Halloween Masks Page 3

  “Wait...” he amended. Then, Hank was reeling back from the window as if a bolt of lightning had stabbed him through the pane. “Jesus!” he cried out. “Sweet Jesus!”

  “What is it?” Donna asked, starting toward him.

  He waved her back, and stumbled backwards toward her, reluctant to take his wide eyes off the window. “I saw another of them...”

  “Another of what?”

  “People. Out in the parking lot.”

  “What people? What were they doing, Hank?”

  “Just standing there. Staring at me. This guy with dark hair. Maybe an Indian or something. An India Indian. And he had blood all over his shirt. He looked like he was ripped open across his body.” Hank made a slash with his hand, from his right shoulder down to his left hip.

  They all wheeled in one synchronized motion toward the door as it banged open...expecting to see the dark-haired, dark-skinned, darkly torn stranger framed in its threshold.

  Instead, they saw Wally in his baseball hat upon which was embroidered the name of his ship, and on which were little enamel pins regarding WW II, the VFW, and Scotland. Tommy’s arm was slung across Wally’s shoulders. Both men were drenched, as if Wally had pulled Tommy out of the sea itself. Dick bolted forward to take Tommy’s other arm. Together, the men walked Tommy to one of the tables and sat him heavily down. The beefy bartender was whimpering to himself inaudibly, tears welling in his eyes.

  As soon as Tommy was settled, Wally rushed back to the door and practically fell against it, locking it against the night.

  “Well?” Dick said, looking from Tommy to Wally and back. “What happened? Did somebody jump him?”

  At the bar, Wally hunched over his pad and scribbled madly. Dick drew close to his side, and saw how Wally’s hand shook, and how the knuckles were gouged and the gouges were filling up with blood, and how blood and water dripped off him to make the ink blur. Wally roughly tore most of the sheet free of the pad and thrust it at the younger vet, who took it and read it. The funny thing was, Wally had a hard time hearing, but he wasn’t mute. People wrote him messages, but he didn’t need to write them himself. This time, however, he seemed to have lost his voice.

  Dick stared at the smeary note in his hands, trying to digest it.

  “What does it say?” Donna demanded.

  “Never mind,” Dick mumbled.

  “What do you mean, never mind? Let us see it!”

  “What time is it?” Dick glanced up at an illuminated clock advertising a brand of low-grade beer. “Only nine thirty. Two and a half hours to midnight. Two and a half hours until Halloween is over.”

  “I’m going to go lock the back door!” Wally announced gruffly, moving around the bar toward the half-open door to the kitchen.

  “I’ll come with you,” Dick said, stuffing the note in the pocket of his jeans and jogging after the older man.

  “For Chrissakes, Dick!” Donna bleated.

  “I don’t think it’s a prank, Donna,” her husband whispered, huddling close to her more out of security than secrecy. “I don’t think these are kids fooling around.”

  “We killed them,” Tommy said aloud, suddenly, as if to explain or only to give voice to his madness. “We killed them...”

  “I’m going out there!” Bob announced, shuffling with determination toward the front door, brandishing his cane like a club.

  “The hell you are, B. T.!” Hank exclaimed, jumping between the gnome-like elderly man and the door.

  “Get out of my way!”

  “Bob, you can’t go out there! Did you see your brother’s face? Take a look at Tommy! It isn’t safe.”

  “They’re our dead, B. T.,” Tommy joined in. “They’re our dead. Come back for us. ‘Cause it’s Halloween, ya know? It’s Halloween and all the doors are open...”

  “It’s the people we killed, Bob,” Hank told him.

  Dick and Wally returned safely from the kitchen. Dick had a huge bread knife in one hand. Wally’s right hand, Bob saw for the first time, was bleeding from lacerated knuckles. Bob gestured at the wounds. “What happened? Did they do that to you?”

  “I took a swing at that guy we saw in the window,” Wally said. “My hand went right through him. I hit the shutter instead.” He added, “He had a hold of Tommy. Him and this other one. They had a hold of him, but I couldn’t hit them.”

  Tommy nodded, his eyes feverish. “Mm-hm,” he agreed. “Mm-hm.”

  “The one I swung at was a Nazi,” Wally said gravely. “The other one was a Korean, I think.”

  Bob sat down at one of the tables. Suddenly it seemed that he couldn’t stand up even with the aid of his cane. “Hank,” he said. “The one you saw, that was torn open across his front.” He repeated Hank’s diagonal slashing motion. “You said he was an Indian. Could he have been...an Arab?”

  “Yeah, I guess, Bobby. I guess he could’ve been.”

  Bob nodded grimly. “They have no right,” he said, but in a softer voice than his characteristic tirade. “They have no right to want revenge. We were right. They were wrong. It was black and white. It wasn’t about us being white and them being Japanese or Vietnamese or whatever the hell they were. We killed Germans and Italians and every kind of man.”

  “And women,” Dick said so very quietly. “And children...”

  “Maybe in your war. That’s what you doped-up killers did!”

  “I have one word for you,” Hank barked at Bob. “Hiroshima!”

  “Listen.” Bob pointed at the locked door. “These people were Nazis! Killing millions of Jews and gypsies and gays and everything! They were bad people! They don’t have a right to do this! To come back!”

  “I guess no one was watching them,” Hank joked very humorlessly.

  “I’m going to call the police,” Donna said. She hurried to the pay phone, and the others watched as she waited for her call to go through. They watched as her face grew rubbery and slack, and Dick thought he could hear a high female voice from the ear piece clamped to Donna’s head. She slammed the receiver back in its cradle.

  “Well?” Bob said.

  “It was a woman talking in another language,” Donna replied, on the verge of tears. “She sounded Vietnamese or Japanese or something.”

  “My God,” Hank breathed.

  “Maybe I should try to make a run for our car, huh?” she said. “I’m not a vet...I didn’t kill anybody. Maybe they’ll leave me alone. And I can get help.”

  “You aren’t going out there!” Hank snapped.

  “No way!” Bob grumbled.

  “We wait,” Dick said. “Until midnight. Until November first.”

  On the opposite wall from the window by the pay phone there was another window, near a glass showcase containing commemorative plaques, framed medals, photos of past Commanders. Wally had built the showcase. The face in the window was like a war trophy inside another glass exhibit. A trophy rather like the human skull Bob had brought back with him from North Africa. It was little more than a skull held together by shreds of flesh and some sodden autumn leaves that had fallen and stuck to it. A hand like a chicken’s gnarled claw scratched feebly at the glass.

  “Go away, damn you!” Wally thundered, taking a threatening step toward the apparition. “I sent you to hell and I’ll do it again!”

  The face withdrew, or perhaps faded, and was gone. They all wondered if Wally had, indeed, frightened the thing off.

  Behind them, the door rattled. They saw the knob trying to turn. Then, a thump at the window by the phone, and another face there as gaunt and translucently white as milk poured over a skull.

  “We’re sorry, okay?” Donna sobbed. “We’re sorry!”

  “No we aren’t sorry,” Bob said.

  “Bob, look!” Hank shouted. “It’s your Arab!” He pointed at the back window by the showcase.

  Bob followed Hank’s finger, and shuddered hard. The face pushed up against the glass so that its lips and nose were bent and distorted was dark-skinned but still ashe
n despite that. Though it had been night when he killed this man, and he had only seen him closely after he was already dead, he knew it was indeed the stealthy murderer who had killed the dock guard when his ship was at port. It could have been him on the pier that night, and that other young sailor safely up on the deck instead. Him with his throat cut. Survivor’s guilt had plagued him ever since.

  “What if they get in?” Donna wailed. “What’s to keep them from getting inside, if they’re spirits?”

  “Go away,” Bob whispered at the face smeared across the glass, orange glimmers reflecting in dead fish eyes. “It’s too late for revenge. I’m old. It’s all over now.” He was beginning to shake, and he put a hand to his chest, afraid that his laboring heart would gallop faster and faster until its legs folded beneath it. Tears of rage and frustration and fear came into his faded eyes. Yet through them, he saw another face rise up over the shoulder of the man at the glass. Another apparition with vacant eyes. But this one had a gaping crescent wound at its throat. And it wrapped its arms around the first apparition. It pulled it away from the window. Both of them, in this embrace, receded into the darkness and were gone.

  It was a reversal of what Bob had seen that night over fifty years earlier. The murderer with his knife coming up on the guard from behind.

  “Someone pulled it away!” Dick blurted, pointing at the window by the pay phone. “Someone grabbed that one!”

  “Maybe the police are here!” Donna babbled.

  “We never called them,” Hank reminded her. “And how could they grab these things? How could they?”

  Wally ventured to the window by the pay phone and dared to put his forehead against the glass. Were those two figures struggling in the parking lot, stumbling closer to the one streetlight? Now they were under the light, but the illumination only seemed to make them look misty, insubstantial, whereas in the dark they had had a faint bioluminescent glow. He swore he was not only seeing the rain in front of their wrestling forms, but through them.

  Then there was a gust, and the figures seemed to tatter, to shred like tissue paper in water, and then they were both gone. Both the man in the Nazi uniform...and the man in the British World War Two uniform who had seized hold of him.

  “They’re gone,” Tommy said, as if he could sense it. “They’re all gone now.”

  Bob came up beside his taller brother. He, too, wore a baseball cap festooned with pins and buttons, the seal for Post # 153 embroidered on the front of his. Shoulder-to-shoulder, they stared out into the night and saw that the rain had diminished to a mere drizzle. The storm was moving on.

  “Let’s have another beer,” Wally Thompson said to his brother.

  Together, they shuffled to the bar. Wally poured one for Tommy, and brought it to him. Tommy sipped it with gratitude.

  Bob raised his glass of Irish red. The others saluted him with their own preferences.

  “ Slainte! ” he said. And then, “ Go mbeire muid beo ar an am seo aris! ”

  “What’s that mean, B. T.?” asked Tommy.

  “It means, ‘May we be alive at this time next year,’” Bob told him.

  ***

  (Dedicated to the memory of my father, Robert Thomas, and uncle, Wally Thomas – JET)

  OCTOBER 3 2 nd

  I drove home from my second shift job at eleven-thirty PM, during the most depressing part of Halloween night.

  This was when the magic drained out of the streets like smoke wisping from a blown out jack o’-lantern. This was when the orange of October threatened to char overnight to the gray-brown of November. With a decisive creak, the earth turned on its axis from autumn toward winter. Yes, the magic was still out there, like a storm front on a weather man’s map, but it was migrating south, toward Mexico, where tomorrow they would have their Day of the Dead. So the gate between the living and the dead was still open...just shifting, like the moon, from one sky to another. The two realms were still in communion, overlapping. Our reality and another, the material and the spiritual, yin and yang.

  But in the wet streets my car sloshed through, there was no more festivity. In fact, I had missed it altogether, having gone to the pharmaceutical company where I punched in every day for three PM. But I remembered the holiday clearly, fondly, from my childhood...and I knew what had been lost as the hour trudged – like a trick-or-treater through piles of leaves – toward midnight. It was now just five minutes away, according to my wristwatch with its numbers and hands glowing a faint fungal green.

  At least I had had a tease of the magic on my way to work. There must have been a Halloween party at the Brown School. As I passed the old brick Wright Plastics building, where I used to work as an injection molder, I saw four children in Halloween costumes waiting to cross the street. They had their backpacks on and had either taken their masks off entirely or wore them pushed up on top of their heads, but at least I saw the wind-blown cape of a vampire, their bodies under their winter coats shiny orange, satiny purple, glittering green. Even the elderly crossing guard, whom I saw there every afternoon on my way to work, seemed to be in the spirit, wearing a bright orange jacket – though actually he wore that every day, no matter the season.

  I had slowed and stopped as the old crossing guard shuffled out into the street, glaring at me with pugilistic menace as though daring me to try to dart through the white lines that barred my way before his charges were safely conveyed through them, as if filing along a narrow bridge that spanned a yawning chasm of black asphalt. But I waited patiently, as always, as he held up his stop sign like a king brandishing his scepter and ushered the children across, like spirits being invited into our world from their own.

  I wished I was one of them.

  But now, there were no more trick-or-treaters walking these sidewalks I passed alongside. Leaves that had earlier been piled crisp in the gutters, fluttering about in the brisk breeze like locusts, were now soggy, matted into something close to a slime. Thank God for the children the rain had held off into late in the evening, but now it was falling in torrents that pounded my windshield and made it hard for my wipers to brush aside.

  A scarecrow sitting in a lawn chair in someone’s front lawn was saturated by the rain, slumped to one side like a dead man in an electric chair. Sometimes, I knew from my own childhood experience, adults dressed as scarecrows and sat still in their yards until unwary kids drew near, and then they would stand or lunge to startle them. This one, however, was most certainly an actual scarecrow...unless the masquerader were asleep. Or dead.

  The air was so wet it was as though my car drove along the bottom of a dark sea. Even the inside of my car was damp, as if its air accumulated and bottled the evaporating moisture from every drying out, shriveling, rotting jack-o’-lantern in the town. I saw these pumpkins dimly on door stoops. Their eyes would be imperceptibly but steadily squinting more narrow, their fanged smiles sucking in toothlessly.

  Where strings of orange lights had glowed from shrubs, there was bristling blackness. Where windows had glowed with plastic pumpkins and candles, there was gaping blankness. Spooky audiotapes no longer played ghostly wails, howling wolves, crashing thunder.

  It seemed, in fact, that I was the only person alive in these streets.

  I did see another car as I drew nearer to the center of town, however. But rather than being someone coming home from work, I suspected they were coming home from a Halloween party at which they’d imbibed too many festive fluids, because the small white car was driving backwards through a crosswise street that intersected with the one I was on. I decelerated , thinking that the vehicle was reversing carelessly so as to turn into my street, perhaps having overshot the intersection...but as I crawled closer I saw no sign of the careless driver down that side road, and I continued on my way.

  I tried to raise myself from my depression at having missed Halloween by considering that there might still be some horror movies playing on cable. I glanced at my dashboard clock, noted that it was ten to midnight. Sure, I though
t, a couple had to be playing, still. I’d make some microwave popcorn, settle into my couch with all the lights out except for my flickering hearth of cathode blue.

  Ahead now I could make out the top of the old brick Crone Plastics building, where I used to be a maintenance worker. The nearby Gray School would be silent and shut at this hour, but I saw that the elderly crossing guard had stayed on late or had arrived early for his next shift. He was hard not to notice in his orange jacket that shone in my headlights. Without children to watch over, he did not glare at me challengingly, did not even look at me as I passed him, just stood there with his stop sign hanging at his side, the rain exploding off his shoulders and his gray hair plastered to his skull.

  I had noticed only moments ago that my gas was running low, though I could have sworn I’d filled up the tank only that afternoon. Maybe I had a leak. In any case, I pulled into the gas station just beyond the Crone factory...but no one came from inside at the sound of the bell, the interior all dark except for illuminated signs advertizing motor oil and the like. I’d have to take care of it tomorrow, then. I pulled back onto the road to continue on toward home.

  The detritus of the holiday was still sadly in evidence around me. On someone’s front lawn, a soggy scarecrow had fallen out of a lawn chair to lie on its face like a drowned man. How clever, I thought, if it were really an adult in costume, diligently waiting for a last trick-or-treater to come along, or a car like mine, so as to leap suddenly to his feet and give me a start. I watched it out of the corner of my eye as I splashed by in the flume of the street, but the sodden mannequin did not so much as raise its head.

  The rain had stopped and the streets of town were now filled with a damp fog so thick one would think it had blown in off Lake Pometacomet, though that was too far from the town center to be the case. Street lights glowed as if buried in mountains of cotton, though there were no mock candles or garlands of orange bulbs to restore to the town the costume of fantasy it had worn while I’d been spending eight tedious hours in the printing company I worked for.