Halloween Carnival Volume 2 Read online

  A half-mile from campus, the houses spread out onto their lots, and the paths marked by the paper-bag pumpkins disappeared. But the festivities continued. Even the country club haunted its golf course every year and opened it to the entire town, though they taped tarpaulins down on the putting greens. At this hour, though, with full dark not yet fallen, these streets were relatively silent. The scares out here, it was understood, were for older kids. The zombies in the leaf piles sometimes held on to you if they caught you. I stopped for just a moment outside Dean Harry Piltner’s house and stood in the strings of snow. As usual, Harry had constructed a long, knee-high crawl-through maze of straw that zigzagged back and forth across his yard. I’d once asked him where he got the wolf spiders and finger-sized roaches he occasionally set free in there to scurry and hunt and, usually, die by squishing at the hands of some screaming teen. He just smiled in response and kept his Halloween secret to himself, like any good Clarkstonian. The homemade brownies his wife left at the exit of the maze were the best anyone I knew had ever tasted.

  The Blackroot River bisects Clarkston five different times as it bends back and forth through town, creating miniature peninsulas. My house, a turn-of-the-century A-frame built by one of the railroad masterminds of the Land Grab that brought homesteaders to the Open Range and, very nearly, civil war to the plains, rides the point of Purviston, the town’s easternmost peninsula, like the smokestack on a steam train. As I crossed the footbridge that leads directly to my door, I scanned my house for lights but saw none. Either Kate had left or she was sitting in the dark. I suspected the latter. In moments of personal and professional crisis, Kate clung to the shadows. Otherwise, she’d never have let Brian lure her to Montana for her graduate work, leaving offers from four Ivies in her wake.

  For just a moment, in the center of the bridge, I stopped to listen to the river. Already, its gurgle had an ugly rasp. By Thanksgiving, it would be frozen and the streets would tuck themselves into their winter hibernation under a thick blanket of snow. I glanced back toward town, saw orange lights winking through the dark, and heard a small child’s scream erupt in the air like the call of a hunting osprey.

  “You missed all the good stuff, Brian,” I mumbled, surprising myself. I hadn’t known I was thinking of him.

  Even after I unlocked the door, it took me a few seconds to realize Kate was there, hunched on the couch by the bay window overlooking the river. She had the blue blanket my mother had knitted me, years and years ago, wrapped around her waist, and her long brown hair draped on her shoulders like a shawl. In sunlight, Kate’s oddly sunken brown eyes made her look as though she never quite got enough sleep. In the half-light, the shadows lent color to her wan skin, and her eyes seemed to creep forward, and she became an astonishingly beautiful woman. At least, she became one to me.

  “Hey,” I said, started toward her, and felt just a flicker of the old uncertainty. I’ve long since gotten over my guilt about dating Kate; though she is a former graduate student of mine, she’s thirty-five, all of six years younger, with more of an academic pedigree than I ever had and no reason whatsoever to let me exploit her, or to exploit me. But I was eleven years without a significant relationship before Kate—Clarkston is a tiny, tiny place, the university tinier still, and I was born reticent, anyway—and even after two years, I’ve yet to regain my confidence completely.

  This night, Kate did nothing to make it easy for me. She stared out the window. The window was closed, but the snow seemed to have seeped into the room somehow. I imagined I could see it winking near her ears like a cloud of will-o’-the-wisps, about to spirit her away. Stepping to the couch, I dropped down beside her. She started to cry quietly. I sat and held her hand and let her.

  “He wasn’t even a good friend,” Kate murmured, after a long, long while. “He wasn’t ever.”

  I touched her hair. “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Too unreliable. Too wrapped up in his own pathetic problems.”

  “He was sick, Kate. He didn’t have a choice.”

  For the first time that night, she turned and looked at me. The depth of her eye cavities made it seem as if I were peering into a cave. The effect always made me want to crawl in there with her. She smiled, and I felt like laughing but didn’t.

  “This is a reversal,” she said.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Kate-O. I wish he’d never come back here—except for the bringing-you-with-him part. I wish you’d never known him. You or anyone else in the damn department, because he had that mopey, haunted intensity that all you grad students flock to like bees to pollen, and then you spread it, and then everybody’s mopey and haunted.”

  Kate laughed, and this time the laugh inside me slipped out.

  “He was a good historian,” she said, returning the squeeze of my hand now.

  “He was a promising historian. You’re a good one. You do the research first, then have your insights.”

  Without warning, she was crying again, whether for Brian Tidrow or her mother, also dead by suicide more than twenty years before, or her vindictive father, or something else entirely, I didn’t know.

  This time, the crying spell lasted more than an hour. I listened to her breath sputter and her voice murmur and choke, watched Halloween night settle over Clarkston. The snow thickened, gathering itself on the dead grass and in the cracks on the pavement. Even through the closed windows, shouts and screams and bursts of organ music reached us from across the river. “I stepped in some of his hair,” Kate mumbled at one point, and I winced and squeezed her hand as she shook. I’d forgotten she’d found him.

  It was at least eight and maybe later when Kate looked up at me. The shaking in her shoulders had stilled just a little. But what she said was “This could go on all night, David. You should go.”

  I blinked, startled, not sure how to answer. “Go where? This is my home. And also where I want to be.”

  “It’s Halloween. The best day of your life, remember?”

  The sentimental response proved irresistible. I hadn’t had many opportunities to try one, after all. “I’ve had other best days, lately,” I said. Then I blushed, grinning like a six-year-old, and Kate burst out laughing.

  “Go haunted-housing. Come back with stories.”

  “Come with me.”

  Instantly, her smile vanished. “I’ve seen my dead person for the day, thanks. Oh, fuck, David.” Her face crumpled again. I reached for her hand, but she shook it off. “Really,” she snapped, and I jerked back. “I want you to go. I want to be alone.”

  “Kate, I want to be with you.”

  “You are with me.” She was still snapping.

  For a long moment, we stared at each other. Then I picked my coat off the chair where I’d draped it and stood. I started to ask if she was sure, but she was. And quite frankly, I was relieved, in all sorts of ways. I knew that I’d done what I could and that my actions had been noted. I knew that Kate loved me. And I knew I wasn’t going to miss Halloween after all.

  “I’ll bring you back a brownie,” I said.

  “God, you’re not going to crawl through Piltner’s maze, are you?”

  I just stood there.

  “You’re an eight-year-old, David.”

  “I’ll check back in an hour. I won’t be gone long.”

  “All right,” Kate said, but she was already withdrawing into her crouch with her gaze aimed out the window.

  I opened the front door, stepped outside, and the cold jumped me. It had teeth and claws, and the way it tore at my skin had me checking my coat front for rips. “Jesus,” I said, started to turn back inside for gloves and scarf, and thought better of it. I didn’t want to be gone long, anyway. And I didn’t want to disturb Kate now. Shoving my hands in my pockets and blinking my watering eyes, I drove forward into the dark. Because I had my head down, I didn’t see the thing on the footbridge until I was almost on top of it. Gasping, I jerked to a stop.

  At first, all I saw was a newspaper blown open. Then the wind
kicked up and the edges lifted like wings but the paper itself stayed put, and I realized there was something underneath it holding it in place. A half-step closer and I thought I could see a head-shaped shadow lying in the larger, deeper shadow of the overhanging poplar trees like…well, like a head in a pool of blood.

  Goddamn Brian Tidrow, I thought again, and started forward. The man lay straight across the bridge, in the dead center of it, with his head against one railing and his feet dangling over the river on the far side. I’ve often wondered where all the homeless people in Clarkston come from and why they stay. I never recognize any of them—they’re no one I ever knew—despite my years of living here. And the climate can’t be conducive to life on the street. Maybe the citizenry are generous, or the food at the shelters is good, or else the plains loom like the roiling oceans of nothing they are and obliterate hopes of safe passage.

  This man, I decided, was sleeping or stone drunk. You’d have to be drunk to sleep in this spot with the wind crawling over you. The only movement as I approached was the fluttering of the newspaper. The only sounds came from the river below and the town beyond.

  “Hey, man,” I said softly. “You all right?”

  The newspaper fluttered. The river hissed. The man lay still. I thought about going home to call the police. I had nothing against the poor guy sleeping on my bridge, but jail would be warmer. Kate wanted me gone, though. And sometimes, I thought, with the fatuous logic of the comfortable, there are better things to be than warm. I planted one foot, lifted the other so that I was straddling the man, and he sat up.

  It was the hand he snarled in the belt of my coat, I think, that kept me from leaping straight over the railing. Clumps of curly black hair flew from his scalp like strips of shredded steel wool. His lips were white-blue with cold, his eyes so bloodshot that the red seemed to have overrun the irises and pooled in the pupils.

  For a few seconds, he held me there, and I held my breath, and nothing moved. He wasn’t looking at me but beyond me, past my hip, at the trees and the riverbank. The intensity of his stare made me want to whirl around, but I couldn’t rip my gaze from his face.

  Finally, I managed to gulp some air into my lungs, and the cold shocked them out of paralysis. I coughed. The man gripped my coat, stared behind me, and said nothing.

  “What?” I finally said.

  The hand at my waist did not relax. The direction of the gaze didn’t change.

  “Are you cold? Can I—” I looked down and saw the crumple of black paper pressed between the man’s palm and my stomach. A whole new shudder rippled through me, drawn from a long-forgotten childhood reservoir. Blind Pugh, and the Black Spot, and the Admiral Benbow Inn. Until dark, Pugh told Billy Bones, on the day of Billy Bones’s death. They’ll come at dark.

  I put my hand on the paper, which turned out to be surprisingly heavy. Construction paper. Instantly, the homeless man’s hand ricocheted back to his side as though I’d triggered a catapult. The whole body beneath me jerked backward into a prone position, and the newspaper snapped into place around him. Uncrumpling the construction paper, still shuddering, I stepped back and looked at what I’d been given.

  “Oh,” I said. Then I said it again. Then I turned and raced for home.

  Kate was still crouched by the window when I burst in. She didn’t look up to ask what I’d forgotten. She looked only a little more conscious than the man on the bridge had. I marched straight to her, anyway.

  “Look,” I said, and held the construction paper toward her. “Kate, I’m serious, look.”

  Her sigh came from way down inside her. Slowly, she took the paper from me, tilted it toward the light coming in the window. She read it twice. Then she stood up. The blanket stayed wrapped around her waist.

  “God, David, we have to go,” she said. “I’ll get my coat.”

  “I’m going to marry this woman,” I said aloud to the window as Kate stepped toward the closet. By the time she returned to me, buttoning her heaviest black overcoat around her, her movements had regained most of their usual speed and grace.

  “You have to understand,” I told her, touching her hair with the back of my hand. Her face still looked wan, but her eyes were bright. “This won’t be my first Mr. Dark’s Carnival.”

  “What do you mean? You don’t even believe it’s real.”

  “I’ve been given tickets on three previous occasions. Twice, I followed the directions on them and wound up at a frat party. Little Halloween prank from my students. The third time, I wound up at a very fine haunted house indeed, right here in Purviston, not five hundred feet from this door. Unfortunately, I happened to recognize Harry Piltner’s stoop under his black cowl at the doorway, and because I’m a jerk, I said, ‘Do I get a brownie, Har?’ And Harry kicked me.”

  “So why are we going?” Kate said, shepherding me toward the door.

  “Get gloves. Hat, too. It’s unbelievably cold.”

  We were outside now, and Kate threw her head back and stood for a moment in the chill. She didn’t even have her coat all the way buttoned.

  “You’re insane,” I said, jamming my gloved hands into my pockets and hunching against the snap of the wind. “We’re going, first of all, because someone went to a lot of trouble to get me these. Get somebody these, anyway. And they did it with high Clarkston Halloween style, so I can’t ignore it. Second, even if it’s a frat party, the beer’ll be good.”

  “Oh, right. You don’t even drink.”

  I held the door of my rusty red 1986 Volvo open for her and kissed the top of her head as she bent to climb in. “You’re freezing,” I said. “Put on your damn hat.”

  “Third?” she said, and smiled up at me. At that moment, she seemed even more excited than I had to admit I was.

  “Third, I had a feeling you’d come, in spite of everything.”

  Her smile widened.

  “And fourth, Kate dear,” I said, glancing toward the bridge, which was empty. Purviston tickets distributed, I thought. I wondered where the homeless man would lay himself and his newspaper next. “Fourth, one just never knows, does one? I don’t, anyway.” I shut her door and got in on my side.

  The car took four cranks of the ignition key, but it did start. It always starts. “Where to?” I said, gesturing toward the black construction paper in Kate’s lap. On it, in gray-white chalk, was a map of Clarkston with a white dotted line snaking through it and the words Mr. Dark’s Carnival Welcomes You underneath. No skull and crossbones this time, and no come-if-you-dare warning. A classier prank, at the very least.

  “Get to Winslow,” Kate said, without looking down at the paper. “Take it south all the way out of town.”

  To my relief, she sounded excited. Exhausted, wrecked, but excited. I threw the car’s heater on, blasting us both with frigid air, and grunted. Kate stared out the window at the dark.

  By now, even the streets of Purviston were alive with costumed revelers. A group of rubber-masked teens came hurtling down the sidewalk from the direction of Harry Piltner’s, their wigs and winter coats caked with straw, hands flashing all over themselves in search of bugs that had probably long since dropped off. I smiled.

  In town, the activity level seemed just slightly lower than usual because of the cold. By 9:30 most Halloweens, the college kids who worked the little-kid haunted houses had been released from scare duty, and they clustered around parked cars or outside the Rangehand pub downtown and blasted hip-hop and waited for midnight, when the frat parties began in earnest and continued until the police shut them down. But this night, the trick-or-treaters had long since retreated indoors, and the partiers had stayed in their dorms, and the only people out were the heartiest Clarkstonians, tracing their habitual routes from one fright sight to the next.

  In a matter of minutes, we were out of town. At the two-mile mark, the last streetlamp stuck out of the prairie like a flag left by a lunar expedition, and then we were in darkness.

  “Still know where we’re going?” I said.
<
br />   “Says seven miles.”

  “Air’s getting warm.”

  Kate didn’t answer. Snow glittered on the asphalt and the endless stunted grass all around us, as though the sky itself had shattered on the ground. The eastern Montana plains on a snow-lit night are as limitless as deep space and just as empty.

  After a minute or so, Kate shifted in her seat. She spoke slowly, softly. She sounded barely awake, and most likely she was after the day she’d had, and now the warming car, the chattering road, the silence. “Tell me again what you think you know, David Roemer, about Albert Alouisius Dark?”

  Instantly, the last of my classroom lecture leapt to my lips. “Delighted you asked. Thought I wasn’t going to get to tell anyone this year.”

  Kate smiled.

  “Judge Albert Alouisius Dark. Born God knows where, educated God knows where, because that’s the first intriguing thing about him, isn’t it? There’s no record of him in this state—it was a territory then, of course—before his appointment to the bench in September 1877. In fact, there’s no record of him anywhere.”

  “You mean you haven’t found records of him yet.”

  “You’re not the only competent researcher in this Volvo, O Barely Speaking Woman. And I’ll thank you to remember the Civil War, and its prodigious though little-noted effects on the record-keeping of our fair cities and towns.”

  Kate nodded. “Go on.”

  “For eight years after his appointment as ranking barrister in this desolate region, Judge Dark maintained a consistently moderate record. Right up until Christmas Eve, 1885. That ni—”

  “Turn here,” Kate said, and I jammed on the brakes, dragged the car to a stop, and stared.

  “Turn where?”

  “Back up.”

  I looked over my shoulder into the black, snow-streaked nothing. “Maybe the map’s upside down.”

  Kate grinned. “Just back up, idiot.”

  I tapped the brake pedal, held it down so that my taillights illuminated the blackness. There, fifteen feet or so behind the car, limned in red paint of some sort, were two tire ruts snaking between two bedraggled plains shrubs and away into the grass. Way down in my stomach, something twitched. Nervousness. Uneasiness, maybe. Disbelief. Hope. If this was a prank, or an imitation, it was the best yet. And if it wasn’t a prank…