Halloween Carnival Volume 4 Read online

  They passed through a doorway to the right of the dining table into a living room with a long hallway and a staircase.

  “I don’t see any bowls of candy,” Sam said.

  JayJay said, “Neither do I.”

  “Then let’s just go,” Kenny said.

  “Not without our treats!” Sam said with mock drama. “Listen to those weird drums. Did they bring in a tribe of jungle natives or something?” He walked without hesitation back into the dining room and through the archway into the kitchen.

  Kenny was so nervous about what they were doing that his palms were slick with sweat and his heart boomed in his chest, but he followed Sam and JayJay through the kitchen to a sliding glass door that looked out on the backyard.

  All three boys stopped and stared silently through the glass, mouths open in disbelief. They stood frozen in place until Kenny whispered hoarsely, “We should…back up. They muh-might see us.” He took one step back, then another, and Sam and JayJay did likewise. Then they stared through the glass door for a while longer, slack-jawed and mute, trying to understand what they were seeing.

  Just outside the door was a covered redwood deck with chairs and a round table. Curled up comfortably beneath the table was a sleeping German shepherd. Beyond the deck, a bonfire blazed in the center of a spacious yard that sprawled beyond, into the darkness. The fire’s orange glow danced fluidly over the figures moving around it. But it was on the figures themselves that the boys focused their attention.

  Kenny spotted Mrs. Castigare immediately. There was a reason she was such a popular teacher, and it had nothing to do with the fact that art was an easy class. Sam said she looked like a blond Jessica Rabbit, a description that was not far off the mark. Mrs. Castigare was hard to miss in a group with her clothes on, but she and the others in the backyard were naked as they moved around the fire in what appeared to be a festive, freeform dance. Some of them were young and attractive, like Mrs. Castigare, but they were in the minority. Most were old, flabby, and jiggly, or too skinny, with bones pressing against aging skin. The beat they had heard as they approached the house was coming from a single man. Several tall, black drums were positioned around him in a half-circle and he moved like a dancer behind them, his hands a blur as they pounded.

  The boys stood well back from the door so they could not be seen, whispering anxiously to one another. Their eyes followed Mrs. Castigare around the fire again and again, as well as a couple of her equally attractive female friends.

  “I’ve never seen so many naked women in person in my life,” JayJay said.

  Sam said, “Be honest, you’ve never seen any naked women in person. Is this an orgy?”

  “People have sex at an orgy,” Kenny said. “They’re just dancing naked around a bonfire.”

  “Well, they gotta start somewhere,” JayJay said.

  “How do you know, Kenny?” Sam said. “How many orgies you been to?”

  “We should go,” Kenny said urgently. “Seriously, guys, let’s just leave, okay? I mean, think about what would happen if they caught us spying on them.”

  “I want to see where this goes,” Sam said.

  “Yeah, it’s bound to get better,” JayJay said.

  Sam chuckled. “I’m starting to see hard-ons, so you’re probably right, JayJay.”

  Kenny’s chest felt tight, as if a steel band were shrinking around his torso, and it was becoming difficult to breathe. His mother had been intensely worried lately about his troubles with anxiety, which had increased since his parents’ divorce, so he had been trying to train himself to hide the problem from her as much as possible so she would not worry. He was a bit more relaxed around his friends, but if his current state worsened much, he would be in the middle of a full-blown panic attack.

  His mind kept jumping ahead to the immediate future, after the police had come and they had been arrested, to the next day, when the whole town would learn that they had walked uninvited into their art teacher’s house to spy on her and her friends dancing naked around a bonfire. The story would go viral and everybody in the world would learn about it on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. They were minors, so the media would protect their names, but that would not last long. They would be identified before the day was out and they would be all over the Internet, all over TV and radio, all over the world.

  They would be a laughingstock. He was only half aware of whispering the word to himself.

  “What?” Sam said.

  “Wuh-we’re gonna be a laughingstock. We’re gonna hang around here until we get caught and those people are gonna panic and call the police and wuh-we’re gonna get arrested and it’ll be a big scandal and—”

  “You think that’s gonna make us a laughingstock?” Sam hissed. He covered his mouth and bent over to hide his laughter, which came out as bursts of air from his nose. “Are you kidding, Kenny? This’ll make us heroes!”

  “Hey,” JayJay breathed.

  Sam continued, “We’ll be the only ones at school who’ve seen Mrs. Castigare naked, everybody’ll want to know what her boobs—”

  “Hey,” JayJay repeated.

  “What is it?” Sam said.

  “Look at them,” JayJay said, nodding toward the naked partiers with a worried frown. “Is it just me, or…well, I don’t know, maybe I…am I imagining it?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Sam said, watching them closely.

  Kenny watched the partiers dance clockwise around the fire, kicking up their legs and thrashing their arms through the air. But as they came back around from the other side, they looked different.

  First, dark patches appeared on their bodies, like streaks of dirt on their pale skin, as if they had rolled on the lawn on their way around the fire. He noticed small white strips of something dangling from their bodies. He was startled to realize that, rather than being smeared with something dark, their pale skin was sloughing off in thin strips to reveal a darker surface beneath, a surface that was not smooth.

  “Jesus, they’ve got scales,” he muttered unintelligibly. Then he noticed the changes in their facial features. “You’re not imagining it, JayJay,” he said in a broken whisper as the bottom fell out of his stomach and his insides seemed to plummet endlessly. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

  But they did not move. Kenny knew the others were no doubt as paralyzed as he was with fear and, at the same time, a smothering fascination with the creatures dancing around the bonfire outside. He could think of nothing else to call them besides “creatures,” because their human appearance was now rapidly deteriorating as more dark, scaly skin was exposed.

  Movement on the deck drew the boys’ attention downward to the dog beneath the table. It stretched, rose, and stretched again, paying no attention to the noisy activity in the backyard. It turned its head toward the door. The dog suddenly became alert when it saw them, head rising sharply, ears twitching, eyes zeroing in on them. The German shepherd’s teeth flashed as it began to bark at them. It was a loud, hard bark that cut through the drumbeat and echoed in the night like an alarm.

  The drumming stopped and the dancers staggered to a clumsy halt. All heads turned toward the house, toward the back door. Every eye, all of them now glowing a sickly gold with a slender, jagged strip of black down the center of each, turned to Kenny, Sam, and JayJay.

  Mrs. Castigare stood to the right of the fire, her body facing the flames, head turned toward them. The golden glow of the fire danced over her body, skin now peeling away in ugly patches, as her eyes locked onto them.

  Kenny’s throat tightened with the certainty that she was looking directly at him, straight into his eyes. She blinked and Kenny gasped because it was a sideways blink. Not from the top and bottom of the eye but from the sides.

  She lifted her arm to point at them, her lips moving as she spoke, and the gaze of the others turned toward the house.

  Just outside the door, the enraged dog barked at them, looking as though it was about to come through the glas
s. That was when the creatures all moved away from the fire and headed for the house.

  3. The Day

  “Fuck,” Sam said as he turned and bolted straight into Kenny, knocking him to the floor. “Shit,” Kenny said with a grunt. “Fuck,” Sam said as he bent down and swept Kenny to his feet. “Sorry.”

  JayJay moved around them and ran, and Sam and Kenny followed. Their feet thundered through the kitchen and Sam knocked over a chair on the way through the dining room. As they stomped into the foyer, the doorbell rang, bringing them to a stumbling halt.

  They stared dumbly at the front door for a moment. The muffled barking of the German shepherd outside the back door became much louder and clearer as its paws clicked and clattered over the kitchen floor.

  “Go, go, go!” JayJay said as they lunged for the front door and pulled it open.

  “Trailer Trash!” Ed Mortimer said, a grin splitting his red-and-black face as he stood on the porch with Spinoza and his friends. “Gingerfag! Jabba! The gang’s all here!”

  For a moment, Kenny felt crippled by his own fear, unable to move or even breathe, ribs and shoulder aching from the beating he had taken earlier, chest jolting with his panicked heartbeat. The dog’s barking and the clicking of its paws on the floor in the kitchen quickly grew louder as it moved into the dining room. Kenny stared at Mortimer and knew that on the heels of that dog were those creatures, whatever they were—including the once-beautiful Mrs. Castigare, her milky flesh peeling away to reveal something horrible—moving through the house, getting closer and closer.

  When Kenny, normally so quiet and submissive around others and more likely to walk away from hurtful words or behavior rather than responding to them, found himself trapped between Ed Mortimer and his minions and whatever horrors they had interrupted in the backyard of Mrs. Castigare’s house, he acted without thinking. Clutching his bag of candy in his left hand, he waved his arms wildly and released a shrill shriek as he plunged forward directly toward Mortimer.

  “What the fuck?” Mortimer said with wide-eyed shock as he threw himself out of Kenny’s way and knocked over one of his friends on the porch.

  Taking their cue from Kenny, Sam and JayJay followed him out the door as Mortimer and his friends parted like the Red Sea for Moses. Behind them, Kenny could hear the commotion that was moving through the house and rapidly closing in on them: the barking, snarling dog, the rushing footsteps, and high, reedy voices now speaking in what sounded like a foreign language.

  “Where are you guys running off to?” Mortimer said.

  Kenny looked over his shoulder and saw them standing on the porch, the front door still wide open. He stopped when he heard Sam whisper, “That day has come, guys.”

  Sam was facing the house, glaring at Mortimer and friends, but the glare quickly became a grin. “Get in there, guys. The candy’s in the kitchen. They’re having a party, and believe it or not, they’re dancing around naked.”

  Half of Mortimer’s thin-lipped mouth curled upward. “You’re shittin’ me.”

  “He’s not,” Kenny said, shaking his head. “It’s true. I couldn’t believe it. You know who lives here? Mrs. Castigare.”

  “The art teacher?”

  JayJay said, “Completely naked. With a bald pussy.”

  “Oh, shit,” Mortimer muttered as he turned and hurried through the open door. His friends followed in a train behind him.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Sam said.

  As they were hurrying to the sidewalk, a sound like a gunshot made them look over their shoulders. The front door was closed.

  “Somebody slammed it,” Kenny said.

  They ran then, but not fast enough to avoid hearing the screams coming from the house they had just left. Kenny recognized Ed Mortimer’s voice among the screams, and he was surprised by how much he did not enjoy the sound. It made his stomach feel a little sick.

  The drums never stopped.

  4. The Next Day

  It was Thursday. Art class was on Tuesdays and Thursdays, right after lunch. The lunch bell rang and they went to their usual far-corner table with their brown-bag lunches as silently as they had walked to school together. As silently as they had been the previous night as they watched horror movies. They had quit early, and Sam had gone home. Kenny and JayJay had slept in sleeping bags in front of the TV in the living room.

  They seemed afraid to talk about it. Kenny certainly was. He was already terrified of what the next day would bring, and if they started talking about it, he knew Sam or JayJay would point out some reason to be even more afraid. He suspected they were quiet for the same reason.

  Taking their lunches out of their bags, they seemed to be waiting for someone to speak first.

  Finally, Kenny said, “Are you guys going to art class?”

  That was all it took. They leaned in close as they ate and spoke rapidly.

  “Do you think we should?” JayJay said. “What if she’s there?”

  “I haven’t heard anything,” Sam said. “Have you guys? I mean, I haven’t heard anything about Mortimer.”

  “Yeah, but have you seen them today?” JayJay said.

  Kenny shook his head. “I haven’t. None of them.”

  “I say we skip,” Sam said.

  “We can’t just skip art class for the rest of the year,” JayJay said. He turned to Kenny. “What do you think?”

  “If we don’t go to class, we’re going to mess up our attendance and fail the class. If we go…what can she do?”

  “What do you mean?” Sam said.

  “She can’t say, ‘I saw you boys watching us dance naked last night,’ can she?”

  JayJay nodded, then smiled. “Yeah. It’ll have to be our little secret.”

  “Unless something happened to Mortimer and his friend,” Sam said. “We sent them in there.”

  “What the fuck were those things?” JayJay whispered. “What is she?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to find out,” Sam said.

  “She can’t do anything in class,” Kenny said. “I say we go and see what happens.”

  As the lunch period neared its end, they reluctantly headed over to the small building beside the gym that housed the art and music classes. They made their way slowly down the hall to Mrs. Castigare’s classroom and looked through the window in the door.

  There was no one in the room yet, not even the teacher. Easels waited for students among tables cluttered with art supplies.

  “Maybe she didn’t come today,” Kenny said, but he knew they could not see her office from the door. He opened it and stepped inside, past a short wall covered with fall-themed artwork, and looked around the corner to the right.

  A rectangular window looked into her office. The door was closed. She stood inside the window, smiling as she spoke to someone out of sight.

  “She’s here,” JayJay said.

  The bell rang, ending the lunch period.

  Mrs. Castigare tilted her lovely head back and laughed about something, then gestured toward the door of her office. Ed Mortimer stepped into view, followed by Spinoza and the others who had been with him Halloween night.

  Mortimer spotted them and Kenny felt like a bull’s-eye at a shooting range.

  As Mortimer’s mouth, lips closed, spread into a happy smile, his friends turned to see who he was looking at, and they smiled at Kenny and his friends, too.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Sam whispered.

  Mrs. Castigare saw them and came out of the office.

  “Well,” said Mortimer as he and his friends came out and stood around her, “if it isn’t Gingerfag, Trailer Trash, and Jabba the Scrote.”

  Mrs. Castigare smiled approvingly and said, “Yes, it is.” Her eyes flashed a sick gold for a moment, just a moment.

  Then other students began to come into the room.

  The Halloween Tree

  Bev Vincent

  That was the year Luke decided to make his own Halloween costume instead of buying one at the five
and dime. His new favorite TV show was The Planet of the Apes, and he wanted to go as a character from that program. He’d never seen the movies—and with only two channels of television, he didn’t think he ever would—but he’d found the novelizations of three of them on the rack at the pharmacy, where he also discovered a magazine about the series that had cool behind-the-scenes articles with actual photographs showing how they applied the makeup effects that turned actors into chimpanzees, orangutans, and gorillas.

  He’d already turned his G.I. Joe into an ape using Plasticine, a razor blade, and a glass rod with a rounded end to blend the pieces together and create the wrinkles and other fine details that he copied from the magazine. It had looked so good that his older sister, who was practically an adult, had moved it away from his bedroom window because she thought the direct sunlight had softened his toy. She thought it was real!

  He liked the chimpanzees best—they were the good guys, the smart ones—but a gorilla would be better for Halloween, he thought. They were dark and brutal. He’d spent most of his allowance on several packages of black modeling clay, and he’d already made a few attempts at scaling his G.I. Joe version up to life size. They’d been pretty good, but he was sure he could do better, so each time he peeled the clay off his fiberglass goalie mask and turned it back into a big lump. The white mask was getting stained by the oily Plasticine, but it wasn’t like he used it for anything else. Last winter, his older brother and friends had convinced him to put on goalie pads and other hockey gear and stand in front of the net in their backyard rink while they took wrist shots and slapshots at him, but when his mother found out what they were doing, she put an end to that.

  The most difficult part of the costume was turning the pieces of furry material he’d found in a department store bargain basement into a helmet shape that would fit around the mask and complete the illusion. His mom could probably have done it with her eyes closed, but he was too embarrassed to ask for her help.