All Hallows' Eve (5 page)

"Don't let him hurt me anymore," the kid said.

"He won't," Ashley assured him. "He can't."

At least the kid stopped rocking. "Why didn't they take me?" he asked. "Why did they take the others but not me?"

That was a chill up her back. "Who are you?"

The boy began rocking again. Though he looked Ashley's age, his fear made him appear much younger. "I can't remember," he cried in desperation. "Everything's fading away from me." He held his hands out to her. "Like with the light."

She could see through him: She could see his torso through his hands, the door through his torso. She angled the flashlight's beam farther away from him, and the lack of light made him easier to see.

"At least there were the others before," he said, and Ashley wondered if Roehmar had kept one boy alive longer than the rest, though she had never heard anything like that, but then he added, "the ones in the crawl space. But they took them away, and they left me."

"Where are you?" Ashley asked. Dumb question, he was obviously right in front of her in the barn.

But he didn't say that. He said: "Here. Under the porch."

Her breath came in a hiss.

There was another body.

The police had found the plastic bags under the floorboards, crammed into the crawl space. And they'd already found more than they had thought to find. But there was another. Buried in the ground. The house had stood empty, then been knocked down; the barn had eventually gone up in the same place—but without a foundation, without digging.

"Can't they come again to get me?" he pleaded. "Can't you show them?"

"Yes," she assured him.

"Will you stay with me until..."—she suspected he altered the direction of his question—"until then?"

"Of course." Though it was the last thing in the world she wanted to do.

Nikko, or whoever he sent to check up on her, would come bearing flashlights, but she would make them turn the lights off, and then they would see. She would not be silly, easily spooked Ashley, but Ashley who had solved a mystery, who was helping to lay a spirit to rest.

"Can you call them to come now?" the lost boy asked.

"My headset's broken," she explained.

"I'm good ... I used to be good..."—the kid closed his eyes—"with electronic stuff."

She went back to gather the parts: earpiece, loose wire, and battery pack. The thunder was a distant grumble now; she could hear the water dripping off the roof, but no longer the sound of rain battering the barn or the ground. Help would be here soon enough, but she couldn't bear to tell the poor dead kid to wait any longer than he already had. "Can you touch..."
Um, how did one word THAT?
"Solid things?"

"Sometimes," the boy replied from his seat by the door, so weak and wistful she worried he was about to fade away again. If he did, how would she ever know when he'd come back so she could rescue him?

She rushed back to the door and crouched beside him. He looked more solid than ever, and when she leaned in close, her hand brushed his arm, and she felt it—she
felt
it, though before she'd seen the light pass through him. "How's this?" she asked, holding the earpiece in one hand and the battery pack and the loose wire in the other. The flashlight was back where she'd left it, turned away from the door, beyond the hanged man.

"Fine," he said. His hand touched hers—
touched hers
—as he picked up the wire and stretched it out. "Fine," he repeated. Then, moving quicker than she'd have thought possible, he wrapped the wire around her neck and began to squeeze.

Ashley clawed at his face, but that just made him tighten the wire even more brutally.

"Stupid girl," he hissed into her ear. "I hate stupid, treacherous girls."

He jerked the wire with each word until the room was spinning. She clawed at her own neck, trying to get her fingers beneath the wire, away from her throat, but it was cutting into her, cutting off her breath, cutting off her ability to think—except for the one thought over and over,
How can this be? How can this be?
—until there were no thoughts anymore, no breath, no...

Morgan Roehmar let the girl's dead body slump against his and felt the excitement that killing always brought. She
was
stupid. Why in the world did she assume a ghost would choose to look the way its body had looked at the moment of death—all bloody or diseased? Or old? He much preferred to take on the form of the way he had looked at seventeen—the age of the boys he'd killed. But that had been a mistake, killing boys, he now knew, thinking of the woman who had betrayed him to the police, thinking of this one.

He was stronger, now that he'd killed her, and he'd get stronger with each additional death. Already he was no longer limited to the area where the porch had been, where he'd died. Though he had no access to a chain saw, or to plastic bags, he did have time, before people would come with their damn lights that would scatter him in the air. He laid her out on that bale of hay beneath the mannequin with the knife, with her peasant dress arranged artfully about her, her hands folded just below her bosom, the earpiece over her head, the battery-pack wire entwined around her fingers the way a funeral home placed rosary beads.

Nice and neat.

Ready for her friends to find her.

For there was nothing, Morgan Roehmar thought, worse than a messy dead body.

As far as Martin could tell, the village of Farnham was too small to have anything interesting ever happen. Sixteen years of living in Farnham was enough to make anyone's brain begin to slumber, but Martin was determined not to let this happen to him, as it had so obviously happened to all the elders of the village, and to so many of his kinsfolk, and was now beginning to happen to his age-mates.

Even his cousin Raleigh, who had always been good for thinking up schemes and pranks and ways to get out of working any more than was absolutely necessary, even Raleigh was no longer fun. Lately he was taken with Lissa, the blacksmith's daughter, and all of a sudden he was concerned about not looking foolish, or lazy, and he was absorbed with searching out opportunities to talk with her, and—failing that—to talking
about
her.

It was enough to make Martin a bit desperate.

The last almost-exciting thing to happen in Farnham was during the summer when old man Tomlin had run away from home to join the army—or, depending on who was telling the story, to get away from his old scold of a wife, Elfirda.

Yet when Martin expressed the thought that maybe army life would be more appealing than farming, Raleigh—who seemed intent on turning into someone's grandmother—countered that no one ever thought to see old Tomlin alive again. Soldiering, he said, was sure to get a body killed much faster than boredom ever did.

Then, in the fall, as the season of harvesting was drawing to a close, and a long, hard winter of cold days and dark nights was all there was to look forward to, a holy man named Brother Wade came to the village.

Farnham was too small to have a church or a priest, but occasionally preachers would visit and use Martin's father's tavern as a gathering place to give their sermons. The fact that Brother Wade was someone new was the exciting thing—not his sermon, for Brother Wade talked about Purgatory, where the souls that were not quite ready for Heaven waited. This was not a subject that Martin craved to learn more about.

"It is our job," Brother Wade said, "the job of us, the Church on Earth, to join with the saints who have gone before us and pray for those souls in Purgatory. Purgatory is an in-between place—not Heaven, not Hell, not of Earth, but buried deep in the center of the earth."

Finally, Brother Wade said something interesting: "Come All Hallows' Eve, the gates of Purgatory open, and the souls fly out and enter Heaven, where they join the saints and become the Church Triumphant. If you're watchful on All Hallows' Eve, you may catch a glimpse of your loved ones who have died that year as they make their way from Purgatory, through Earth, and up to Heaven."

Martin hadn't ever heard this before.

Martin's father didn't care for Brother Wade. It was his father's custom to provide free ale to the holy men who passed through Farnham. But none had stayed as long or drank as much as Brother Wade. "And," Martin's father complained to the family, "I never heard anyone explain Purgatory in quite that way before. I'm not even sure he has it right."

Martin, too, found it hard to picture Brother Wade's description of the dead souls coming up through the ground on All Hallows' Eve and walking among the living one final time before breaking the bonds of Earth and floating up to Heaven. Martin had lived through sixteen All Hallows' Eves, and he had never yet seen a spirit walk, that night or any other.

Still, Brother Wade's discourse suggested a plan to Martin, a plan that was so good it was sure to shake Raleigh out of his Lissa-induced lethargy.

"I have a wonderful idea," Martin told Raleigh that afternoon, "for a trick to play on mean old Elfirda tonight." In truth, Elfirda was no older than his parents, but she was as sullen and cranky as a toothache. She always chased the village boys away from her property, not letting them take the shortcut to the stream, where they liked to swim on hot summer days. And every autumn, she accused them of stealing apples from her trees, when everyone could see there were too many for her and her equally ill-tempered husband to ever eat on their own. And now that Tomlin was gone, Elfirda was practically drowning in apples and should have been happy to rid herself of some. But she was as stingy with them as ever. Now, on this day of Brother Wade's sermon, Martin had seen how distraught Elfirda looked when Brother Wade talked about catching a glimpse of recently dead loved ones, for—like everyone else—she must assume Tomlin had probably gotten himself killed by now. This looked like a fine opportunity to get back at her.

"Aw, leave the old biddy alone," Raleigh said. "It has to have been hard for her this past year, with her husband abandoning her and leaving her on her own. She has enough misery without us to add to it."

"Well, of course, Tomlin left the old nag," Martin said. "The wonder is that he stayed as long as he did."

Raleigh was still shaking his head.

Martin said, "You can be the ghost of old man Tomlin. I'll run up ahead of you to Elfirda's cottage and tell her I've seen you, that you must have died in the war, and you're on your way from Purgatory to Heaven. That way I'll put the idea in her head that you're Tomlin, and we won't have to worry overmuch that you're taller and not so broad as he was." This was a great concession on Martin's part since
Martin,
in fact,
was
the right size.

"Naw," Raleigh said. "It's a low trick. Besides, I promised Lissa—"

"But this is All Hallows' Eve. Your plans for her can wait another night. Tonight is our one and only chance for this."

"Still...," Raleigh said, shaking his head.

"Never mind, then." Martin stalked away, disgusted that—once again—Lissa was all Raleigh could think about.

But it was such a good plan, Martin couldn't resist, even without his cousin.

When he got home, and while his mother's back was turned, Martin fetched some flour from the drum where his mother kept it. That night, after the rest of his family had gone to bed, he rubbed it onto his face and hands to make himself look pale and gray. Next, he smashed some berries onto a rag, which he wrapped around his head so that it looked like a bloody bandage—with the added benefit that it also covered his dark hair and a good deal of his face. It would not convince Elfirda should she get a good look at him, but his intention was to only let her catch a glimpse.

Silently he crawled out the window of his parents' house and into All Hallows' Eve night. He delayed only to go to a place where the stream gathered in an elbow of land, where the water was stagnant. He rinsed his shirt in that water, giving it the stench of death, which would help convince Elfirda that he was her departed husband.

Then, as the moon hung low in the sky, Martin went to old lady Elfirda's cottage. He scratched at her window shutter, whispering in a hoarse voice, "Elfie, Elfie," which is what Tomlin had always called her.
That
should startle her awake and out of bed, but still give him time to run away. "Elfie, Elfie, come and bid your husband good-bye."

All in all, it was a very good disguise.

What Martin had no way of knowing was that Elfirda wasn't in bed, or even in the cottage, but instead had been tending her cow in the barn, for it had injured its foot.

Nor did he see her come up behind him and bend to pick a rock up off the ground.

The last thing he heard was her crackly voice muttering, "Drat, I killed you once and pushed your body in the stream to rid myself of you. Why would I want to say good-bye again?"

Janelle hardly listened as Ms. Hurston gave the same lecture all teachers all over the world always give every time there's a field trip:

• Don't be an embarrassment to the school.

• Don't litter.

• Don't damage anything.

• Don't damage each other.

• Don't get lost.

Janelle and the other nineteen students in Ms. Hurston's fifth-period ninth-grade literature class yawned all the way through this.

Then, because they
were
ninth graders, Ms. Hurston added:

• No smoking.

• No drinking.

• No wandering off as couples.

Because they were ninth graders, the kids tittered.

Then, because they were going to a cemetery, Ms. Hurston repeated the rule about not being an embarrassment.

"Remember," she said, standing in the front of the bus, swaying every time they went around a corner or over a bump, "even though we're going to be in the part of the cemetery where there are mostly old graves, there
are
recent interments, too, and there might be people there visiting their loved ones."

Brandon, who—as far as Janelle was concerned—had been a pain in the butt since she'd first met him in third grade, said, "Yeah, and besides, it's Halloween." He wiggled his eyebrows and—just in case anybody didn't get it—explained, "And on Halloween there's no way to know if someone you meet in a cemetery is
visiting
or
staying.
" Again the eyebrows wiggled.