away in sheets with each shuddering movement.

  The child’s laughter cadenced. From nearby, Elliot heard the sound of some unseen crowd clapping.

  Elliot stumbled back through the threshold of his parents’ home, and slammed the door shut.

  His vision darkened, blurred, then came back into focus.

  Next to the coatrack was a puddle of vomit. It smelled like sherry. Elliot didn’t remember throwing up, but the back of his throat burned as if he had.

  It was quiet now. But he didn’t dare look out through the peephole in the door.

  He thought about calling the police, but he never wanted to call them under any circumstance. A boyfriend back in Brooklyn had left him in the middle of the night just because he wouldn’t call the cops on his noisy neighbors. He liked the boy and he liked his neighbors, and he didn’t know which to betray, so in the end he stuck with inaction.

  But he didn’t like what he had just seen on the porch.

  And what did I see? he thought.

  Maybe this was a new thing that wasn’t feasible in the big city. Trick-or-treaters bringing the haunted houses with them, showing off spooky effects to the whole neighborhood.

  Just a magic trick.

  Just an illusion.

  Just a thing that looked too real to possibly be true.

  The doorbell rang again.

  He looked through the peephole and saw a woman about his own age. For a second, he expected her skin to fall away like the flesh of the dancers, for some child to leer out from the bushes. But she just stood there, arms crossed, tapping the toes of her Doc Martens.

  She wore khakis, a superstore polo, a thick black sweater, aviator sunglasses. Her cropped hair was dyed a purple-tinged black. But the way she looked around, surveying her surroundings, so patient and alert, was unmistakable.

  He opened the door for Heather.

  “Come in, come in, so good to see you,” he said as he pulled her into an awkward, one-armed hug. He hurriedly beckoned her into the kitchen, hoping she wouldn’t see or smell the pool of vomit beside them. If she did, she gave no indication.

  “Cup of tea?” He asked.

  She shrugged, removing her sunglasses. “Do you have anything stronger?”

  Elliot thought of the cooking sherry, the acidic burn of it at the back of his throat, the bile, the laugh of a child, the skin falling away, all the skin in the world… .

  “Just tea, I’m afraid.”

  “Sure, tea’s fine. Just no caffeine please, it’s bad for my anxiety.”

  He put the kettle on and found a packet of store-brand sandwich cremes in the cupboard, which he arranged on a dinner plate.

  “I know why you’re in town. Sorry for your loss.”

  “Thanks.”

  He didn’t want to talk about his loss, so he fixated on the simple fact that he was there, not the reason. “It’s weird being back. It’s been so long, and it seems so different here, but also … also the same really.”

  “Why didn’t you ever come back? To visit your parents? To visit me?” She whispered the last part.

  He shrugged. “Mom and Dad always liked coming to the city. Every Christmas, more or less. They liked walking around, seeing the Rockefeller tree lit up, sitting in coffee shops to meet whatever new person I was seeing at the time. And no matter how short any of those relationships were, they always had a Christmas present for whoever that might be. They visited a lot in winter, said it got so lonely out here. And what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Why did you stay?”

  “Because I can’t leave.” She said it so definitively, like some unseen force had kept her in the same place her whole life. “Oneonta is my home,” she added.

  They sipped their tea in silence.

  “I talked to Takiyah.”

  “What did she say? Is she still living in LA?”

  “No. She’s in Thailand now. Teaching English, it sounds like. It was pretty late, and she was at some bonfire party.”

  “Can you call her back?”

  “What, right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s like four in the morning there.”

  “I’d like to speak to her.”

  He redialed the number, and listened to the ringing as he sipped his tea.

  He was about to hang up, when the connection went through.

  A masculine voice answered in what Elliot assumed was Thai. There was a lot of noise on the other end.

  “Uh, hello. I’m calling for Takiyah. This is her phone, yes?”

  “Are you family?”

  “No, just a friend. From the States.”

  “Do you know her family?”

  “Not really. Not lately. What’s this about?”

  “I am talking to you from hospital. Your friend was in a motorbike crash, very bad. She’s in, what is it… .” The man paused, and Elliot could hear a woman shouting on the other end of the line. “Not sleep. Coma. Yes, she’s in coma.”

  The man gave Elliot the number of the hospital’s main line, telling him if he could find her family, to have them call that number. Elliot said “Thank you” and, just before the line went dead, he heard some strange and familiar music echoing through the halls of a hospital halfway across the world.

  Heather watched expectantly for an ex
planation, her teacup cradled in nail-bitten hands.

  “Takiyah was in an accident, she’s in a hospital. They wanted me to have her folks give them a call.”

  Heather gulped the last of her tea.

  “Well, let’s go then.”

  “Go? What, to Thailand?”

  “Back to the house where all this started.”

  “Where what started?”

  “You looked in the mirror. Even when he said not to. I know. I can tell. I did it too.”

  Elliot felt like he had a thousand questions, but he didn’t know what to say.

  “Let’s go. Takiyah’s house is on the way,” Heather said.

  They walked through the streets, so familiar yet so strange. Everything was washed in golden-hour light, and the trick-or-treaters were coming out in force. Elliot couldn’t remember the last time he spent Halloween in such a suburban place. All the costumes looked so cheap and plastic and boring. He felt so fucking old, so far removed from these children, living out their early years in the same place he once did.

  He was starting to sweat. Was he nervous? No, it’s just the heat. Way too hot to be October. Even the leaves on the trees had hardly changed as much as they should. Everything was too green—the trees, the lawns of so many abandoned houses, too many abandoned houses.

  Others had left this place. Not just him. The streets did seem so very empty.

  “Oh… .” Heather stopped suddenly.

  “What’s up?” Elliot asked. And then he saw it. The ruined rubble of a house fire, on the lot where Takiyah once lived.

  “Fuck, man. I had heard there was a fire around here in August, but I didn’t realize… .”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We can deal with Takiyah back at your place. She’s safe where she is, and we’re almost where we need to be.”

  This was his chance—face his past, or go home and pretend none of this ever happened. He nodded, and Heather led the way.

  They turned down the dead-end street, and walked to the very end.

  The house looked just as he remembered. It appeared to be locked in a timeless state of decay, neither renovated nor more rundown than all those years ago.

  But there was one difference.

  The FOR SALE sign out front.

  He felt the pull of the house, the same irresistible urge he felt all those years ago.

  “It’s locked,” Heather said in a tone of defeat.

  “I think I know the code.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  He stood before the red door, the realtor’s lockbox off to the side. There were six blank spaces on the screen. Six numbers. Six numbers he saw at this very place. He punched them in, with a precise and deliberate jab.

  1 0 2 9 1 8

  And this time he knew why it should be familiar. This was a date, a date that, first glimpsed in his childhood, had come to pass a few days ago. This was the date that his father, newly a widower, took his own life.

  The screen of the lockbox flashed green. Elliot slid open the case, revealing a single skeleton key.

  He slid it into the lock of the red door, slowly turning it. The door swung inwards, revealing the same hall, just as he saw it one Halloween, as a child.

  Elliot and Heather entered the house, side by side. He flicked on the light switch, and a bulb above them flickered to life.

  Heather led the way down the hall. She seemed at ease, almost familiar with the space. The only thing he could hear was the sound of their creaking footsteps and his own breath.

  After a small eternity, they were at the end of the hall, standing before the metal door.

  “I know how he died. The man who lived here,” Heather said, her face turned away from Elliot.

  The gray door shook.

  “I saw it happen. In the phénakisticope he gave me.”

  “What did you see?” Elliot asked.

  The knob of the gray door turned. The door swung outwards. Heather ran inside. Elliot hesitated for a moment, and then followed her into the darkness.

  There were stairs in the dark. He couldn’t see very much, but he heard something from below. A sound from his childhood. That strange music. Definitely music. He was closer to it now than he had ever been that night. He descended the stairs with slow, probing footsteps, trusting the music to lead him on.

  The stairs abruptly leveled off into a cool, packed-earth basement. Elliot didn’t know what a tomb smelled like, not really, but he figured this would be it. The odor was oddly comforting.

  The space was illuminated by a dim light he couldn’t account for.

  “Heather?” he called out. His voice echoed amid the sound of music. Other voices answered. What they said he wasn’t sure, but he followed them deeper into the subterranean space.

  As he crossed the dimly lit basement, passing a multitude of folding-chairs stacked haphazardly along a wall, he realized that he could no longer hear the music or the voices anymore. Instead he heard another sound—it was like sheets of paper, flapping in a wind.

  It sounded so familiar.

  And then he saw the source of both the light and the sound before him.

  There was a long mirror set across the entire back wall of the basement, running parallel to a row of metal chairs. Between each chair and the mirror was a phénakisticope. Many of the chairs were occupied, those seated facing the mirror with their backs to Elliot. He moved closer, and saw the faces in profile. Their bodies were stiff with rigor mortis, but their eyes were bright, and shining, and watching the images in the mirror before them.

  Elliot saw the man from the park, the first person he ever saw die, watching the spinning disk set before him, depicting himself hanging from a tree.

  He saw Andrew, watching himself slipping the lethal needle into his arm.

  He saw Takiyah’s parents sitting side by side, watching themselves burn.

  There was an empty chair beside them. In front of that chair was a spinning disc with a cartoon Takiyah, crashing her motorbike over and over again.

  The man who answered the door of this house all those years ago sat there as well. He was watching himself dying of cancer in a hospital bed.

  And the real estate agent. He recognized her from the sign out front. She was watching herself fall down the stairs of this very house.

  There were others too.

  His fifth-grade math teacher.

  The creepy barber.

  His high school crush that he thought had moved away just like him, but who came back here to die in a car crash on Christmas Eve.

  And there was Heather. Her phénakisticope showed her gunned down during a botched robbery attempt. She was wearing the same clothes in the spinning disc as she had on now.

  There was an empty chair at the end of the row, beside Heather. His own phénakisticope sat before the chair, with the happy dancing skeletons. He wanted so badly to sit down.

  Heather turned toward him and smiled.

  He realized then that all the watchers looked so contented, and not a single one appeared a day older than the day they died. They had achieved some kind of immortality down here, their souls spinning on and on and on and … Heather gestured toward the empty seat. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to sit and join her. It seemed so simple. For his whole life, he felt like a spectator. Why not go all the way?

  But then he realized that there were some people missing. Carly, gone as always. But not just her. There was something else.

  “Where are my parents?” he asked.

  The side of Heather’s eyes twitched. Not so much like a muscle spasming, more akin to a bug crawling beneath the skin.

  “I’m sorry Elliot. Your parents had ordinary deaths,” Heather replied. The words came out garbled, barely decipherable. When she opened her mouth to speak, all her teeth were gone.

  He looked back toward the mirror. His phénakisticope was spinning. The image began to change. There was one skeleton now. Skin began to bloom on its fac
e.

  It was his face.

  He lifted the empty folding-chair, and threw it as hard as he could at the mirror.

  The glass shattered, from end to end.

  The watchers screamed in unison. The sound was like that strange music transposed into the wrong key.

  Heather’s skin began to fall away, a shimmering layer of mold sprouting in its place. She decayed before Elliot’s eyes. All the watchers did. Everything was replaced by an armor of rot, everything but their eyes, still gazing at the spinning of the disks, still seeing their lives reflected back at them in the fragmented remains of the mirror. Only this time, they didn’t look so content with what they were seeing. In fact, the eyes gazing out through all that corruption looked so very frightened.

  Elliot ran through the basement, not daring to look back. He ran up the stairs, to the hall. He was surprised to find the front door was still open, that escape was still possible.

  He ran all the way home, past the burnt-out remains of Takiyah’s home, past the superstore where Heather had been gunned down in a robbery. He entered his parents’ house, and pulled the car keys out from the side table, next to the puddle of his own drying vomit. He quickly climbed into his parents’ car and drove away, out past the last lights of town.

  He never made it back to the city. Instead, he ditched the car in the JFK parking lot and bought a one-way ticket bound to Kuala Lumpur. He left that night, and throughout the whole flight he imagined his own phénakisticope depicting a plane crash. He watched a film that made him think about his mom. The plane landed. A runway crash, then, he thought.

  But no disaster occurred. Instead, the plane landed safely, and a sleepless layover in Beijing followed.

  He tried to read a paperback thriller from the newspaper kiosk, but couldn’t focus. He drank Tsingtao beer for five hours straight as he continuously refreshed his email, looking at the barrage of angry messages from relatives stuck at his Mom and Dad’s funeral, wondering where he was and when he’d be getting there. He boarded the final flight not exactly drunk, just vaguely bloated and dehydrated.

  He spent two weeks intoxicated on the beach before he got the nerve to face what he had come here for. He tracked down the hospital in Phuket where Takiyah was supposed to be a patient. No one there could tell him anything about what happened to her. They had no record she was ever there.