Chapter Seven

On the eve of Halloween, just one week before he would leave, Jonathan and Mary took Jacob to the traditional Halloween parade down the streets of neighboring Collinsville. Originally begun as a small event for Collinsville residents only, with a smattering of children and adults feigning celebrity as they marched down the center of town, it became such a draw that the board of selectmen finally opened the parade to kids from all over, knowing full well their parents would spend money like fiends getting liquored up in the trendy, little outdoor cafés that lined the parade route. Now it was an event that drew easily two thousand people each year. Collinsville was the perfect town square for a Halloween event. It was set beneath a cemetery on the slopes of a hill so steep it boggled the mind as to how the corpses and coffins remained in place and didn’t slide down the mountain and break open on Main Street. Abandoned factories with broken windows and brick facades lined a slow, dark river, which became deep just before a subsurface dam, and then gracefully gushed over, flowing beneath a walking bridge connecting the town to a paved river-walk path that stretched miles downstream. Collinsville had previously specialized in blade-making – axes, saws, knives and any sort of industrial cutting tool. The new restaurants and cafés decorated their walls with old Collinsville creations – crude, bladed steel instruments that seemed vaguely menacing but quaint at the same time. The factories were slowly being converted to apartments, antique shops and art galleries in a small-town version of gentrification.

Jacob, like any boy his age, was excited to dress up, to run through the night, to collect candy from neighbors. He was dressed as a mad scientist, an easy enough costume, which, thankfully, cost very little to create – a simple white jacket, some iron-on lettering, blood spatter, gloves and goggles. His naturally messy hair was trussed up into spikes, jutting out in different directions. Some fake glasses gave him the look of intelligence gone awry. He was picture-worthy even for people who didn’t consider him the center of their world.

Jonathan and Mary were never desperate or organized enough to arrive at Collinsville ridiculously early in order to park in the center of town. Conner and Madison would probably have the finest parking spot available. They also attended every year, parading their children, taking pictures, telling everyone that everything was wonderful. Jonathan recognized he was here to do the same thing, and somehow it seemed a bigger lie.

They parked along the river walk outside of town and joined other families who walked beneath the looming trees beside the river. It was dusk and quickly growing dark. The warmth of the sun faded off, and a mist rose from the black waters and drifted through the trees. As they approached the town, Jonathan could hear the laughter, the voices of revelry just beyond the walking bridge and behind the old brick buildings. The other families shuffled along, their children jumped and ran, and their parents called them back. Jacob walked quietly and calmly and Jonathan wondered to himself if something was wrong. The fear every parent secretly harbors that their son or daughter is somehow different – that they were not playing properly with other kids, not behaving like normal kids – crept into his mind. Jacob, at times, seemed morose and isolated. He had no brothers or sisters, and there was no best friend up the street with whom he played. And with that concern came guilt. How could any child come out ‘normal’ with a father like him?

But it wasn’t just Jacob’s quiet manner at a time when he should be a bounding barrel of excitement and joy; the whole evening seemed off. Jonathan knew he had been avoiding the night, hiding inside with the lights on, but now his open-air presence in the darkness couldn’t be helped and he felt an insane sense that something stalked through the trees between the walking path and the deep river. He couldn’t describe it exactly; it was like knowing a song on the radio but being unable to remember the name until hours later. Perhaps it was just a memory, a key revelation sneaking up in slow and horrific fashion. The tops of the trees rustled in an unfelt wind; their brittle orange-and-brown leaves brushed together in a whispering dirge and then floated to the earth like confetti.

They crossed the bridge out of the woods and into town. Jacob grew tired of walking and Jonathan carried him for a time. More people began to appear. Other parents smiled as they passed, commented on his costume, and, naturally, Jonathan and Mary returned the compliments until, five minutes into the event, Jonathan was already exhausted with small talk. The children, dressed as any number of things both foreign and familiar, looked strange, bumping around on short legs, unsure of their own dimensions. As they reached the center of town Jonathan could see the throngs of people. The weather had been beautiful all year and tonight was no exception. There were easily twice as many people this year as usual, traveling from all over the state. The mass of decorated flesh surged in the night, and the streetlamps seemed like torches in the darkness, flickering between shadows.

The three of them were suddenly absorbed into the mass, and Jonathan felt lost in a strange world, weak and exposed. The people twirled in their costumes, stumbled drunkenly, bumped and jostled, laughed and screeched. It seemed there were more adults dressed in costume than children, bent on some form of mild debauchery, dressed as witches, goblins, ghouls and other creatures born out of myths and ancient tales, their costumes an attempt to expose humanity to the deathly fate that awaits them all. Jonathan saw children dressed as zombies, the desiccated dead risen from the grave, skin sallow or peeling, eyes blackened, bloody and evil, and he couldn’t help but wonder what awaited him the following week in Coombs’ Gulch. The boy had lain in that sealed case underground for ten years. Jonathan had never seen a corpse that had fully experienced all the ravages of death, except through the special effects of movies, but now it seemed as if all the stages of death crowded on the streets, mingling in a ritualistic gathering of citizenry. From the angelic face of a young child to the bare bones of a skeleton, a pantomime of the life-and-death process paraded down Main Street in the night.

Jonathan’s stomach curled: would they open the box? Would they need to? He didn’t know. Part of him wanted to treat it like any other piece of luggage to be thrown away, but there was something else burning in his soul, something that said he could never put it to rest until he fully confronted it, gazed into that box and communed with the reality of death.

He felt that somewhere in the crowd, somewhere in this night, the boy was dancing around him, parading and marching, waving and laughing, gray with putrescence, walking on wobbly, dead legs, hand in hand with something much larger and more terrifying in its power.

It stirred both his guilt and wonder. After weeks of researching and his phone call with the Texan, what disturbed Jonathan more were the children dressed as caricatures of familiar things – clowns, farmers, characters from cartoons or movies, and his own little mad scientist. They were real things distorted and accentuated into something other. It made him think of those strange images, the children caught on hunting cameras in the middle of the forest in the night, places not meant for people. It occurred to him that the children in those pictures appeared too perfect, like something pulled out of an advertisement, meant to show what children are supposed to look like, but rarely do. In that way, they seemed alien and even more frightening than the caricatures of death. Jacob walked beside him, his eyes wide in fright and wonder at the massive, roiling crowd of strange faces. Jonathan felt Jacob’s little hand slipping from his own.

After finally reaching Main Street, they shuffled along with the throng of parents and kids. People lined the sidewalks, waving and laughing; cameras flashed, smartphones recorded video. Perhaps when they played the video back later they would see something different, something more powerful hovering in the sky, bearing down on them all. Perhaps they would see what the ancients feared and sacrificed to during these days of descending darkness.

Jonathan heard Mary laugh – a welcome sound – and turned to look. She had her hand on Madison’s shoulder. Conner was standing, tall and lithe, beside his wife, and it took Jonathan a moment to recognize him in the strange setting. Conner nodded and they shook hands briefly. Mary was asking why they didn’t see more of each other and why they didn’t get the kids together more often. Madison nodded her perfect, pretty head in agreement.

Jonathan looked down and saw Conner’s children, Brent and Aria. Brent was dressed as a hunter, in camouflage jacket and pants, which were baggy and creased in odd angles on his small body, a bright orange cap that seemed to glow in the darkness, black makeup beneath his eyes and a toy rifle cradled in his arms. His face was smiling, pale, innocent and unbroken, and, for a moment, Jonathan thought that it was all just some tremendous joke, the boy in the woods nothing more than an elaborate prank, his life for the past ten years a reality television farce played out for some cackling audience.

“He saw the old pictures of you guys from your hunting days and wanted to dress up like his daddy and Uncle Mike,” Madison said.

Jonathan saw Michael standing a few feet back, looking aloof and lost in the mass of families, his wife, Annie, nowhere to be seen. He came to do his duty in supporting his brother, niece and nephew, but he looked out of place and uncomfortable.

Jonathan looked at Conner. “A hunter, huh?”

Conner put on his proud-dad face. “Yeah, maybe someday.”

“Well, I bet you guys are excited to go out together again next week,” Madison said, and Mary launched into a speech about how she was always trying to get Jonathan to go out with his friends and do the things that bring him joy – a veiled admission that his life was largely joyless. “You just can’t work your whole life,” she said.

She didn’t realize that for men like them there were no friends, there was no joy.

Jonathan turned back and gazed out at the mass of costumed people streaming around them. The pitch-black sky bore down over the yellowed streetlamps with their dull coronas of electric light. They were halfway up the incline of Main Street, which drove straight toward the steep hill with the cemetery looming over them all. He looked up at the great black hill and wondered at something that escaped his mind. He turned and looked down Main Street, which plunged toward the river and the submerged dam just beyond the street. He heard Madison and Mary talking. He heard the crowds of revelers. There was movement all around, horrific, screeching faces, made up with blood and gore and alien smiles.

Far off, near the river and trees and just at the edge of the light from a streetlamp, a tremendously tall figure stood cloaked in black. Jonathan strained his eyes but could not make out its features, other than it was standing in shadow and its head reached halfway up the lamppost. It did not appear to be part of the celebration, not walking or mingling. Instead, it stood alone in the darkness – a creep, probably, one of those mentally unstable adults who wallow in gothic darkness and get a kick out of trying to convince the world they’re psychotic.

But then the figure stepped closer to the lamplight, and suddenly Jonathan could make out its features. The face was a crude mask of wood with poorly carved slits for eyes, mouth and nose and primitive designs of dull color painted on the flat face. Upon its head were the antlers of a tremendous stag, which reached like bony fingers up into the night. Its hands were raised at shoulder level as if offering up a sacrifice – a pagan priest transported from the scene of some ancient rite, his prayers and incantations rending time, existing in both realms simultaneously. A wind moved high in the trees, sweeping down from the great cemetery above, and it carried a deep and haunting dirge. The masked priest called out for them, for blood and sacrifice. He stared out from darkness, and his eyes seemed to shine in the light.