Halloween Carnival Volume 4 Read online

  They started walking again. They were on the wrong side of the road, with their backs to oncoming traffic, but it had been a while since any cars or trucks had gone by. The lights were now off in the houses they passed, and the entrance to the quarry was shrouded in darkness.

  And then there it was again.

  The lone streetlight beyond cast a faint amber glow, putting the tree in stark relief to the others around it. The steel-gray trunk fairly gleamed, and the dozens of gnarled, thorny branches cast shadows on shadows. In that moment it looked like a giant ogre, with arms upraised and outstretched, ready to wrap them up in a crushing embrace, impaling their bodies with spiny talons six feet long.

  “Holy crow,” Benny said. As one, they moved to the very edge of the road, practically walking in the ditch. They were so focused on the tree that they didn’t notice they were on the verge of the Corrigan compound until a dog leaped at them from the darkness, growling and barking.

  If there had been any traffic coming, the boys might all have died in that instant as they instinctively dashed across the dark highway, away from the immediate threat. When they got to the other side, Luke looked back to see if the animal was coming after them, ready to fend it off with his wooden pole. He heard a clanking sound and realized that the dog was chained. It lunged and strained at them, but it could reach no farther than the edge of the lawn.

  Luke was drawing a breath of relief when something wrapped around his body and plucked him from the ground. The odor of dead leaves, peeled bark, and tree sap enveloped him. His feet thrashed but could find no purchase. His bag of treats tumbled to the ground. Up, up he went. He thrashed to the left and right with his wooden pole, all the while yelling for help at the top of his lungs.

  The dog was going berserk across the road, but his three friends seemed paralyzed. They stood there, gazing upward. Luke was certain they were going to flee at any moment, leaving him to perish in the clutches of this evil entity. “Help!” he cried again, and this time when he swung his stick, he made contact with a branch, which shattered and fell. “Help!”

  Below, Terry, Benny, and Donnie sprang into action. Donnie pulled out a pack of firecrackers and lit the whole thing, throwing it up into the tree. It exploded like a bomb, and Luke felt the tree flinch in response. For a second he thought he was about to fall, but the tree’s grip on him was reestablished.

  Benny grabbed an arrow from his quiver and nocked it on his bow. He drew back and let the missile fly, but his first shot missed completely. While he loaded up another, Donnie planted sparklers around the base of tree and lit them, sending sparks into the wood.

  Benny’s second shot was true. The arrow embedded in the tree trunk a few feet below Luke. Terry unslung his ax from its holster on his belt, stepped forward, and let loose a mighty blow. Luke felt the tree tremble again. He swung his pole and knocked a thick branch free. It crashed to the ground, nearly hitting Donnie, who had just ignited another bundle of firecrackers. He faltered for a second and Luke thought the whole thing was going to explode in his friend’s hand, but Donnie regained his footing and let the fiery bundle fly. It crashed against the tree and went off like a machine gun.

  Then Luke was falling. He dropped his wooden pole and flailed his arms. He managed to catch hold of a branch and swung around it the way he imagined an ape might. Then the branch broke and he was tumbling again. The fall seemed to last forever, but he hit the ground and rolled. Pain shot through his left ankle, but he was able to stand up. He limped a few feet and picked up his pole, ready to swing it at any branches that might come his way.

  Benny had taken the ax from Terry, who looked exhausted, and swung it at the tree over and over again. Great chunks of wood exploded from the growing wedge near the base. Black sap oozed from the wound. Donnie picked up the bow, plucked an arrow from Benny’s quiver, and shot the tree point blank.

  They attacked with a ferocity and singlemindedness Luke had never before experienced. They weren’t afraid anymore—not really—and they felt like they could win this battle. They could defeat this terrible creature, the one that had haunted Luke’s nightmares for as long as he could remember.

  They all took turns with the ax. Donnie tried to set fire to the bark, but it wouldn’t catch, although he did manage to scorch the tree in several places with a bundle of sparklers. In his mind, Luke heard it cry out in pain and rage, even though the only sounds he could really hear were the thunks of the ax striking the wood, the whimpers and howls of the Corrigans’ dog, and the occasional blasts of firecrackers.

  Finally, the tree shuddered and started to lean toward the boys. They dropped whatever they were holding and scattered out of its way as it came crashing down, landing with a mighty bang, mostly in the ditch but with the top extending to the edge of the road. Branches broke off and scattered like shrapnel.

  The dog stopped barking. The boys collapsed onto the ground, panting, waiting to see what would happen next. The moon emerged from behind the clouds, casting silver light on the ground, which was now lightly dusted with snow.

  Danny was the first to his feet. He pumped his fist. “We got you, you bastard,” he said.

  “Yeah. Bastard,” Terry said. He went over to the fallen tree and delivered a solid kick. “Ow. Holy moly, that hurt,” he said.

  The fallen tree reminded Luke of the giant from “Jack and the Beanstalk.” He struggled to his feet and limped over to his friends. He hardly knew what to say to them. They could have run away, but instead they had come to his rescue. He borrowed Donnie’s flashlight and looked for his candy sack in the ruins of the tree. When he found it, he brought it over to where his friends were picking up their belongings, plucking arrows from the tree trunk and cleaning up the remnants of the exploded firecracker packs. Hiding the evidence, he realized.

  Luke dug into his sack and pulled out a wad of candy, which he offered first to Benny, who shook his head. He tried Terry next, but he also refused the offer, as did Donnie.

  “All for one,” Donnie said.

  “All for one,” the other three echoed.

  Terry was about to return his ax to its sling on his belt when Benny stopped him. “You can’t take that home. They’ll know the tree was chopped down and blame us. Blame you.”

  “We can say someone stole it,” Donnie said.

  “Yeah,” Luke agreed. “Big kids. Bullies.”

  Terry nodded, wiped off the ax handle even though they were all wearing gloves against the cold, and tossed the tool at the base of the tree. “Let’s go home,” he said.

  Without a glance back at the fallen tree, the four boys swung their sacks over their shoulders and headed up the road. By the time they reached Luke’s house, Luke’s ankle was mostly better and he could walk without limping too badly. He said goodbye to his friends. “See you on Monday,” he told them, and off the others headed into the night, waving until they were out of sight.

  —

  Of course there were questions the following morning about the tree that was chopped down on the side of the road. “Didn’t Terry have an ax?” Luke’s father asked when they drove past it on the way to church.

  “He lost it,” Luke said with a straight face. “I think someone stole it from him.” He would pray for forgiveness later. Surely God would understand.

  “I see,” his dad said. “It probably would have fallen on its own soon anyway. It was pretty rotten.” And that was that.

  That afternoon, Luke grabbed a few candy bars from his sack and wandered out to the end of the driveway. He tried to make a snowman from the new-fallen snow, but it was too dry. He finally got up the nerve to look down the road toward the corner.

  A Highway Department truck was parked on the side of the road and he could hear the sounds of chainsaws.

  He stayed outside until the workers finished loading the pieces of tree onto the back of the truck. When they drove past, Luke gave them a mock salute and went back inside to see what his mother was making for supper.

  Pumpki
n Eater

  C. A. Suleiman

  “Nobody dances on Halloween,” Pete said around the rim of his Oktoberfest, the last of its ambered froth disappearing into his mouth. “It’s not a dancing holiday, Marlene.”

  He spoke his wife’s name hard, as if it were properly accented on both syllables.

  MAR-LEEN.

  She used to laugh when he said it like that, back when they first fell in with each other half a lifetime ago, but she never laughed at it anymore. Hardly laughed at all these days, in fact. Instead, she usually just made a face he’d come to think of as her Resting Witch Face (all nose and eyebrows, that scowl), and she did the same again now, breaking it out as she turned from the granite countertop he’d installed and stepped to the rustic kitchen cabinets he’d installed.

  To Pete, the most frustrating thing about Resting Witch Face was that his wife never really pointed it directly at him. Just made it on the sly, as though he weren’t intended to see it. But of course he was. After sixteen years of marriage, she knew full well what got under his skin.

  Don’t give her the satisfaction, he warned himself. Remember…today’s Halloween.

  Pete smiled warmly at his wife. “I mean, do we even know anyone who dances?”

  As she turned to face him, a lock of her hair fell across her face, and as was her custom, she had to poke it to one side before she could speak. She was what her hairstylist called a “harvest blonde,” which meant her hair had only the barest whisper of traditional blond in it. Pete used to find it the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Now it just hurt to look at for too long.

  “We don’t, no,” she said, setting down the plates she’d pulled from the cupboard. “But I do. Other people do dance on Halloween, you know. They don’t all just get drunk and eat pie.”

  Other people, his mind smirked. I wonder who she could be talking about.

  Pete chuckled in a way that he hoped sounded casual. “Well, I say that shit’s unnatural on Halloween, but…if you really want to go dancing tonight, fine.”

  “Nah,” she said, leaning over to peer into the little window that looked out on the world inside her oven. “Got the pies in already. Be about an hour. Just wanted to see what you’d say.”

  “Pies? Plural?” He got up from his seat at the breakfast table nestled into the nook he’d built as a special extension to the kitchen three years earlier. The project took months to finish, and his wife griped to no end about the indoors being exposed to the elements for a two-week stretch, but the result was easily worth it. When one sat in the far chair, technically outside the house, one could simultaneously sit in the kitchen and look up through the glass at an open sky. His wife said that sitting at the back of his nook made her feel like a potted plant. He didn’t care. It was his favorite spot in the house, and he wasn’t about to let her ruin that for him, too.

  “Yes, plural,” she said, moving aside at his approach so he could better reach the fridge. “Your Granny Smith apple is in there, just like every year, but I’m making another one, too.”

  Pete pulled a fresh beer from the door and stared at her as he worked the bottlecap off. “Don’t tell me. Yams.”

  She smiled patiently, but without any warmth. “Actually, yams are a whole other thing, but yes, it’s sweet potato.”

  “Christ,” he said and sighed.

  “Honestly, how does a guy who loves Halloween as much as you do hate sweet potato?”

  He shrugged and took down a big gulp of his new Oktoberfest. “It’s nasty.”

  She folded her arms in front of her chest and glowered up at him. “Well, I like it.”

  He stared down at her and took another gulp of his beer. Then another.

  “Bully for you, Marlene.”

  (MAR-LEEN.)

  After a long moment of frostbitten eye contact, his wife said, “Well, I’m going upstairs. You’ll get your pie soon enough, and I’ll get mine.”

  You’ll get yours, all right.

  On her way out, she paused in the doorway to the hall. “Since this is your clambake, why don’t you make sure the walkway’s lit and the candy bowl is full for the trick-or-treaters. We wouldn’t want anyone to have a shitty Halloween.”

  Then she was gone, her footfalls echoing down the hall and disappearing up the stairs. Pete lingered at the refrigerator, sipping his beer, savoring the moment as much as the drink.

  She had no idea that he knew. No idea the price she would have to pay.

  Yep yep. This was going to be a holiday to remember.

  —

  Two beers later Pete stood smoking on his front stoop, a charmless slab of concrete that gave way to a descending series of similarly charmless gray slabs as the front yard made its slope to the lower elevation at street level down on Covington Road.

  Starting on the first step down, each concrete slab had company. Two gray pumpkin faces bookended the width of each step, leering stonily at oncoming visitors to the front door. There were ten in all, two for each year Pete had been making them. (He started this décor project six years ago, but had spent the Halloween of three years ago holed up at his in-laws’ dusty house in the middle of boondock hell. He and his wife hadn’t gone there together since.)

  Each stone pumpkin of a pair was the same size as its twin, but the size of each pair rose as one got nearer the house. The pumpkin sentinels on the bottom step were so small they were cute—a fledgling craftsman’s first and most modest attempt at transformation. Concerned about the possibility of cracking and overflowing liquid concrete, Pete had really reined it all in. Flushed with success, though, his confidence rose and by the time one reached the penultimate step, just a few feet from the door, the two pumpkin doormen were larger than real pumpkins.

  He hardly set the trend (he saw a video about concrete jack-o’-lanterns on YouTube), but he was the first to do it in their neighborhood and came to feel like that could suffice. The things were easy enough to make: plastic pumpkin, box knife, shitload of ShapeCrete—or even the harder stuff, if one feels like going full stone weight…and voilà. But when it came to pumpkins, neither materials nor difficulty was ever really the point. It was the doing Pete enjoyed.

  His wife said it made the front yard look like a “fucking pumpkin graveyard,” but of course she did. It was a Halloween thing, and he got off on it, so of course it must be morally objectionable somehow. It wasn’t that she hated Halloween. It’s that she didn’t get its appeal. And now that she was fucking another man, she probably appreciated it even less. It and Pete.

  He doused the butt of his cigarette on the bottom of his boot and looked around. Their house had received fewer and fewer trick-or-treaters over the last several years (Pete wondered if maybe the latest batch of kids was just congenitally afraid of gray pumpkins, or something), and the trend seemed primed for growth this season.

  Even though the crisp fall sky had rolled up under the scrim of advancing night overhead, and the day’s hallows had now fallen truly to eve, no children passed to and fro in harmlessly ghoulish attire. No undersized superheroes draped in oversized helmets and capes giggled as they all but raced from house to house, efficiently raking in the confectionary booty. He could just make out the bobbing will-o’-the-wisp of a lone flashlight down at the very end of his street, where it intersected with the more widely trafficked Maple Lane, but aside from that his entire corner of the neighborhood was quiet as a church mouse.

  And on this particular Halloween, that was all just as well.

  Pete stepped back inside to turn on the porch light, just like his wife had instructed, and to check that the candy bowl was full (it was), just like his wife had instructed. She hadn’t instructed him to pull the shades in all the front-facing windows on the ground floor of the house, but he did that, too, before walking quietly, nearly stalking, to the rear of the house.

  The door to the backyard of the house at 1408 Covington Road was located in a claustrophobic cubby that also contained doors to the basement and to the rear entrance of the d
ining room, on the other side of which was the kitchen. He moved through that dim little space and into the backyard now, slowly closing the door behind him. The fence surrounding his backyard was, as he put it to his wife during installation, “just exactly as high as any good neighbor should want it to be” so he didn’t have to sneak or hide or skulk. He was in his element now.

  Arriving at the faux-stone doors of a Coleman storage shed, he pulled out his key ring and popped open the Master Lock that kept them sealed together. Inside, taking up almost the entirety of the floor area of the shed, squatted Pete’s latest and greatest creation. He’d built it atop a palette dolly for ease of transport, and now it was time to haul the glorious thing on out.

  It rolled smoothly and softly over the grass to its final resting place, a cleared-out circle of dirt in the middle of the backyard. There, Pete unloaded it very carefully—not for fear of making too much noise, but to protect the integrity of its shape—off the dolly and into place. He took a step back to regard it and a childlike grin erupted across his face.

  I’m sorry, but this is a thing of beauty, he thought. Easily the best idea I’ve ever had.

  On reflection, what he enjoyed most about his best idea was that his wife was the one who’d given it to him. They were sitting right out here, on crappy lawn chairs laid out where he stood now, drinking beer and soaking sun on a pleasant summer afternoon, and she decided to pick that particular occasion to lay into him about the state of the yard. See, it wasn’t enough that it housed their patio furniture and his storage shed, even though he also kept it mowed. What he should be doing is spending all his free time changing his backyard, not enjoying it.

  I’m changing it now, honey.

  When the buzzkill had gotten a little too sour even for Patient Pete, he’d looked up from his longneck and politely requested that she give it a rest, for the love of Christ, please. This went over about as well as it usually does with women, and yet another marital spat ensued. Vague were the specific words he used (that wasn’t his first longneck of the afternoon), but he remembered her exasperation and her suggestion that he just go ahead and dig a well in the backyard so that she could throw herself down it and find some peace of mind at the bottom.