Halloween Carnival Volume 4 Read online

  And found none.

  Against his better judgment, for surely this would be the moment when they would explode back to life and scare the living hell out of him, he reached a hand out and placed it, palm down, on Lenny’s right breast. After a few moments, he moved his hand up and held his fingers before the man’s lips.

  No heartbeat.

  No breath.

  Puzzled, Theo looked around at the gathering, everyone frozen, all perfectly motionless. If it was a prank, it was a mighty convincing one, but how were they doing it? It was making less sense the longer it went on. For example, the dancer in the schoolgirl costume—Veronica Dawson—was leaning backward in faux revolt from the spastic gyrations of her boyfriend, Dean Nolan. She had one knee raised, her arms thrust up in the air, so the angle at which she was leaning should not have been sustainable for more than a few seconds. And yet she was holding it with no indication of strain at all.

  “Okay,” Theo said, stepping away from the dancers. “You got me. Good job, everyone.”

  They ignored him.

  “I have to admit, this is very, very impressive. I’d love to know how you all pulled it off.”

  After a few moments, he moved to the girl with the food tray.

  “Hi, Betty. What’s good?”

  Raggedy Ann stared robotically at some point to the left of his face.

  He helped himself to some Ritz Crackers and cheese cubes from her tray. Management will provide the food, he thought. Cheapskates.

  “I should have come as Raggedy Andy,” he quipped and chuckled around a mouthful of cheese. “What a pair we’d have made.” As he spoke, a sliver of cracker flew from his lips and lodged in the white of her left eye. Theo gaped, a horrified apology surging up his throat but stalling when he realized she hadn’t blinked, hadn’t reacted or registered the intrusion at all. And he couldn’t help it, he laughed. Laughed so hard he wept, and when he noticed that Betty’s offended eye was weeping, too, the only reaction he’d seen from any of them thus far, another wave of mirth hit him until he was doubled over and coughing a mixture of crackers and cheese out onto the floor.

  At length, the gales of laughter subsided, and he rose, wiped his eyes, and took another cube of cheese from her tray. He popped it into his mouth, leaving only the cocktail stick in his hand, which he regarded thoughtfully. Then he looked at Betty, her eye streaming tears, and let his gaze rove down her face and neck until he was staring at the ample swell of her bosom beneath the gingham material of her dress.

  “What if I were to touch you? Would you move then?” he asked, and his voice sounded strange to his own ears in a way he didn’t like. Indeed, he felt strange. The hair was prickling all over his body. His pulse raced; he could feel it ticking away in his dry throat as if he’d swallowed a watch. His body was trembling and he felt warm, much too warm, and yet giddy at the same time. It was alarming, this new sensation, but not unwelcome. A small grin crept across his lips and stayed there. Let them play, he thought. I can play, too. And with that, he grabbed a cluster of cheese cubes and slid them free of the sticks on which they had been impaled, and returned to the makeshift dance floor in the center of the main aisle.

  “What about you?” he asked Lenny Hall, who was still holding his arms aloft. “How long are you going to keep this up? Or is it your intent to be the last one standing?”

  When Lenny didn’t answer and just kept on dancing without moving, Theo swallowed, moved in close, and pricked the man’s belly with the cocktail stick. He almost expected the skin to resist, to be solid like concrete, but it behaved the way skin is supposed to and dimpled under the tip of the needle. Theo chuckled drily, looked up at Lenny’s face for a reaction, and pricked him again, this time hard enough to leave a tiny dot of blood on the wound.

  “How about now, Lenny? You in there? You going to answer me?”

  Lenny’s head was thrown back, eyes to the ceiling, chiseled jaw jutting defiantly forward. He was smiling. Consequently, Theo’s grin faded.

  “You’re very popular in this office,” he said. “And I honestly never understood why. Your looks? Sure, you’re not ugly, but those looks are already starting to fade and you’re only…what, thirty, thirty-one? Is it the coke, you think?” He pricked Lenny again, harder this time, right under his nipple, and still the man did not react. “Oh, yes, I’ve walked in on you snorting that stuff in the bathroom. You fancy yourself a celebrity, I think. I think you believe you’re better than everyone here. You’re not, though.” He stabbed Lenny with the little needle again and again and again as he spoke, until the orange sky of Lenny’s chest was dotted with tiny red suns. “You know what I heard Betty say about you once?” He let his hand move down until it was poised before the man’s crotch. “I overheard her say she bets that with an ego so big, you probably have a tiny”—he jabbed the man in the groin three times in succession—“prick.”

  And still Lenny did not blink.

  Theo looked at him strangely. What kind of a prank required this level of dedication? The answer, of course, was: none. This was not a prank, not some fun activity designed to mess with his head. No. This was something entirely different, the nature of which eluded him for the moment. But the genesis hardly mattered because he was overcome with power, a sensation he could never remember feeling before. If these people refused to acknowledge him now the same way they refused to see him during the day, he was in a unique position to make them pay for that. It was almost as if he’d been granted special powers, like a superhero, his cause vengeance for the injustices he had suffered his whole life at the hands of others. And while on some level, his most human level, this struck him as patently ridiculous and inherently dangerous, it did not prevent him from returning to Betsy and her tray of hors d’oeuvres, where he stripped all the sticks from the cheese cubes and inserted one into each of her eyes. It reminded him of prepping olives for martinis—except of course, olives didn’t burst when you skewered them.

  With a plastic grin frozen on his face, he moved from person to person, stripping them naked and jabbing playfully at their faces and bodies and ignoring the heightening sense of panicked urgency that built in tandem with each punctured eye.

  You can stop. You can go home. You can end this. The prank is real and you’re falling for it, but it’s the worst kind of prank, the kind intended to expose the monster inside you…

  At some point the music resumed, but he did not hear it, no more than he heard the counsel of that voice deep down inside him.

  But as the hour grew late and midnight crept ever nearer, a great sadness descended on him. Any vestigial joy he might have felt perforating the fleshy disguises of his coworkers ebbed away, leaving him feeling hollow and guilty. He did not know what had come over him and he dropped the bloodied cocktail sticks in disgust. Ultimately, these people were not to blame for how he perceived himself, and hurting them was only a cowardly substitute for hurting himself. And that’s what really needed to be done.

  He felt a black horror in his soul that he doubted he would ever be able to remove, and, dispirited, he made his way to the coatrack by the door. “I’m sorry,” he muttered, as he watched his blood- and fluid-soaked hands retrieve from the hook the same boring jacket he wore each and every day “Truly, I am.”

  Theo turned and took in the room, the statues all in states of disrepair, all naked, all bleeding, and it no longer seemed so strange that they were ignoring him, or the lengths to which they had gone to teach him a lesson that needed hearing. Tonight, Halloween night, his forward momentum would bring him to one last stop: home, and a drawer full of knifes he would use to remove himself from this life.

  Freddy would understand.

  For once, everybody would.

  With one final nod of apology, he turned and quietly exited the room.

  As soon as the latch clicked home, Sally Thurston plucked a cocktail stick from her eye and smiled at the others. One by one, they smiled back.

  After a moment reserved to ensure T
heo was truly gone and not lingering in the hall, the party resumed.

  Across the Tracks

  Ray Garton

  The Candy

  It felt more like early summer than Halloween, with the sun setting on an unseasonably warm day and an evening that did not even require a sweater. But Halloween it was, and it looked to Kenny like it would be the same as any other. He and his friends JayJay and Sam would spend it together, on their own, trick-or-treating in homemade costumes while the other kids avoided them. Or worse. They did not complain and were happy to have one another. Having a couple friends made it hurt less when people crossed the street to get away from you or stayed put and tormented you when you passed. Afterward, they would settle in front of the TV for monster movies at Kenny’s house, where they would dump their bags on the floor and start trading and eating their candy while they browsed through Kenny’s stacks of comic books.

  Later, Sam would go home, which was just down the road, and JayJay probably would stay the night at Kenny’s instead of going home to the trailer park, where his parents were usually drunk and fighting. They would be miserably tired when they got up the next morning for school, but they did not care. That was how every Halloween night had played out since they were little kids, and so far, this one was no different.

  “Can you believe this shit?” Sam said. “First house we hit on the right side of the tracks gives us an apple. An apple! Cheap bastards.”

  “My mom says fruit is expensive,” JayJay said. “That’s why she gets us fruit punch instead.”

  The boys had walked from their neighborhood—which was Pond Road for Kenny and Sam and the sprawling eyesore that was the Four-Star Trailer Court at the end of Pond Road for JayJay—and along the canal that ran behind the Dollar Saver strip mall, and across the tracks where there were better neighborhoods with better candy. Better smells, too. Across the tracks, the smells of marijuana and garbage and dog shit gave way to the aromas of delicious meals being cooked, wood smoke from fireplaces (although not on such a warm evening as this), flowers in well-tended yards, and an occasional sweet whiff of potpourri from inside one of the houses.

  In this neighborhood, the houses were much bigger and farther apart, with spacious yards and neat, trimmed lawns, circular driveways, and much better decorations than anyone on Pond Road could afford. There were trick-or-treaters everywhere, and a few parents drove along slowly in their cars while others walked with their children and waited on the sidewalk as the kids went door-to-door.

  “You come to a neighborhood like this, you expect candy,” JayJay said. “The good candy.”

  “All candy’s good,” Sam said. He felt free to say that in the presence of his friends because he knew they would not respond by pointing out his morbid obesity, not even jokingly, and telling him he did not need any candy. Had there been others around, anyone else at all, he would have said nothing.

  “No, I mean stuff like Snickers and Hershey bars and Kit Kats and M&M’S. You know, chocolate. Not that cheap stuff like Smarties and Laffy Taffy.”

  “Then when you get ’em,” Sam said, “give your Smarties and Laffy Taffy to me. That might make up for the fuckin’ apple.”

  Kenny said, “I got a rock.”

  The boys laughed. They laughed at that Peanuts joke every year.

  The next house had a giant, inflated Frankenstein’s monster emanating a green glow on the lawn and flashing purple bats suspended from the widespread limbs of a fruitless mulberry. A string of orange lights in the shapes of ghosts, skulls, and pumpkins ran along each side of the concrete path that led to the porch. As they neared the door, they heard happy voices shouting to be heard above loud music. Kenny rang the bell, and a moment later the door was opened and the noise inside spilled out. In the doorway stood a voluptuous, attractive, middle-aged woman dressed as a slutty nurse. Pressed together by her confining bra, her fleshy, freckled breasts billowed up and out of the low collar of the tight, white uniform dress and quivered with every movement.

  That was another benefit of crossing the tracks on Halloween. There were frequently parties under way in the houses they visited, and a lot of hot moms wore slutty costumes. It was a great opportunity for eleven- and twelve-year-old boys to catch a glimpse of some thighs and cleavage that were not on a screen.

  “Oh, how sweet,” the smiling woman slurred as she swayed a bit in the doorway. “Let’s see, you’re a…an injured football player?”

  “A zombie football player,” Sam said.

  “And you are…a soldier, right?”

  “I’m a zombie soldier,” Kenny said.

  “And you…I give up. What are you?”

  JayJay said, “I’m just a zombie.”

  She laughed as she reached into the big black bowl cradled in her left arm. “Do you boys like these?” she said as she teasingly held up a fun-size Three Musketeers bar directly in front of her bulging breasts.

  All three of them gave her an enthusiastic and simultaneous “Yeah!” as they stared unabashedly at her trembling cleavage.

  “You boys have a happy Halloween,” she said with a little wave before stepping back and closing the door.

  “That’s more like it,” Sam said as they turned to leave the porch. “Three Musketeers and boobs. Now it feels like Halloween.”

  A group of four trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk turned onto the concrete path and headed straight for Kenny and his friends. Walking in the lead was a beefy boy with a familiar gait.

  “Oh, shit,” Kenny whispered.

  He was dressed as Darth Maul, face painted red and black beneath a skullcap rimmed with horns. Kenny thought it was typical that of the universe of characters provided by the Star Wars series, Ed Mortimer chose a minor villain from the worst movie in the franchise. It was probably Ed’s favorite. Darth Maul did not do him justice. In fact, Mortimer was scarier.

  Mortimer was, to put it simply, a bully. He was a professional bully of great skill and accomplishment. If there were a Nobel Prize in Bullying, Mortimer would win it. Whether at Lincoln Heights Middle School or on the street, he was the guy people like Kenny and his friends burned up a lot of time and energy trying to avoid. They did not always succeed. Since they had first encountered him in grammar school, Ed Mortimer had been a permanent part of their lives, a human animatronic Halloween yard decoration that could jump out of the dark at them at any time, all year long.

  As a little boy, Kenny had always imagined that when he got older things would change and there would be no Ed Mortimers. Even now, it seemed to him that they were too old to be afraid of a bully. But all it took to erase that notion was the sight of Mortimer lumbering up that orange-lit path with some friends. The red face opened into a wide, snaggletoothed grin as he approached. Mortimer saw the fear in their eyes, and nothing made Mortimer happier than fear in the eyes of others.

  “Gingerfag!” Mortimer said to Kenny. “It’s Gingerfag, Trailer Trash, and Jabba the Scrote. I didn’t know they let guys like you come to this side of town.”

  Kenny was frozen in place and knew his friends were as well.

  Mortimer stopped and grinned up at them menacingly while his friends moved past him up the steps to the door and rang the bell.

  “Well, come on, guys,” Mortimer said. “It’s our turn. Time to leave the porch so we can get our candy. Move your dirty, fat, freckled asses.”

  The door opened and Kenny heard the slutty nurse fawning over the trick-or-treaters again, and suddenly it felt safe to move.

  Kenny stepped down off the top step and moved around Mortimer, with Sam and JayJay close behind.

  “We’ll catch up with you,” Mortimer called as they hurried down the path to the sidewalk, and his friends laughed their forced, toadie laughs.

  “We should get off this block,” Kenny said.

  Sam said, “Fast.”

  They hurried back the way they had come, crossed at the intersection, and turned right. After hurrying to the next corner, they turned left, trying to put as m
uch distance between themselves and Mortimer as they could. They said nothing until after they rounded that second corner onto Amelia Way and were heading up a street lined with what looked like the kind of houses Kenny’s dad called McMansions. They headed up the sloped driveway of the first house.

  “I think this is where Mrs. Castigare lives,” JayJay said.

  “The new art teacher?” Kenny said. “You mean, in this house?”

  “No, in this neighborhood.”

  “How does an art teacher afford to live in a neighborhood like this?” Sam said.

  “Her husband’s rich.”

  “I’m not surprised. She’s pretty hot. She’s so hot, she should be on a screen, not in a classroom.”

  “You just want to see her naked,” JayJay said.

  “And who doesn’t? How rich is her husband? I mean, if he’s really rich, he can do a lot better than this neighborhood.”

  “I don’t know how rich. Let’s just say that he’s got a lot of money and they’re well off.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I pay attention, dummy. Didn’t you hear people talking about it when she first came?”

  “Who pays attention to people?”

  At the door, a silver-haired woman dropped candy into their bags and they headed for the next house. As they got back on the sidewalk, they looked in both directions for the familiar, thick, lumbering frame of Ed Mortimer but did not see him among the trick-or-treaters on their side of the street.

  All three boys had a long history with Mortimer. They were in the same class and he had followed them through school from the second grade onward. Of the three of them, Sam had been his first victim when Mortimer plunged his head into a toilet filled with turds and urine while Tony Spinoza, one of Mortimer’s flunkies, removed Sam’s pants and urinated all over them.