Halloween and Other Seasons (24 page)

Then Grant leaned back in his chair again, his fingers drumming lightly on the neat desk.

The interview was over.

There are worse things than a kid getting killed…

“No, there aren’t,” Len Schneider said to himself, and loud enough for someone else to hear.

~ * ~

The kid might have been eleven or twelve. Without a face, it was hard to tell if he had been good-looking or not—sometimes by that age, you can tell how the features will set through the teen years. He looked like he was sleeping when they dug him up—resting his hand under his head; the face, or where it would have been, was turned into the dirt so that it looked like he had nuzzled into a pillow. The hand was covering a ragged hole in the boy’s head where his brains had literally been beaten in. He was still fully clothed, except for his shoes and socks—later they found that he had been undressed and then redressed by Carlton, who had kept the footwear—along with one of the boy’s toes—as souvenirs.

Jerry Carlton had almost boasted about it at his trial—his shaggy hair had been cut and combed, his red tie knotted, his eyes covered with mirrored sunglasses which, thank God, the judge had made him remove. He smiled through the whole proceeding, and played with his watch. He could fix a tractor, a television set, could build just about anything, and had murdered five boys in three states calling himself Carlton the Clown. He’d worn a different clown costume for each murder.

Len had never forgotten that: Carlton the Clown.

He’d wanted only three minutes alone with Jerry Carlton, but they wouldn’t give it to him.

Just three minutes…

And nearly every night, because he made a mistake, Len Schneider dreamed of a kid with no face, turning his head from where it was nuzzled into his pillow and staring at him with empty eye sockets, trying to speak without lips…

This time, Len Schneider vowed to himself, he’d get his three minutes.

And he wouldn’t make any mistakes

~ * ~

Schneider was convinced the Wendt kid was not merely missing. Everything pointed to it. The kid’s mother (another thing that made it worse: there was no father, he had died in a construction accident four years ago) swore her son had never left the house by himself before. Which led Schneider at first to conventional lines: that whoever had taken the child had learned the house routine, and knew that there was a window of opportunity every once in a while when the child was alone for a half hour, between his afternoon sitter leaving and his mother getting home from work.

But there were no signs of forced entry, which led Len automatically to the next line of enquiry: that the child had unlocked the back door himself and let the abductor in.

Which could have happened—although, again, there was no evidence that anyone had been in the house. It had been a quick snatch, if that had been the case—which meant that the boy had probably known the assailant.

Which was possible, up to a point—the point being a weird one. It had rained a few days before the abduction, and the ground had been fairly soft—but there were only one set of footprints in the backyard, leading away from the house to the back fence.

Indicating that someone had lured him over the fence—
something he had
never done before
—without actually stepping into the backyard himself.

When he asked Mrs. Wendt for a list of people, with the emphasis on males, who might be enough of authority figures in her son Jody’s eyes to entice him to do such a thing, her face went blank. There were no clergy, no relatives, no real male role model who he would follow over that fence, she was sure.

He told her to think about it, and if anyone came to her to let him know right away.

~ * ~

At that point Schneider did the conventional thing: he followed the child’s footprints as far as he could. And it was quite a job: behind the Wendt property was a patchwork quilt of pumpkin fields owned by various farmers. He nonetheless was able to follow the boy’s movements through four of these fields to the edge of a fifth, which then dropped off down to a shallow valley and a thin ribbon of water known as Martin’s Creek.

From the marks he found, it looked as though the boy had slid or fallen down the embankment.

There were indications that he had crossed the creek at one point.

For a moment Schneider’s heart climbed into his throat, when he saw how deep the creek was at the point the boy entered. He followed the line of water downstream, fearing that the boy’s drowned body might turn up at any moment.

But he found markings on the other side of the water at a shallower area where a fallen tree bridged the creek (perhaps the boy
was
in trouble until he came up against this spot) and these fresh marks led into the tangle of trees on the other side of water.

The odd thing was that there were only the boy’s tracks. He broadened his search, and discovered that, a second, oddly-shaped set of tracks led from the pumpkin field behind the Wendt house down the embankment into the woods, but they were nowhere near the boy’s.

Which led him to believe that, perhaps, the boy had been
following
someone?

Out of breath and sweating a little, his slight paunch only one indication of how out of shape he was (
thirty years old and already starting to look like an old cop
), he found himself at a spot in the patch of woods marked by a broken pumpkin where both sets of tracks converged.

It was here, obviously, that the boy was abducted.

There were signs of a struggle. And then only the second set of prints—which were very odd indeed, not shoe or boot prints but large flat ovoids, which made him think that someone had worn some sort of covering over his shoes, to disguise the prints—led away.

And then, abruptly, in the middle of nowhere, among a gloomy stand of gnarled trees, so thick and twisted they blocked all light from above, they stopped.

At that point the hair on the back of Schneider’s head (where there still
was
hair, a good part of the top of his head being bald) stood on end. He looked at the clearing he stood in, covered with leaves and dead branches.

Where…

He brought in dogs, of course, and along with two uniformed policemen he brushed the area of leaves and twigs, looking for an underground opening. But there was none. Even the dogs, who had been given a piece of Jody Wendt’s clothing, had stopped at the same spot Schneider had.

One of them threw back its head and bayed, which, again, made the hair on the back of Schneider’s head stand on end.

Jody Wendt had disappeared into thin air.

3

The poster, which read:
UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU!
was upside down. He was glad his mom had taught him to read. There was more writing at the bottom of the poster, but he couldn’t make out what it said because it was too small and it was also upside down. So was everything else. The sign was in bright colors, red and blue and yellow and green, as if the colors had been splashed on or finger-painted—they ran over their borders and looked still wet. The room smelled like paint, like the time his mother had painted his bedroom in March and left all the windows open. He’d slept on the couch in the living room that night (sneaking the television on at three in the morning, but there had only been commercials on for exercise equipment—some of which Mom had—and for calcium and vitamin supplements—he had soon tired and turned the TV off; even out here he could faintly smell the paint on the walls of his room) and when he went back to his room the next night he got sick to his stomach, even though the paint was dry and the windows had been left open a crack. A week later all his own posters and his bookshelf with
Mike Mulligan and
His Steam Shovel
(his favorite book) and
The Wizard of Oz
and
Sam Hain and the
Halloween that Almost Wasn’t
were back, and the smell was gone. He’d forgotten his room had ever been painted.

But the smell wasn’t gone here—it was stronger. It had a curious burning odor underneath the paint smell, as if someone was heating paint in a pan.

That was funny, heating paint in a pan…

He felt light-headed, and suddenly wanted to throw up.

Ahhhhh…

The discomforting noise he made caused another noise out of his vision, a shuffling like a dog had been disturbed. He could not see. Except for the upside-down poster and an upside-down coat hook next to it with a rain coat which was hung near the floor and ran up the wall (again: funny! And despite his queasy stomach he gurgled a short laugh) he could see little else. The wall was colored chocolate brown, and it was stuffy in the room.

Again he heard the dog-shuffle.

Something new came into his view, in front of the wall poster—something just as brightly colored. It was accompanied by the shuffling noise, which was caused, Jody saw, when he strained his eyes to look up (which hurt) by the slow movement of a pair of huge clown feet, which were red with bright yellow laces. His vision in that direction was impeded by a sort of cap that appeared to be on his head, though he felt nothing there. There was a sharp rim, and he could see no farther. What he saw of the ceiling under the clown’s feet, was the same color as the wall.

Jody looked down, and his sight trailed over the figure of a circus clown dressed in blue pants, a red and green-striped blouse with baggy sleeves and white gloves, and a white face with impossibly wide, bright red smile, eyelashes painted all around his eyes, all topped by a snow-white cap with a red pom-pom.

The shuffling stopped; the clown was facing him now and Jody noted that the figure’s real lips inside the painted-on smile weren’t smiling. The eyes looked serious inside their cartoon lashes, too.

“
Ted?
” The clown whispered, in an impossibly gentle voice. “You’re awake, Ted?”

Jody tried to tell the clown that his name wasn’t Ted, but the feared throw-up rose hotly in his throat, out his mouth and ran up his face.

It was now, through the paint smell and dizziness and headache, that he realized
he
was upside-down, not the room.

The clown
tsk-tsked
, and a wet cloth was pressed to Jody’s nose and cheeks, rubbed gently.

The bile was gone.

It was getting very stuffy in the room.

“Soon, Ted, soon…” the clown said, and then he shuffled out of Jody’s sight.

“I—” Jody managed to get out.

The shuffling stopped. “Yes?” the clown asked, and there was a closed-in hush in the room.

“I…no…Ted…” Jody spit out, along with more bile, before his vision began to blur.

“I know, Ted. Yes,” the Clown answered, in what was almost a sing-song whisper.

Then, Jody closed his eyes.

~ * ~

When he opened them again, he was hungry.

The paint smell was still there, and the queasiness, and the headache, which was worse now, and he was still upside-down and couldn’t move. But, somehow, he felt more alert.

He saw immediately that the poster—
UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU!
—was partially blocked by a familiar sight: the Pumpkin Boy, or at least part of him. The Pumpkin Boy’s chest, which was a thicker tube of metal than the articulated stalks that composed his arms, was open, revealing a cavity within with something red, suspended in a web of golden wire, that throbbed darkly. The web shivered noticeably with each beat. The cavity’s door lay hinged back against the Pumpkin Boy’s side. He seemed to be missing from the legs down (or up, to Jody’s eyes) and his head was hinged open on the top. Now, in the light, Jody saw that the head itself looked to be made of some sort of ceramic or plastic or other hard surface; it was too hard-edged and brightly colored (a hue as bright as the poster colors, and the Clown suit colors) to be real. There were no seeds stuck to the inside of the lid, which looked smooth and clean.

A trail of golden wires led out of the Pumpkin Boy’s head, the back part behind the eyes, nose, and grinning mouth (could there be a hidden compartment back there?) and were bundled together with white plastic ties. There looked to be hundreds of individual hair-thin wires. The bundle ended in a curl, like a rolled hose, on the floor.

Jody saw that the Pumpkin Boy wore a pair of ordinary leather carpenter’s gloves, like the ones his mother used in the garden.

Jody now realized how quiet it was.

“Hel…lo?” he said. His voice sounded like a frog’s croak.

There was no answer.

Feeling stronger than he had before, Jody tried to twist himself around.

Whatever he was trussed to, it gave little, but it did give. He turned a bit to the right, then swung back, as if he were suspended on a rope. He had seen the wall beyond the Pumpkin Boy and the poster: flat brown, unadorned.

He twisted again, harder. His legs were asleep, which at least meant that his twisted ankle didn’t hurt anymore. His hands were also asleep, but he could feel enough of them now to discover that they were bound behind his back, tightly.

He tried for a time, but couldn’t loosen them.

This time as he turned he saw the wall and something on the true floor: a table, a bright silver machine with a big black dial and the edge of a huge white clock-face with too many numbers around the edge.

He came stubbornly back to rest.

He was growing weaker.

The Pumpkin Boy hadn’t moved, was staring straight through him.

Jody gave a mighty turn, with an
ooofff!

This time he felt as if a lance had pierced his forehead. He cried out in pain—but he saw the whole silver machine, which was on casters, and other machines, one of which looked like the emergency generator Mom kept in the garage, and a door. No windows. The clown suit was draped over a single chair, next to a lamp—

The door was just opening.