The Nightmare Factory

  He left the candle burning in the jack-o-lantern. Let it make the most of its brief life. Tomorrow it would be defunct and placed out with the other refuse, an extinguished shell pressed affectionately against a garbage bag. Tomorrow…All Souls Day. Pick up Mother for church in the morning. Could count it as a weekly visit, holy day of obligation. Also have to remember to talk to Father M. about taking that kiddie group to the football game.

  The kids. Their annual performance was now over, the make-up wiped away and all the costumes back in their boxes. After he turned off the lights downstairs and upstairs, and was lying in bed, he still heard “trick or treat” and saw their faces in the darkness. And when they tried to dissolve into the background of his sleepy mind…he brought them back.

  II

  “Ttrrrick or ttrrreat,” chattered a trio of hacking, sniffing hoboes. It was much colder this year, and he was wearing the bluish-gray wool overcoat he delivered the mail in. “Some for you, you, and you,” he said in a merely efficient tone of voice. The bums were not overly grateful for the handouts. They don’t appreciate anything the way they used to. Things change so fast. Forget it, close the door, icy blasts.

  Weeks ago the elms and red maples in the neighborhood had been assaulted by unseasonable frigidity and stripped to the bone. Clouds now clotted up the sky, a murky purple ceiling through which no star shone. Snow was imminent.

  Fewer kids observed the holiday this year, and of the ones who did a good number of them evidently took little pride in the imagination or lavishness of their disguises. Many were content to rub a little burnt cork on their faces and go out begging in their everyday clothes.

  So much seemed to have changed. The whole world had become jaded, an inexorable machine of cynicism. Your mother dies unexpectedly, and they give you two days leave from your job. When you get back, people want to have even less to do with you than before. Strange how you can feel the loss of something that never seemed to be there in the first place. A dwarfish, cranky old woman dies…and all of a sudden there’s a royal absence, as if a queen had cruelly vacated her throne. It was the difference between a night with a single fibrillating star in it and one without anything but smothering darkness.

  But remember those times when she used to…No, nihil nisi bonum. Let the dead, et cetera, et cetera. Father M. had conducted an excellent service at the funeral home, and there was little point in ruining that perfect sense of finality the priest had managed to convey regarding the earthly phase of his mother’s existence. So why bring her now into his thoughts? Night of the Dead, he remembered.

  There were no longer very many emissaries of the deceased roaming the streets of the neighborhood. They had gone home, the ones who had left it in the first place. Might as well close up till next year, he thought. No, wait.

  Here they are again, coming late in the evening as they did last year. Take off the coat, a sudden flash of warmth. The warming stars had returned, shining their true light once more. How they beamed, those two little points in the blackness. Their stellar intensity went right into him, a bright tightness. He was now grateful for the predominant gloom of this year’s Halloween, which only exacerbated his present state of delight. That they were wearing the same costumes as last year was more than he could have hoped.

  “Trick or treat,” they said from afar, repeating the invocation when the man standing behind the glass door didn’t respond and merely stood staring at them. Then he opened the door wide.

  “Hello, happy couple. Nice to see you again. You remember me, the mailman?”

  The children exchanged glances, and the boy said: “Yeah, sure.” The girl antiphonied with a giggle, enhancing his delight in the situation.

  “Well, here we are one year later and you two are still dressed and waiting for the wedding to start. Or did it just get over with? At this rate you won’t make any progress at all. What about next year? And the next? You’ll never get any older, know what I mean? Nothing’ll change. Is that okay with you?”

  The children tried for comprehending nods but only achieved movements and facial expressions of polite bewilderment.

  “Well, it’s okay with me too. Confidentially, I wish things had stopped changing for me a long time ago. Anyway, how about some candy?”

  The candy was proffered, the children saying “thaaank yooou” in the same way they said it at dozens of other houses. But just before they were allowed to continue on their way…he demanded their attention once more.

  “Hey, I think I saw you two playing outside your house one day when I came by with the mail. It’s that big white house over on Pine Court, isn’t it?”

  “Nope,” said the boy as he carefully inched his way down the porch stairs, trying not to trip over his costume. His sister had impatiently made it to the sidewalk already. “It’s red with black shutters. On Ash.” Without waiting for a reaction to his answer he joined his sister, and side by side the bride and groom walked far down the street, for there didn’t seem to be any other houses open for business nearby. He watched them become tiny in the distance, eventually disappear into the dark.

  Cold out here, shut the door. There was nothing more to see; he had successfully photographed the encounter for the family album of his imagination. If anything, their faces glowed even brighter and clearer this year. Perhaps they really hadn’t changed and never would. No, he thought in the darkness of his bedroom. Everything changes and always for the worst. But they wouldn’t make any sudden transformations now, not in his thoughts. Again and again he brought them back to make sure they were the same.

  He set his alarm clock to wake himself for early mass the next day. There was no one who would be accompanying him to church this year. He’d have to go alone.

  Alone.

  III

  Next Halloween there was a premature appearance of snow, a thin foundation of whiteness that clung to the earth and trees, putting a pallid face on the suburb. In the moonlight it glittered, a frosty spume. This sparkling below was mirrored by the stars positioned tenuously in the night above. A monstrous mass of snowclouds to the west threatened to intervene, cutting off the reflection from its source and turning everything into a dull emptiness. All sounds were hollowed by the cold, made into the cries of migrating birds in a vacant November dusk.

  Not even November yet and look at it, he thought as he stared through the glass of his front door. Very few were out tonight, and the ones who were found fewer houses open to them, closed doors and extinguished porchlights turning them away to roam blindly through the streets. He had lost much of the spirit himself, had not even set out a jack-o-lantern to signal his harbor in the night.

  Then again, how would he have carried around such a weighty object with his leg the way it was now? One good fall down the stairs and he started collecting disability pay from the government, laid up for months in the solitude of his home.

  He had prayed for punishment and his prayers had been answered. Not the leg itself, which only offered physical pain and inconvenience, but the other punishment, the solitude. This was the way he remembered being corrected as a child: sent into the basement, exiled to the cold stone cellar without the relief of light, save for that which hazed in through a dusty window-well in the corner. In that corner he stood, near as he could to the light. It was there that he once saw a fly twitching in a spider web. He watched and watched and eventually the spider came out to begin feasting on its prey. He watched it all, dazed with horror and sickness. When it was over he wanted to do something. He did. With a predatory stealth he managed to pinch up the little spider and pull it off its web. It tasted like nothing at all really, except a momentary tickle on his dry tongue.

  “Trick or treat,” he heard. And he almost got up to arduously cane his way to the door. But the Halloween slogan had been spoken somewhere in the distance. Why did it sound so close for a moment? Crescendoing echoes of the imagination, where far is near, up is down, pain pleasure. Maybe he should close up for the night. There seemed to
be only a few kids playing the game this year. Only the most desultory stragglers remained at this point. Well, there was one now.

  “Trick or treat,” said a mild, failing little voice. Standing on the other side of the door was an elaborately garbed witch, complete with a warm black shawl and black gloves in addition to her black gown. An old broom was held in one hand, a bag in the other.

  “You’ll have to wait just a moment,” he called through the door as he struggled to get up from the sofa with the aid of his cane. Pain. Good, good. He picked up a full bag of candy from the coffee table and was quite prepared to bestow its entire contents on the little lady in black. But then he recognized who it was behind the cadaver-yellow make-up. Watch it. Wouldn’t want to do anything unusual. Play you don’t know who it is. And do not say anything concerning red houses with black shutters. Nothing about Ash Street.

  To make matters worse, there was the outline of a parent standing on the sidewalk. Insure the safety of the last living child, he thought. But maybe there were others, though he’d only seen the brother and sister. Careful. Pretend she’s unfamiliar; after all, she’s wearing a different get-up from the one she wore the past two years. Above all don’t say a word about you know who.

  And what if he should innocently ask where was her little brother this year? Would she say: “He was killed,” or maybe, “He’s dead,” or perhaps just, “He’s gone,” depending on how the parents handled the whole affair. With any luck, he would not have to find out.

  He opened the door just far enough to hand out the candy and in a bland voice said: “Here you go, my little witch.” That last part just slipped out somehow.

  “Thank you,” she said under her breath, under a thousand breaths of fear and experience. So did it seem.

  She turned away, and as she descended the porch steps her broom clunked along one step behind her. An old, frayed, throw-away broom. Perfect for witches. And the kind perfect for keeping a child in line. An ugly old thing kept in a corner, an instrument of discipline always within easy reach, always within a child’s sight until the thing became a dream-haunting image. Mother’s broom.

  After the girl and her mother were out of sight, he closed the door on the world and, having survived a tense episode, was actually grateful for the solitude that only minutes ago was the object of his dread.

  Darkness. Bed.

  But he could not sleep, not to say he did not dream. Hypnagogic horrors settled into his mind, a grotesque succession of images resembling lurid frames from old comic strips. Impossibly distorted faces painted in garish colors frolicked before his mental eye, all entirely beyond his control. These were accompanied by a series of funhouse noises which seemed to emanate from some zone located between his brain and the moonlit bedroom around him. A drone of half-thrilled, half-horrified voices filled the background of his imagination, punctuated by super-distinct shouts which used his name as an excuse for sound. It was an abstract version of his mother’s voice, now robbed of any sensual quality to identify it as such, remaining only a pure idea. The voice called out his name from a distant room in his memory. Samuel, it shouted with a terrible urgency of obscure origin. Then suddenly—trick or treat. The words echoed, changing in sense as they faded into silence: trick or treat—down the street—we will meet—ashes, ashes. No, not ashes but other trees. The boy walked behind some big maples, was eclipsed by them. Did he know a car was following him that night? Panic. Don’t lose him now. Don’t lose him. Ah, there he was on the other side. Nice trees. Good old trees. The boy turned around, and in his hand was a tangled web of strings whose ends extended up to the stars which he began working like kites or toy airplanes or flying puppets, staring up at the night and screaming for the help that never came. Mother’s voice started shouting again; then the other voices mixed in, becoming a foul babbling unity of dead voices chattering away. Night of the Dead. All the dead conversed with him in a single voicey-woicey.

  Trick or treat, it said.

  But this didn’t sound as if it were part of his delirium. The words seemed to originate from outside him, for their utterance served to disturb his half-sleep and free him of its terrible weight. Instinctively cautious of his lame leg, he managed to wrest himself from sweaty bedcovers and place both feet on the solid floor. This felt reassuring. But then:

  Trick or treat.

  It was outside. Someone on the front porch. “I’m coming,” he called into the darkness, the sound of his own voice awakening him to the absurdity of what it had said. Had the months of solitude finally exacted their strange price from his sanity? Listen closely. Maybe it won’t happen again.

  Trick or treat. Trick or treat.

  Trick, he thought. But he’d have to go downstairs to be sure. He imagined seeing a playfully laughing shape or shapes scurrying off into the darkness the moment he opened the door. He’d have to hurry, though, if he was to catch them at it. Damn leg, where’s that cane. He next found his bathrobe in the darkness and draped it over his underclothed body. Now to negotiate those wicked stairs. Turn on the hallway light. No, that would alert them to his coming. Smart.

  He was making it down the stairs in good time, considering the gloomy conditions he was working under. Neither this nor that nor gloom of night. Gloom of night. Dead of night. Night of the Dead.

  With that odd sprightliness of cripples he ambled his way down the stairs, his cane always remaining a step ahead for support. Concentrate, he told his mind, which was starting to wander into strange places in the darkness. Watch out! Almost took a tumble that time. Finally he made it to the very bottom. A sound came through the wall from out on the front porch, a soft explosion it seemed. Good, they were still there. He could catch them and reassure his mind regarding the source of its fancies. The labor of walking down the stairs had left him rather hyperventilated and unsure about everything.

  Trying to effect the shortest possible interval between the two operations, he turned the lock above the handle and pulled back the door as suddenly as he was able. A cold wind seeped in around the edges of the outer door, prowling its way past him and into the house. Out on the porch there was no sign of a boyish trickster. Wait, yes there was.

  He had to turn on the porchlight to see it. Directly in front of the door a jack-o-lantern had been heaved forcefully down onto the cement, caving in its pulpy shell which had exploded into fragments lying here and there on the porch. He opened the outer door for a closer look, and a swift wind invaded the house, flying past his head on frigid wings. What a blast, close the door. Close the door!

  “Little buggers,” he said very clearly, an attempt to relieve his sense of disorder and delirium.

  “Who, meezy-weezy?” said the voice behind him.

  At the top of the stairs. A dwarfish silhouette, seemingly with something in its hand. A weapon. Well, he had his cane at least.

  “How did you get in here, child?” he asked without being sure it really was a child, considering its strangely hybrid voice.

  “Child yourself, sonny. No such things where I come from. No Sammy-Wammies either. I’m just in disguise.”

  “How did you get in?” he repeated, still hoping to establish a rational manner of entry.

  “In? I was already in.”

  “Here?” he asked.

  “No, not here. There-dee-dare.” The figure was pointing out the window at the top of the stairs, out at the kaleidoscopic sky. “Isn’t it a beauty? No children, no anything.”

  “What do you mean?” he inquired with oneiric inspiration, the normalcy of dream being the only thing that kept his mind together at this stage.

  “Mean? I don’t mean nothing, you meany.”

  Double negative, he thought, relieved to have retained contact with a real world of grammatical propriety. Double negative: two empty mirrors reflecting each other’s emptiness to infinite powers, nothing cancelling out nothing.

  “Nothing?” he echoed with an interrogative inflection.

  “Yup, that’s where you’re g
oing.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?” he asked, gripping his cane tightly, sensing a climax to this confrontation.

  “How? Don’t worry. You already made sure of how-wow-wow…TRICK OR TREAT!”

  And suddenly the thing came gliding down through the darkness.

  IV

  He was found the next day by Father Mickiewicz, who had telephoned earlier after failing to see this clockwork parishioner appear as usual for early mass on All Souls Day. The door was wide open, and the priest discovered his body at the bottom of the stairs, its bathrobe and underclothes grotesquely disarranged. The poor man seemed to have taken another fall, a fatal one this time. Aimless life, aimless death: Thus was his death in keeping with his life, as Ovid wrote. So ran the priest’s ad hoc eulogy, though not the one he would deliver at the deceased’s funeral.

  But why was the door open if he fell down the stairs? Father M. came to ask himself. The police answered this question with theories about an intruder or intruders unknown. Given the nature of the crime, they speculated on a revenge motive, which the priest’s informal testimony was quick to contradict. The idea of revenge against such a man was far-fetched, if not totally meaningless. Yes, meaningless. Nevertheless, the motive was not robbery and the man seemed to have been beaten to death, possibly with his own cane. Later evidence showed that the corpse had been violated, but with an object much longer and more coarse than the cane originally supposed. They were now looking for something with the dimensions of a broomstick, probably a very old thing, splintered and decayed. But they would never find it in the places they were searching.

  THE PRODIGY OF DREAMS

  I conceived my ideal leavetaking from this earth—a drama prepared by strange portents, swiftly developed by dreams and visions nurtured in an atmosphere of sublime dread, growing overnight like some gaudy fungus in a forgotten cellar…