“Listen to me. Don’t ask any questions.” He wiped the sheen of sweat off his forehead with a trembling hand. Jaime’s soft brown eyes reflected the terror he’d brought into the house with him. “We’re leaving right now. We’re going to drive to Birmingham and check into a motel.”
“It’s Halloween!” Karen said. “We might have some trick-or-treaters!”
“Please…don’t argue with me! We’ve got to get out of here right now!” Dan jerked his gaze away from his child’s left hand; he’d been looking at the little finger and thinking terrible thoughts. “Right now,” he repeated.
Jaime was stunned, about to cry. On a table beside her was a plate with the Halloween candies on it—grinning pumpkins with silver eyes and licorice mouths. “We have to go,” Dan said hoarsely. “I can’t tell you why, but we have to.” Before Karen could say anything else, Dan told her to gather whatever she wanted—toothpaste, a jacket, underwear—while he went out and started the truck. But hurry! he urged her. For God’s sake, hurry!
Outside, dead leaves snapped at his cheeks and sailed past his head. He slid behind the pickup’s wheel, put the key into the ignition, and turned it.
The engine made one long groaning noise, rattled, and died.
Christ! Dan thought, close to panic. He’d never had any problem with the truck before! He pumped the accelerator and tried again. The engine was stone-cold dead, and all the warning lights—brake fluid, engine oil, battery, even gasoline—flashed red on the instrument panel.
Of course, he realized. Of course. He had paid off the truck with the money he’d won. The truck had been given to him while he was a resident of Essex—and now whatever was coming to their house tonight didn’t want him driving that truck away from Essex.
They could run for it. Run along the road. But what if they ran into the Halloween visitor, there in the lonely darkness? What if it came up behind them on the road, demanding its trick-or-treat like a particularly nasty child?
He tried the truck again. Dead.
Inside the house, Dan slammed the door and locked it. He went to the kitchen door and locked that too, as his wife and daughter watched him as if he’d lost his mind. Dan shouted, “Karen, check all the windows! Make sure they’re shut tight! Hurry, damn it!” He went to the closet and took out his shotgun, got a box of shells off the shelf; he opened the box, put it on the table next to the pumpkin candies, broke open the gun’s breech, and stuffed two shells into the chambers. Then he closed the breech and looked up as Karen and Jaime returned, clinging to each other.
“All…the windows are shut,” Karen whispered, her scared blue eyes flickering back and forth from Dan’s face to the shotgun. “Dan, what’s wrong with you?”
“Something’s coming to our door tonight,” he replied. “Something terrible. We’re going to have to hold it off. I don’t know if we can, but we have to try. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“It’s… Halloween,” she said, and he saw she thought he was totally cracked.
The telephone! he thought suddenly, and ran for it. He picked up the receiver and dialed for the operator in Barrimore Crossing to call for a police car. Officer, the Devil’s on his way to our house tonight and we don’t have his favorite kind of candy.
But on the other end of the line was a piercing crackle of static that sounded like a peal of eerie laughter. Through the static Dan heard things that made him believe he’d truly hurtled over the edge: the crazy theme music from a Porky Pig cartoon, a crash of cymbals, the military drumming of a marching band, assorted gurgles and gasps and moans as if he’d been plugged into a graveyard party line. Dan dropped the receiver, and it dangled from its cord like a lynched corpse. Have to think, he told himself. Figure things out. Hold the bastard off. Got to hold him off. He looked at the fireplace and felt a new hammerblow of horror. “Dear God!” he shouted. “We’ve got to block up the chimney!”
Dan got on his knees, reached up the chimney, and closed the flue. There were already pine logs, kindling, and newspapers in the fireplace, ready for the first cold night of the year. He went into the kitchen, got a box of Red Top matches, and put them into the breast pocket of his shirt; when he came back into the room, Jaime was crying and Karen was holding her tightly, whispering, “Shhhhh, darling. Shhhhhh.” She watched her husband like one would watch a dog with foam on its mouth.
Dan pulled a chair about ten feet from the front door and sat down with the shotgun across his knees. His eyes were sunken into his head and ringed with purple. He looked at his new Bulova watch; somehow, the crystal had shattered. The hands had snapped off.
“Dan,” Karen said—and then she too started to cry.
“I love you, honey,” he told her. “You know I love both of you, don’t you? I swear I do. I won’t let him in. I won’t give him what he wants. Because if I do that, what will he take next year? I love you both, and I want you to remember that.”
“Oh, God… Dan…”
“They think I’m going to do it and leave it outside the door for him,” Dan said. His hands were gripped tightly around the shotgun, his knuckles white. “They think I could take a cleaver and—”
The lights flickered, and Karen screamed. Jaime’s wail joined hers.
Dan felt his face contorting with fear. The lights flickered, flickered—and went out.
“He’s coming,” Dan rasped. “He’s coming soon.” He stood up, walked to the fireplace, bent down, and struck a match. It took four matches to get the fire going right; its orange light turned the room into a Halloween chamber of horrors, and smoke repelled from the blocked flue swept around the walls like searching spirits. Karen was pressed against the wall, and Jaime’s clown makeup was streaming down her cheeks.
Dan returned to the chair, his eyes stinging with smoke, and watched the door.
He didn’t know how much longer it was when he sensed something on the front porch. Smoke was filling the house, but the room had suddenly become bone-achingly cold. He thought he heard something scratching out there on the porch, searching around the door for the items that weren’t there.
He’ll come knocking at your door. And you don’t want that. You really don’t.
“Dan—”
“Shhhh,” he warned her. “Listen! He’s out there.”
“Him? Who? I don’t hear—”
There was a knock at the door like a sledgehammer striking the wood. Dan saw the door tremble through the smoke-haze. The knock was followed by a second, with more force. Then a third that made the door bend inward like cardboard.
“Go away!” Dan shouted. “There’s nothing for you here!”
Silence.
It’s all a trick! he thought. Roy and Tom and Carl and Steve and all the rest are out there in the dark, laughing fit to bust a gut!
But the room was getting viciously cold. Dan shivered, saw his breath float away past his face.
Something scraped on the roof above their heads, like claws seeking a weak chink in the shingles.
“Go away!” Dan’s voice cracked. “Go away, you bastard!”
The scraping stopped. After a long moment of silence, something smashed against the roof like an anvil being dropped. The entire house groaned. Jaime screamed, and Karen shouted, “What is it, Dan, what is it out there?”
Immediately following was a chorus of laughter from beyond the front door. Someone said, “Okay, I guess that’s enough!” A different voice called, “Hey, Dan! You can open up now! Just kiddin’!” A third voice said, “Trick-or-treat, Danny boy!”
He recognized Carl Lansing’s voice. There was more laughter, more whooping cries of “Trick-or-treat!”
My God! Dan rose to his feet. It’s a joke. A brutal, ridiculous joke!
“Open the door!” Carl called. “We can’t wait to see your face!”
Dan almost cried, but there was rage building in him and he thought he might just aim the shotgun at them and threaten to shoot their balls off. Were they all crazy? How had they managed the
phone and the lights? Was this some kind of insane initiation to Essex? He went to the door on shaky legs, unlocked it—
Behind him, Karen said suddenly, “Dan, don’t!”
—and opened the door.
Carl Lansing stood on the porch. His black hair was slicked back, his eyes as bright as new pennies. He looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary.
“You damned fools!” Dan raged. “Do you know what kind of scare you people put into me and my family? I ought to shoot your damned—”
And then he stopped, because he realized Carl was standing alone on the porch.
Carl grinned. His teeth were black. “Trick-or-treat,” he whispered, and raised the ax that he’d been holding behind his back.
With a cry of terror, Dan stumbled backward and lifted the shotgun. The thing that had assumed Carl’s shape oozed across the threshold; orange firelight glinted off the upraised ax blade.
Dan squeezed the shotgun’s trigger, but the gun didn’t go off. Neither barrel would fire. Jammed! he thought wildly, and broke open the breech to clear it.
There were no shells in the shotgun. Jammed into the chambers were Karen’s pumpkin candies.
“Trick-or-treat, Dan!” the thing wailed. “Trick-or-treat!”
Dan struck into the Carl-thing’s stomach with the butt of the shotgun. From its mouth sprayed a mess of yellow canary feathers, pieces of a kitten, and what might have been a piglet. Dan hit it again, and the entire body collapsed like an exploding gasbag. Then Dan grabbed Karen’s hand in a frantic blur of motion and was pulling her with him out the door. She held on to Jaime, and they ran down the porch steps and across the grass, along the driveway and the road and toward the main highway with the Halloween wind clutching around them.
Dan looked back, saw nothing but darkness. Jaime shrieked in tune with the wind. The distant lights of other Essex houses glinted in the hills like cold stars.
They reached the highway. Dan shouldered Jaime, and still they ran into the night, along the roadside where the high weeds caught at their ankles.
“Look!” Karen cried. “Somebody’s coming, Dan! Look!”
He did. Headlights were approaching. Dan stood in the middle of the road, frantically waving. The vehicle—a gray Volkswagen van—began to slow down. At the wheel was a woman in a witch costume, and two children dressed like ghosts peered out the window. People from Barrimore Crossing! Dan realized. Thank God! “Help us!” he begged. “Please! We’ve got to get out of here!”
“You in trouble?” the woman asked. “You have an accident or something?”
“Yes! An accident! Please, get us to the police station in Barrimore Crossing! I’ll pay you! Just please get us there!”
The woman looked at them uncertainly, glanced over at her own costumed kids, and then motioned toward the back. “Okay, get in.”
They gratefully scrambled into the back seat, and the woman accelerated. Karen cradled her sobbing child, and Dan’s voice shook as he said, “We’re all right now. We’re all right.” The two ghost-children stared curiously at them over the seat.
“You have a car accident?” the woman asked, and looked in the rearview mirror as Dan nodded. “Where’s your car?” One of the children giggled softly.
And then something wet and sticky hit Dan’s cheek and drooled down his face. He touched the liquid and looked at his fingers. Spit, he thought. That looks like—
Another drop hit his forehead.
He looked up, at the roof of the van.
The van had teeth. Long, jagged fangs were protruding from the wet gray roof of the van, and now they were rising from the floorboard too, drooling saliva.
Dan heard his wife scream, and then he started to laugh—a terrible, uncontrollable laughter that sent him spinning off the edge of sanity.
“Trick-or-treat, Dan,” the thing behind the wheel said.
And Dan’s last coherent thought was that the Devil sure could come up with one hell of a Halloween costume.
The fanged jaws slammed together and began to grind back and forth.
And then the van, now looking more like a huge cockroach, crawled off the road and began to scurry across a field toward the dark hills where the Halloween wind shrieked in triumph.
Chico
“EVERYTHIN’,” MARCUS SALOMAN SAID as he took another swig of wisdom, “is shit.” He finished his beer and thunked the bottle down on the beat-up little table beside his chair. The noise spooked a roach from its hiding place under the lip of an overflowing ashtray, and it fled for a safer haven. “Jesus!” Salomon shouted, because the roach—a shiny black one perhaps two inches long—had leapt to the arm of his chair and was skittering madly along it. Salomon whacked at it with his beer bottle, missed, the roach ran down the chair and got to the floor and shot toward one of many cracks along the baseboard. Salomon had a bulging beer belly and a number of jiggling chins, but he was still fast; at least, faster than the roach had anticipated. Salomon slid out of the chair, stomped across the room, and smashed his foot down on the roach before it could squeeze into the crack.
“Little bastard!” he seethed. “Little bastard!” He settled his weight down, and there was a satisfying crunch that changed his sneer to a grin. “Got your ass, didn’t I?” He ground his shoe down, as if grinding a cigarette butt, and then he lifted his foot to look at the carnage. The roach had been torn almost in half, its abdomen crushed into the floorboards. A single leg feebly twitched. “That’s what you get, you little bastard!” Salomon said—and it was no sooner spoken than another black roach shot out of a baseboard crack and ran past its dead mate in the opposite direction. Salomon bellowed with rage—a shout that shook the flimsy walls and the dirty glass in the open fire-escape window—and stomped after it. This one was faster and more cunning, trying to get under the threadbare brown rug between the apartment’s front room and the narrow hallway leading to the rear. But Salomon was an experienced killer, though he missed twice, his third stomp stunned the roach and made it lose its course. The fourth stomp mashed it, and the fifth one burst it open. Salomon settled his two hundred and thirty-seven pounds on the roach, grinding it into the boards. Someone hammered on the floor from below, probably with the end of a broom, and a voice shouted, “Stop that noise up there! You’re breakin’ the damn place down!”
“I’ll break your ass, monkey lips!” Salomon hollered back at old Mrs. Cardinza in the apartment below.
And then came the frail, almost frantic voice of Mr. Cardinza: “You don’t talk to my wife like that! I’ll call the police on you, you bastard!”
“Yeah, call the cops!” Salomon shouted, and stomped the floor again. “Maybe they’ll want to talk to that nephew of yours about who’s sellin’ all the drugs in this building! Go on and call ’em!” That quieted the Cardinzas, and Salomon stomped on the floor above their heads with both feet, his weight making the boards shriek and moan. And now Bridger, the drunk next door, started up: “Shut your mouths over there! Let a man sleep, damn you to hell!”
Salomon stalked to the wall and pounded on it. The apartment was thick with the steamy heat of mid-August, and sweat glistened on Salomon’s face and wet through his T-shirt. “You go to Hell! Who you tellin’ to go to Hell? I’ll come over there and kick your skinny ass, you—” A motion caught his attention: a roach zooming over the floor like a haughty black limousine. “Sonofabitch!” Salomon shrieked, and he took two strides after the insect and brought his shoe down on it like Judgment Day. He pressed hard, his teeth gritted and sweat dripping from his chins: a crunch, and Salomon smeared the roach’s insides across the floor.
Another movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned, a wall of belly, and looked at what he considered a roach of a different kind. “What the hell do you want?”
Chico, of course, didn’t answer. He had crawled into the room on his hands and knees and now he sat on his haunches, his oversize head cocked slightly to one side.
“Hey!” Salomon said. “Want to see somethi
n’ pretty?” He grinned, showing bad teeth.
Chico grinned too. In his fleshy brown face one eye was deep-set and dark, and the other was pure white—a dead, blind stone.
“Real pretty! Want to see it?” Salomon nodded, still grinning, and Chico grinned and nodded in emulation. “Come on over here, then. Right here.” He pointed to the glistening yellow insides of the crushed roach that lay on the floor.
Chico crawled, eager and unaware, toward Salomon. The man stepped back. “Right there,” Salomon said, and touched the glinting mess with his shoe. “It tastes like candy! Yum-yum! Go on and lick it!”
Chico was over the yellow smear. He looked at it, looked quizzically up at Salomon with his single dark eye.
“Yum-yum!” Salomon said, and rubbed his belly.
Chico lowered his head and stuck out his tongue.
“Chico!”
The woman’s voice, shrill and nervous, stopped him before he reached the smear. Chico lifted his head and sat up, looking at his mother. The weight of his head began to instantly strain his neck and make his skull tilt to one side.
“Don’t do that,” she told him, and shook her head. “No.”
Chico’s eye blinked. His lips pursed; he mouthed no and crawled away from the dead roach.
Sophia trembled. She glared at Salomon, her thin arms dangling at her sides and her hands gripped into fists. “How could you do such a thing?”
He shrugged; his grin had gotten a little meaner, as if his mouth was a wound made by a very sharp knife. “I’m just kiddin’ with him, that’s all. I wasn’t goin’ to let him do it.”
“Come here, Chico,” Sophia said, and the twelve-year-old boy crawled quickly to his mother. He rested his head against her leg, like a dog might, and she touched his curly black hair.
“You take everythin’ too serious,” Salomon told her, and he kicked the crushed roach into a corner. He enjoyed killing them; picking up the dead ones was Sophia’s job. “Shut up!” he bellowed through the wall at Bridger, who was still shouting about a man never being able to get any sleep in this festering hellhole. Bridger fell silent, knowing when not to push his luck. In the apartment below, the Cardinzas were quiet too, lest the ceiling cave in on their heads. But other noises swarmed into the apartment, both from the open window and from the guts of the tenement itself: the relentless, maddening roar of traffic on East River Drive; a man and woman shouting curses at each other in the garbage-strewn square of concrete that the city called a “park”; a boom box blasting, turned up to its highest notch; the choked chugging of overloaded pipes; and the chatter of fans that were utterly useless in the sweltering heat. Salomon sat down in his favorite chair, the one that had a caved-in seat and springs hanging out the bottom. “Bring me a beer,” he said.