Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (3 page)

headed, so she could get how brave that made us, how we might

not be making it back, all that, but she was already gone with her second-grader.

“Look for Bo Peep,” her mom said, instead of goodbye. Because

[24] THIRTEEN

she wanted us to be happy, I knew. Because she remembered how

your heart can swell when you’re in eighth grade.

I met up with everybody in the alley ten minutes later and we

were gone, my dad’s menthols safe in my chest pocket. I’d sneaked

one at a time all week.

The graveyard, as it turned out, was still the graveyard. Crooked

headstones, weeds as tall as us, and, when we first got there, a couple of sophomores making out on the concrete bench. We ignored them,

or pretended to pretty well, but I guess they could tell. Then it was just us and the grossest cigarettes ever invented. And the town,

spread out before us.

Marcus was buried back wherever he’d lived before. Not here.

And it wouldn’t have been in this graveyard, anyway. This was just for people who died a hundred years ago, before the convent got

condemned and haunted.

According to the seniors, there was a zombie nun who still carried a candle around in there.

We didn’t believe them even a little bit. But we didn’t get any

closer than the graveyard, either. The reason we knew the nun wasn’t in there was that she’d been in our dreams already for years, her

candle going out right when she got close to us.

So we sat on the headstones like they were nothing, and we blew

smoke up into the inky-purple sky, and, squinting like outlaws at the full moon, we held our cigarettes up to Marcus, wherever he was.

Like we’d even really known him.

We were pretending he’d been the best of us, that he was some

tragedy.

We’d been the ones who paid for his ticket that night, though.

Soon enough, like always happened, I took a drag too deep, that

green smoke filling my lungs, and I had to stagger off into the bushes, to throw up. Because it had to be some kind of bad luck to throw up on a hundred-years-dead person. It might be like giving them a little bit of life. Just enough.

I fell through the trees, finally got to the little cliff we’d used to drop our action figures from to test our bandanna parachutes, and I splashed my dinner all down that scar of white rock.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES [25]

When my eyes could see again, what they saw was the east end of

Saginaw Street, right before it hits St. Francis.

Five years ago, this was the best candy street of all. It was all old people, who only got to see kids on Halloween, pretty much. Better, they’d forget you almost as soon as you left, so you could go back to that same well again and again. Sometimes we’d trade masks, mix

and match costumes, but I don’t think they’d have busted us anyway.

Or cared.

Saginaw Street was still doing good business, too. Was still the

place to be if you hated your teeth.

I stood up to go back to the graveyard, and, if I’d just done that half a second sooner, I’d have never seen the shepherd’s crook cresting over the Frankensteins and ghost heads. It was navigating through

them, moving down the sidewalk.

Bo Peep.

Grace.

I smiled, nodded to myself, pinched the hateful menthol back up

to my lips.

There she was, all right. Her second-grade robot holding her

hand. Cars moving slow and heavy alongside her—all the parents

who were driving their kids instead of walking them. That’s cheating, though. If you want the candy, you’ve got to earn it.

I waved my arms as big as I could then remembered one of them

was glowing. I balanced my cigarette on a rock behind me then stood up again, waving bigger, and yelling.

By now Grace’s second-grader was moving up a sidewalk, his

silver-tubed arms and legs making him look like he was going to

topple over with every step.

And she heard me, somehow.

Because of love, I think.

At first it was only her head angled over, like being sure, but then she turned around, her lungs filling with hope.

I jumped, jumped, but what she fixed on instead of me was one

of the parents creeping past.

She leaned forward as if she hadn’t heard something all the

way and the dad behind the wheel leaned out the open passenger

[26] THIRTEEN

window, holding out a white bow, the kind that goes on a good Bo

Peep costume.

Grace looked back to her second-grade robot, still cued up for

some grandparent candy, and the way she looked I could tell she was timing it. That she felt she had to, because what was this dad going to do with a Bo Peep bow, right?

Right.

She lifted the front of her big skirt, kind of ran out to the car, and, because I was a good almost-boyfriend, I kept my eye on her second-grade robot for her, watched him stiff-arm his plastic pumpkin up

to Miss Massey, who used to teach English, and always tied verses of poetry to her candy.

Once upon a time the poem on my candy had told me the fields

were white, the fields were long, the fields were waiting, and I’d always wanted to ask her for the rest of it, but never had the nerve.

By the time I looked back to Grace, she was in the passenger seat

of the car, and it was pulling away slowly, no rush at all. Just melting back into the parade.

“
No
,” I said—what about the robot?—and started to step forward but my foot stabbed into open space and I had to balance back hard, my arms windmilling in space.

I fell back, ran along the cliff for the next break in the trees, the last piece of road before the highway opened up, and I got there just in time for the driver to look right through the bushes at me, and nod.

It was the dad from the movie, the one Grace had wished into

our world.

He smiled his winning smile, his trustworthy smile, his smile

with the sharp, sharp corners, and that was the last time anybody

ever saw Grace Lynn Andrews, except as a photo on the news for two states in every direction, and it was the last cigarette I ever smoked, too, and it was the last year Halloween was the same for any of us.

It was also three months to the night before I crept out my

window one Wednesday after lights out, and filled one of my mom’s

good glasses with kerosene from the lamp her mom had given her,

balanced it all the way downtown in the cold.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES [27]

It wasn’t cold for long, though.

The Big Chief had just been waiting for somebody to burn it to

the ground.

I stood there beside it and I held my breath as long as I could, the skin of my face drawing tight in the heat, my heart shaped exactly like two hands holding each other, and when I finally turned to go home, Lucas was there, and Thomas, and Trino, and they hid me,

and they never told, and I’ll never leave this town, I know.

Not for the usual reasons, though.

In the flames that night before anybody got there, I saw a boy,

the front of his pants wet with blood, and I saw Marcus, wearing

his swim goggles, and I saw a pale white shepherd’s crook ahead of them, leading them through, leading them on.

Someday she’ll come for me too, I know.

I’ll be waiting.

N

Stephen Graham Jones
is the author of sixteen books now. Most recent are
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth
and
Flushboy
. Coming up soon are
The Least of My Scars
and
The Gospel of Z
. Jones lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado. More at demontheory.net.

a

THE MUMMY’S HEART

m

Norman Partridge

Who knows how dreams get started.

But they gear up in all of us, maybe more than anything else.

Waking . . . sleeping . . . sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.

Sometimes dreams are sweet little ghosts, dancing in our heads like St. Nick’s visions of sugarplums. Other times they’re a hidden nest of scorpions penned up in a bone cage they can never escape, digging

stingers into soft brain-meat hour after hour and day after day.

Sugarplums and scorpions. Take your pick. Or maybe grab

yourself a full scoop of both. Because we all do that, don’t we? Hey, I plead guilty. I’ve had my share of dreams. Most of them have been bad, but even a guy like me has had a few sweet ones. And every time I’ve bedded one of those and snuggled up close, a monster movie

scorpion came crawling from beneath the sheets and jack-hammered

his king-sized stinger straight into my brain.

That’s why I don’t trust dreams.

That’s why I’d rather have nightmares.

Nightmares are straight up. They’re honest—what you see is what

you get. Dreams are another story. They don’t play straight. They take your nights, and they take your days, too. Sometimes they make it

hard to tell one from the other. They make you want things and want them bad, and every one of those things comes with a price.

Of course, no one thinks about the price of dreams on the front

[31]

[32] THE MUMMY'S HEART

end of the deal. We all figure we’d pay up, but that’s because the price is never self-evident going in. So we spend more time dreaming, as if the act itself will turn the trick. A few of us work hard, building a staircase toward a dream—but people like that come few and far

between. Most of us look for a shortcut. We toss coins in a fountain or go down on our knees and say a prayer. We look for a quick fix

from some mystic force, or one god or another.

After all, that’s the dreamer’s playbook. Dreamers don’t take the

hard road. We look for instant gratification. We make a wish, or two, or a dozen . . . as if something as simple as a wish could be a vehicle for a dream. But you never know. The universe is deep, and odds are that someone has to get lucky taking the short road sometime. And

wishing only takes a second. Like the man said:
Nothing ventured,
nothing gained
.

Nothing
. It turns out that’s a key word, because the thing most dreamers end up with is a fistful of nothing. And for most of us,

that’s when the whole idea of
dreams becoming reality
disappears in the rearview mirror. For others, that’s when the longer road comes in. It’s not a road taken by realists, or workers, or builders. No. It’s a madman’s road. It’s built on books of mystic lore, most of them written by other madmen. It’s built on half-truths and faulty suppositions and twisted logic that (by rights) should be nailed through with a stake, boxed up, and buried in a narrow grave. It requires a certain brand of blind faith codified in stories and legends, and it demands a high level of trust in things that are beyond fantastic. Wizards and witches, monsters and myths. The power of an eye of newt, a jackal’s hide, or even a child sacrifice.

Most of the time, it’s a twisted trail that leads nowhere, except

maybe to a cozy rubber room or not-so-cozy prison cell, or (if we’re going gothic) a locked attic in the home of some rich relation. But that doesn’t happen all the time . . . and it doesn’t happen for all madmen.

I say that because I know it’s true.

I’ve seen where those roads can lead.

The night I first walked a madman’s trail I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, no more than a passerby in the darkness. It wasn’t my own dream or my own trail, but it was one I took.

NORMAN PARTRIDGE [33]

Walk any trail and you’re bound to soak up the scenery. Might

be there’s only one way to go, so you follow it. And you put one foot in front of the other, the same way as those who have gone before

you, and sometimes the darkness takes hold of you as it did them.

Sometimes it draws you in.

You might stay on that trail a long time, always looking for a way off, sure you’ll find one eventually.

But walk anywhere long enough, and that place becomes yours.

Especially if you walk alone.

The trail I’m talking about was cut by a mummy.

He did the job on Halloween night in 1963. He was mad as a

hatter, and he came out of a plywood pyramid that was (mostly)

his own making. And no, he wasn’t really a mummy. But that night,

he was definitely living the part. Even in the autopsy photos, that shambler from the darkside was a sight to behold.

His name was Charlie Steiner and he was nearly twenty-three years

old—too old to be trick-or-treating. And Charlie was big . . . football-lineman big. If you know your old Universal Studios creepers, he was definitely more a product of the Lon Chaney, Jr.
engine of destruction
school of mummidom than the Boris Karloff
wicked esthete
branch.

But either camp you put him in, he was a long way from the cut-rate dime-store variety when it came to living-dead Egyptians.