Shivers 7 (6 page)

“That’s kinda cool.”

“I dragged us here tonight—pushed for it, even, when Eddie tried to talk us out of it—because I thought for once the forest actually might be scary. We’d break in late at night, and the place would be falling apart and maybe dangerous. Haunted. But it’s not. It’s just sad.”

“I bet Eddie’s pretty scared right now. He probably crapped himself when that cup fell on him.”

Craig wouldn’t laugh with him. “You didn’t do that on purpose, did you?”

“No. Did
you?
”

“I mean, you said you didn’t realize how heavy it was.”

“I said no.” Skates attempted a serious expression, but it still came across like a smirk. He got in trouble for that a lot at school.

“All right,” Craig said. “Let’s keep looking around.”

* * *

Outside, Craig cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled into the air. “We’re still here. We’ll get you out soon.”

No answer. Might have been too far away, and the sound didn’t carry well. Just as likely, Eddie was giving them the silent treatment.

Skates did a two-fingered whistle, then made a few hoot-owl noises.

“Cut it out,” Craig said. “He’s probably sulking.”

Still no signposts, but he registered where they were headed. In the midst of the overgrown forest a giant shoe loomed, a front door carved out of its heel. He remembered the windows in the sides and up the tall back of the shoe—like a tower, the old woman leaning out the top window to wave at her many children, some of them scrambling over bright blue laces, and she’d waved at him and Hallie, too.

She still waved, but she was headless. The filthy shoe looked like something a homeless giant had worn through, then discarded.

The door was open, but when Skates ducked inside he couldn’t get far. Craig pushed in after him. A spiral staircase had fallen over, along with all the upstairs exhibits. A few small body parts were visible: several of the old woman’s children had been crushed in the collapsing rubble.

Skates pulled at a plank that looked intact. It broke at his touch. The wood was rotten.

Craig recalled Hallie’s sing-song recitation of the rhyme—
so many children she didn’t know what to do.
How many children were there, really?

“This is a terrible rhyme,” he told Skates.

“Dude, it’s a lame-ass park all around.”

“That not what I mean. The rhyme—I think it’s about being poor. This woman’s got all these kids, and she’s freaking
old,
and doesn’t have a husband or a job. They’re living in a shoe, for Christ’s sake. Real life, they’d be starving to death.”

Skates kicked at another board. A tiny fiberglass hand holding a lollipop rolled off the pile. “What a shithole.”

“Hallie actually cried when they closed this place down. But I guess she cried about a lot of things.”

“Can’t compete with that, can you?”

“Nope. Hallie always got her way.”

“I’m sorry man.”

“That’s okay.” Craig closed his eyes for a second, blacking out the flashlight beam and the trash and the pile of collapsed rubble. Everything but the memories. “I wish I’d never come here.”

“We’ll be out soon enough,” Skates said. He set the flashlight on the floor, planted one foot at the bottom of the heap, and grunted and pulled at a curled metal bar. It was part of the broken banister, about five feet long once he’d extracted it. “This’ll work like a big crowbar, don’t you think?”

* * *

Outside, Skates whistled and did the hoot-owl a few more times. As they retraced their steps back to the teacup ride, he dragged the metal bar on the path behind him, a dragon’s claw scraping at the blacktop. Craig held the flashlight, which began to dim; he flicked the power off now and then, to conserve the battery. Slivers of moonlight through the trees made it easy enough to see, as long as they stayed on the path.

“How about this,” Skates said. “We get back there, pry the cup off him, and it’s like one of those ghost stories where at the end the guy’s hair has turned white from fear. Imagine Eddie with white hair. And he’s lost his voice from being so scared, that’s why he doesn’t answer. He’ll never talk again.”

“We should be so lucky.”

“Could be, you know, some serial killer followed us into the park. Waited for us to split up, like dumb kids do in horror movies. He’d go after the weaker kid first, the one who’s alone and can’t get away.”

“And we’d be next.”

“Sure. We’re probably walking into a trap.” Skates practically had to shout to be heard over the scrape of the metal bar. Now he lifted the bar and switched to a whisper: “We get there, and it’s totally silent. The cup’s been lifted and you point the light inside and nobody’s there. But there’s all these splashes of fresh blood.”

“You’re enjoying this a little too much.”

“Or try this: We get there, and that dumb cup’s still upside down, and Eddie’s still sulking and saying nothing, and we creep closer and we hear…
chewing.
Teeth tearing at flesh, chomping on bone.”

“Okay, you’re really starting to spook me a bit.” He wasn’t really, but Craig figured that was the only way to get him to stop.

“One more. We get there, and Eddie
does
talk, says something like, ‘Give me a hand.’ The voice is a little hoarse, though, and I think maybe he’s been crying like a baby, so I reach in through the opening. A hand closes over mine, and… it’s
not
Eddie. It’s not even human.”

The punchline to his story echoed in the forest; the flashlight was off, the moon had gone behind a cloud, the trees were thicker overhead. “Good one,” Craig said, not intending a compliment. His friend laughed, like someone who had lost his mind.

Ridiculous. Skates was joking around. Eddie was angry, but he was fine. After all, this was the Storybook Forest. Nothing terrible ever happened here.

Clouds drifted away from the moon. In the distance, the facade of a castle appeared through the trees, a sign they’d nearly reached the site of the teacup ride. One of the turrets was split down the side—painted Plexiglas instead of stone. Branches hatched thick shadows across the castle’s decayed surface. From this angle, it really did look haunted.

They hurried up the path, hoping to rescue whatever was left of their friend.

Simple

Al Sarrantonio

Two boys.

Two girls.

Dusk.

Halloween.

* * *

The rising moon hung sharp-edged and near-full behind a gauzy blanket of clouds. Sidewalks rose and sank, up one gentle hill, down another, their cracks sprouting brown, dry grass. The wind, picking up winter-to-come’s chill, rattled the trees, making them shed—brown red yellow leaves which nestled against the gutters and rustled like there were living things beneath.

Two girls.

Two boys.

The town of Orangefield.

* * *

“I say he don’t exist!” insisted Excalibur, whose real name was Jim Gates. “I say it’s all hooey!” A night spent as an actual sword, made of stiff cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil with a face cut out the center had made him cranky and bold.

“Hell,” said his male companion, Gil, dressed like a simple cowboy, his brimming candy bag weighing him down, “you weren’t even born here! You just moved in! What do you know?” He frowned. “And your Great Uncle Riley was one of his
victims
!” The weight of the treasure bag finally became too much for him, and he put it down with an “Oooof!”

The girls, twins named Marcey and Carsey, remained silent, wide-eyed. Their own bags were on the ground already—it had been a profitable evening.

“I gotta be home—” Carsey said, as the silence lengthened, but Marcey gave her a dirty look, twitching her cat girl whiskers.

“No we don’t,” Marcey countered, her whiskers twitching again, one side of them falling off.

“Hey, we’re all ten years old, right?” Gil said, trying to stand tall, though he was the shortest of them, even with his cowboy hat on.

Jim narrowed his eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

Gil looked at the ground, but Marcey said, almost a shout, “Let’s go find ’im!”

Carsey’s eyes grew real wide, and she looked like she wanted to cry.

Then Gil looked up, and suddenly he smiled, and the rest smiled too, even Carsey, in a sad way.

And Excalibur, for a brief moment, shined with an almost blinding light as the Moon broke through the clouds and looked coldly down at the four of them.

* * *

They hid their candy in Ranier Park, between two big rocks with another across the top that made a cave. Gil swore it would be safe there, and when Jim protested he said, “You’re new here. Trust me.”

Jim looked back longingly at the small dark cave mouth as they walked away, but once again Gil repeated, “Trust me.”

Ten minutes later found them in the empty pumpkin patches of Schwartz’s farm. The ground was rutted, filled with rows of twisting dead pumpkin vines, already waiting for the winter to freeze them stiff and turn the furrows to brown icy ditches.

But here at the end of October the ground was still soft, the vines in the moonlight looked like twisting fingers.

“This is creepy,” Carsey said.

“This is where they first saw the Pumpkin Boy,” Gil countered. “It’s
supposed
to be creepy.”

“We’re not looking for the Pumpkin Boy,” Marcey remarked.

“I don’t believe that one, either,” Jim said, his jaw hurting from bumping against the lower cardboard cutout of his huge mask.

Finally he made them stop while he yanked the top of the costume off, shredding aluminum foil and hitting the bottom of his jaw again as he pulled the massive mask off.

“Ow!”

“I’d say ‘ow’ too if I had a face like that,” Gil said, laughing.

“I meant to tell you earlier how dumb your cowboy outfit was,” Jim said, recovering.

The two girls laughed, a simultaneous giggle, half an octave apart.

Jim threw down the ruined sword, which settled into a furrow, in a nest of vines and they walked on.

* * *

“And that’s the valley where the Pumpkin Boy snatched little Jody Wendt,” Gil announced, as they stood on the top of a steep slope which led down to a patch of woods near a thin, bubbling creek.

“Now that one I
know
was hooey,” Jim snapped. “That Pumpkin Boy thing was just a machine some loony made.”

Down below, in the middle of the thin spot of woods, something glowed, silver and orange.

“You don’t think…” Marcey said.

“They say you can still see him, some Halloweens,” Gil answered, his voice suddenly soft.

“Good thing we’re not going that way,” Jim said, trying to sound tough, but he too was rooted to the spot as something peeked out of the woods and then was gone.

“I thought I saw…” Carsey squeaked.

“A pumpkin head?” Gil said, and there was no mockery in his voice.

Carsey nodded, but then there was a hoot and a laugh from down below and three older children emerged from the woods, two wearing realistic animal masks, fox and hound, and the other with a pumpkin head, which he removed, laughing again.

“So much for the Pumpkin Boy!” Jim hooted.

Gil reminded him: “But that’s not who we’re looking for.”

Carsey looked back as they left, and something else, more ethereal, glowed in the woods down below.

* * *

They followed the line of the slope, until it gradually disappeared underfoot, leading them down gently to the level of the valley. Ahead of them was a deeper wood, darker, thick with trees. There were stout elms and stately oaks, and the forest floor was covered with fallen acorns.

The moon had climbed above the thin clouds.

The wind was sharper, colder.

“When did we have to be home?” Marcey asked, suddenly hopeful. “What time is it? I think we should go now.”

“You were the one said we didn’t have to be home,” Carsey replied.

“You sure we hid that candy where the big kids won’t find it?” Jim said.

“The candy’s fine,” Gil snapped. “And no one’s going home yet.”

Carsey looked like she wanted to cry.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said.

Gil shot her a look, and Marcey hissed, “Be quiet.”

Carsey began, “But–”

“
Be quiet!
”

Jim looked at the three of them. “What’s wrong with you guys?”

Gil smiled tightly. “Nothing.”

“Are we going in or not?”

The others stood still.

“Why don’t you go in first?” Gil offered. He gave a weak smile. “Since it’s all hooey.”

Jim shrugged. “Fine.”

He took a step forward into the woods.

* * *

The wind suddenly died, and it became very quiet. He could not see the path before him, only the darker edges of nearby trees.

There came a rustling in the dark ahead of him, swallowed by an almost palpable silence, and then nothing.

He turned around, expecting to find his new friends behind him, but they had stepped away from the woods.

“Marcey? Carsey? Gil?” he called.

“We’ve…decided to go home,” Gil said.

“You can’t go home,” Jim answered.

Gil’s smile was even weaker than his last one, and then he looked at the ground. “What are you going to do, threaten us with your sword?”

“Go home, then,” Jim said.

The three of them suddenly turned and ran.

“See you!” Gil called back, and it sounded like a choked sob.

Marcey and Carsey’s crying echoed and faded.

Jim turned back toward the woods, and something just inside the dark, something that looked like a gently flapping cape topped with a white oval of a face cut by a thin red slash of mouth, said, “Come in.”

* * *

Back in Ranier Park, at the mouth of the cave, four fat bags of trick-or-treat loot sat amidst three trick-or-treaters.

No one said anything until Gil, fumbling with the handles of his own bag, looked up from the fourth bag and said, “I don’t want any of it.”

“Me either,” echoed Carsey. “Maybe we can give it to charity or something.”

“Maybe there’s a hospital that could use it,” Marcey offered. “For the kids who couldn’t go trick-or-treating this year.”

“Maybe we could put it in a box and send it to India, to poor kids there.”

Gil shook his head. “I don’t think they have Halloween in India.”

“Maybe we could—” Marcey began, but her sister cut her off.

“He should have known better.”

The three of them nodded.

Gil added, “He should have especially known, being Riley Gate’s kin and all.”

Again all three of them nodded their heads.

Marcey said, “Too bad he was the new kid in school. I kind of liked him. Too bad it couldn’t have been Larry Jarvis. I can’t stand him.”

“Me neither,” Gil said. “But Larry Jarvis knows.”

“Of course he does,” Carsey said. “We all know. The only ones who don’t know are the new ones.”

Again there was a silence, this one longer.

“I wish it hadn’t been our turn,” Gil whispered, looking at the floor.

Marcey said, “Everybody gets a turn. That’s just the way it is. When you’re nine, or ten, or eleven, it gets to be your turn. You don’t have a choice.”

Carsey began to sniffle. “I liked him.”

“Me too.”

“And me too.”

“Too bad.”

The three of them nodded.

Gil sounded like he was talking to himself, justifying. “And that’s just the way we keep things…simple.”

“Simple,” Marcey parroted.

Carsey nodded, drying her sniffles.

“And you don’t mess with Samhain,” Gil added.

“No you don’t.”

“
Everybody
knows that.”

“It’s all he asks for. One a year. To keep things…simple.”

They all nodded.

The longest silence of the evening. Marcey sat staring at the extra bursting bag of candy.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt if we just took a little.”

She reached out, scooped some Double Bubble from the very apex of the bulging bag.

Carsey nodded, plucking a Mars bar whose end peeked above the upper level.

“It would be a shame to let it go to waste.”

“A sin, even,” Gil said, shoving his palm into the brimming horde and removing a handful, which he stuffed in a jacket pocket.

“After all, we don’t have a big box. And I don’t even know where India is.”

Soon the bag was empty.