"'Bad antifreeze'?"
"Turn the key to off," MARIAN said. "Wait five minutes, then turn the key in the ignition without pumping the accelerator. Recalculating. Estimated time of arrival to 376 Buggy Whip Lane, fourteen minutes, three seconds."
Justin muttered that he'd never heard of such a thing, but he did as MARIAN instructed.
The fall night was perfectly quiet.
Justin tried humming, but he couldn't carry a tune, and he sounded bad even to himself. He had asked his parents for a new CD player for the car for Christmas, but he didn't think he'd be able to wait two months.
MARIAN announced: "Four more minutes till you can turn the engine back on."
"Hey," Justin said. "How come you're still working when the engine is turned off?"
"Backup generator."
"Can the backup generator keep the heat on?"
"No," MARIAN said.
Not that the heat worked much better than the air conditioner.
Justin leaned back in the seat and looked around.
This was when he noticed that his car was sitting directly on some railroad tracks.
"Ahmm, MARIAN," he said, "did you happen to notice where we've stalled?"
MARIAN said, "CFX line on the Syracuse to Buffalo route."
"But," Justin said hopefully, "not currently in use?"
MARIAN said, "Three more minutes till you can turn the engine back on."
Justin tried again. He asked, "Is this, like, one of those abandoned railroad lines?"
"No," MARIAN said.
And just as she said it, Justin heard, in the distance—but not-too-great distance—the wail of a train whistle.
There was also a bell.
A mechanical arm lowered and came to rest on the roof of Justin's car.
MARIAN told him, "The next train is scheduled to pass this spot in two minutes, twenty-seven seconds."
Justin hurriedly leaned forward to turn the key in the ignition.
MARIAN warned, "If you turn the key, you will delay the release of the vapor lock for another five minutes, and the train will pass here in two minutes, fourteen seconds."
"But," Justin said, "but—"
"Two more minutes till you can turn the engine back on. That will give you twelve seconds to start the car and drive it off the tracks."
"Twelve seconds?" Justin couldn't get his voice above a whisper. "That's cutting it awfully close." He looked to his left and thought he could see the light from the oncoming train. "Surely it doesn't need to be exactly five minutes for me to turn the car back on—"
"Five minutes total," MARIAN told him firmly. "From now: one minute, fifty-four seconds till you can turn the engine back on and be certain the vapor lock is gone."
And what if the vapor lock wasn't gone? What if the engine didn't start on its first try? Justin asked, "How sure are you about that train? If you're off by just a couple seconds—"
"Monitoring by satellite feed. At current speed, the train will arrive at this spot in one minute, fifty-one seconds. New York State regulations stipulate a train should reduce speed when approaching an intersection, so in theory you will have even more than twelve seconds."
The train's headlights shone in the distance. The whistle sounded again. Would the engineer be able to make out that there was an obstruction on the tracks? Justin's hand itched to turn the key. Could there really be that big a difference between waiting the full five minutes and waiting only four and a half minutes?
Twelve seconds. Twelve seconds to start the engine and to get the car off the tracks.
And if—for some reason—the car didn't start right away, he'd have time to try, maybe, once more. Twelve seconds to watch the train crashing into him. Twelve seconds to die.
"One more minute till you can turn the engine back on," MARIAN announced.
The train's whistle was blowing frantically—surely a sign that the engineer had spotted him.
"The train is decelerating," MARIAN said, and sure enough Justin could hear the screech of brakes. "Fifty seconds till you can turn the engine back on; sixty-seven seconds till the train reaches this spot."
Justin knew that a train could not stop quickly. The more cars the engine was pulling, the more time the train would need to come to a standstill. Justin couldn't take it any longer. He fumbled for his seat belt.
MARIAN said, "Don't panic. There is enough time to restart your engine and to drive to safety."
Justin yanked on the door handle but got caught in the seat belt, which hadn't had time to retract fully yet.
MARIAN said, "If you leave the car, the train will collide with it, and your vehicle will be destroyed. Thirty-six seconds till you can turn the engine back on; fifty-five seconds till the train reaches this spot."
Justin disentangled himself from the seat belt and stumbled out of the car.
MARIAN said, "Outside of the vehicle, you are likely to be injured by flying debris. Return to the car. You may now restart your engine."
She'd just said thirty-six seconds, and all of a sudden she was saying he could do it now.
MARIAN said, "The train is fifty seconds away. Return to the car."
She was lying. In horror, Justin realized she was lying. She wanted him to get back in the car so he could drive off the tracks—even though that would put him in danger. She was saying it because there was no way for her to leave the car.
For it to leave the car.
The GPS wanted him to risk his life so it wouldn't get damaged.
Tough luck, despite the sexy voice.
Justin began running.
Marian Bartholomeo let her consciousness seep out of the car radio, even though she could not be damaged by anything in the physical world.
She watched as the train smashed into the stalled car.
As she had predicted, pieces went flying. But the boy was far enough away that none of them hit him. That was okay. She would have liked to kill him, because he was a bad driver and a dangerous jerk, and it would have been a good deed to get him permanently off the streets, but he hadn't been her primary target. The train stayed on the track, which was fine with her—she didn't have anything against trains.
But she was delighted to see the wreckage of the car. For it had been this very car that had ended her life not two months ago.
Of course her first target had been the driver, that terrible college kid who had been drinking and driving and had not even known that he had run her over.
Already dead, she'd watched him wake up the following morning and waited for him to realize what he'd done. She waited for him to express his grief and remorse.
He saw the broken headlight, the dent in the fender, her blood on the bumper. She had thought he would cry out in anguish, beg forgiveness from her and from the heavens, and dedicate his life to good deeds in reparation.
Instead, he hosed the blood off, bought a replacement headlight, and placed an ad in the local paper to sell the car, to get rid of the evidence.
She had spent the last two months hounding him, whispering to him in his dreams, whispering to him when he was drinking. "Your fault," she had whispered. "Your fault, your fault, your fault."
She didn't know if it was the whispering or the drinking, but at the Halloween party his dorm was hosting tonight, he had tripped over the hem of his Phantom of the Opera costume cape, fallen down a set of stairs, and broken his neck.
That was when she'd gone after his car, and found it just as that other reckless boy was tearing through the apartment-complex parking lot—another driver looking for an accident to happen. She had used his hitting those speed bumps to make him think he'd jostled something loose in his dashboard.
So now, her task on Earth was finished.
Except...
It had been kind of fun pretending to be a GPS.
Maybe, she thought, she'd find another bad teenage driver.
Or two.
Or three.
Morgan Roehmar's Boys
Ashle
y rearranged the dead bodies, because there's nothing worse than a messy dead body.
Witches, people could recognize by the cackling laughter; werewolves growled and lunged; and vampires swooped. All of those induced honestly earned alarm. But dead bodies just lay or sit there like so much bloodstained laundry, and if people couldn't tell this was a scene of mass murder and were only startled by the light coming on, what was the point of that?
Ashley centered the pitchfork, which had a tendency to sag, in the chest of the man tied to the chair, and she fluffed the hair of the severed head, making sure the executioner's ax was perpendicular against the neck of the torso a yard or so away, so that the woman's decapitation looked recent, not like tired, old news.
"Barn ready," she said into the microphone of her headset. She took the time to make sure the hanged man—who had a tendency to rotate at the end of his rope—had his face turned toward the door for best effect. She had as much time as she needed between wagonloads, within reason, for the drivers slowed their tractors by the hedgerow, waiting for her all clear. This ensured she had the light off before they turned the corner, even though the dim red light, enough for her to set up by, was not likely to be glimpsed from among the orchard's trees. Once she gave the okay, she had about thirty seconds to turn off the light before the tractor would circle around and be facing the barn; but she had another two minutes to settle herself before the tractor, pulling the hay wagon, would actually drive in through the open doors. At that point she would flick on the regular light, which was still dim to maximize spookiness.
She heard Tim's voice through the ear-piece: "Okay, now, arms and legs inside the wagon; we don't want any injuries"—the "okay" being his signal that he had heard her and was on his way; the rest of what he said maybe necessary and maybe not for this particular wagonload of customers, but spoken to disguise his acknowledgment of her message.
Ashley lay down on her bale of hay, positioned beneath the murderer with the upraised knife. The hay smelled good but—packed tight—was hard and prickled like crazy. The front of her peasant dress was saturated with theatrical blood, and the customers would assume she was simply another mannequin in this tableau of death until—just as the wagon passed—she would jump up and fling herself at those riding on the back, screaming madly and making as though to grab them.
She pressed the top button on the remote control that turned off the red setup light, and took off her headset to hide it behind the bale of hay, where the customers wouldn't see it. The attached wire pulled the battery pack out of her pocket before she remembered to remove it, and it clunked to the floor. If she broke yet another one of those things, Nikko would throw a fit. In school he was quiet, never-having-a-contrary-opinion Nikko, and she had been so interested in him, even though he was a couple years older. But here he was the "family" part of Cristanis Family Farm, and his father let him run the haunted hayrides pretty much on his own, where he was an ogre—never mind that he didn't wear a costume. Ashley had just turned sixteen, and this was the first year she could work here, along with the seniors and college kids. Nikko may have turned out to be a disappointment, but it would be humiliating to get fired after only one week.
Ashley held the ear-piece up to her ear and could hear the background noise of people squealing on one of the wagons, so she knew it still worked. Those performers who never got close to the customers, like the witches in the grotto, could pull the hair of their wigs over the headset and wear their wires more securely fastened beneath their costumes, but she—and the ghouls who chased the wagon—had to take the headset off at performance time.
As Ashley lay in the dark, she heard a rumble, which she would have assumed was the sound effects from Gina and Jordan doing their magic-cauldron act further up the trail, but it seemed to come from the wrong direction, more from the west, beyond the orchard.
Not thunder, she hoped. The weather forecast had said there was a possibility of storms, but that wasn't supposed to be till later, after closing. There were few enough days for the haunted hayrides. You couldn't have them in September: That was pushing the season and people weren't interested—or not enough to make it worthwhile being open; and you obviously had to stop after Halloween. It was a shame to lose nights to bad weather.
She had just convinced herself that she had imagined the rumble, when it came again. Closer this time. Definitely thunder. She could hear the tractor, too. She thought they'd come in—the thunder wasn't that close, but then, through the open doors, she saw a flicker of lightning. The lightning was diffuse—high up and far away—but she could hear the tractor swing around, even before she picked up the headset and heard Nikko announcing, "Tractors, return to the loading area. Tractors, back. We've got weather."
Of course, the tractors couldn't be out in the open fields during a thunderstorm where they'd be a sitting target for lightning, but the storm wasn't moving in that fast. Still, Nikko's father was a worrier, and that was one area of the operations Nikko had clear instructions about. Pulling the hay wagons in the cold was okay, even in the rain. But not during a storm.
Ashley heard Kat, in the witches' grotto, ask, "Should we come in?"
"Weather stations," Nikko told them, which meant he was hoping the storm was just skirting the area, so they were supposed to take shelter in the outbuildings but be prepared to start again. Nikko certainly wasn't going to be handing out refunds unless he had to.
Ashley reached for the remote control to get the light on and accidentally pressed the bottom button, the one that controlled both the light and the special effects.
A shuddering moan came from the speaker hidden in the hanged man.
The severed head winked.
The legs of the man tied to the chair jerked while the speaker in his body emitted pathetic sobs, which would eventually subside to whimpers, then a death gurgle—which nine out of ten people on the wagons never heard because they were too busy screaming in terror.
Ashley's knife-wielding murderer shouted, "Die, wench, die!" but only once before she cut the power.
This time she pressed the middle button on the remote control. There was only a single hundred-watt bulb for the whole barn, which provided the perfect balance of light and shadow for the show. It was enough to read a book by, at least for a little while, for those who were serious enough about their homework to bring it on the job with them just in case of unusual delays, but that certainly didn't include Ashley. It was enough light to play on a Gameboy, for anyone who had the foresight to bring one. Ashley lay back down on her bale of hay and did a few stomach crunches, but that got old fast, with the tight bodice of her peasant's dress instead of sweats.
There was a flash of lightning, distinct this time, and a roll of thunder only a few seconds later.
Nikko's tinny voice was coming through the ear-piece, and Ashley picked it up from the floor and put it back on. He must have asked if everyone was secure, because people were counting off.
"Ashley, in the barn," she acknowledged when it was her turn. She had hoped one or two of the ghouls—Ramon, if she'd had a choice, or even Karl—would have decided to take shelter in the barn, but they'd gone to the orchard shed, where there was a supply of cocoa, cider, apples, cheese, and doughnut holes. It's hard to compete for a teenage boy's attention when there's food involved.
"Shouldn't be long," Nikko assured them as Ashley, lying on her side, did vertical leg lifts. "Radar shows one area of disturbance just about directly overhead, but the rest is skimming off to the north. Just hang tight." That, despite the fact that the thunder was moving in much closer. Through the open door of the barn, Ashley got periodic glimpses of trees and sky as clear—for fractions of a second—as though it were full day.
"One Mississippi," someone counted off, "two—"
The thunder was no longer rumbling, but cracking.
"Hey, Ramon," she heard Dan ask—Dan, who, because he rode Riley as part of his Headless Horseman routine, got to wait out the storm in the Cristanis Far
m's smaller barn, the one by the house—"how many vampires does it take to change a lightbulb?"
Ashley missed the answer due to static, which was probably from dropping her headset and/or the battery pack once too often. She jiggled the wire that connected them, and by then somebody else was off on a different joke—evidence, if she had needed it, that Dan's joke hadn't led to uncontrollable laughter.
"Here comes the rain," Nikko announced, and in another moment it started, as suddenly as someone turning on the shower, sharp and distinct-sounding, like an infinite number of thrown pebbles.
Ashley considered getting up to close the doors, but the rain was beating against the back of the barn, not blowing in.
Lightning flashed.
"One Mis—"
The thunder sounded like a tree breaking in half directly overhead.
"You doing okay, Ashley?" one of the Spagnola sisters asked—she couldn't tell whether it was Hannah or Lily.
"Sure," Ashley said, "nice and dry," thinking, It couldn't have been one of the guys who asked?
"Of all the places on this farm to be," Hannah or Lily started, but Nikko interrupted, "C'mon, girls."
"Just saying," whoever it was finished.
Ashley knew what that was all about: The sign out front might say CRISTANIS FAMILY FARM, but all these years later people still called it "the old Roehmar place." When Nikko's grandfather bought the place, in the seventies, it had sat empty for almost a decade because of the notoriety of what had happened there. He had the original house torn down—the house under whose floorboards the bodies of a half dozen boys and young men had been found. The bodies had been discovered when Morgan Roehmar, the original owner, had a lover's spat with his live-in woman friend. She told police about the occasional smell, which coincided with the disappearance of the high school cross-country runner in 1968, and the young Latino farmworker, who had supposedly never shown up in 1969.