He’s different than I expect. Older and worn down, the way time in such a place can alter a man’s grooming habits and posture. A person’s pride slips away, along with his inner spirit.
The medications typically don’t help. Per my request, they’ve limited Naylor’s dosage today to keep him alert.
The previous director at the Klinenberg facility, Sylvia Jeffers, had severely restricted Naylor’s access to facts uncovered in subsequent investigations for fear such details might confirm the patient’s delusions. She and her team essentially kept Naylor in a bubble with no access to media reports and strict instructions on what visitors could and could not say. Thomas Edgeworth, newly appointed, has granted me far more leeway than his predecessor. He’s allowed the investigation to take precedence. To his way of thinking, uncovering the truth, facing it directly, should benefit all parties.
On the various recordings he’s made, Naylor doesn’t provide a full explanation. However, in most occurrences that seem to incriminate the children, he offers an excuse or diversion—sometimes casting suspicion on himself, more frequently on his deceased wife. A few sections seem to incriminate the community manager, Shawna Diedrichs, but that seems a red herring.
His voice is instantly familiar, the way a celebrity’s might be. I’ve listened to his recordings over and over: I know his cadences, the way he speeds up when he’s ready to make a wry comment, how he’ll drop to a slow whisper when he describes something ominous or terrifying.
His voice is also familiar like an old friend’s. Though he addresses the therapist du jour on each segment, he achieves an easy rapport throughout most of the narrative and even a disinterested listener could get drawn into his story.
In all fairness, I could hardly call myself disinterested.
The most startling aspect of his appearance, to me, is his hands. Whatever surgery they were able to perform hasn’t corrected the problem. In fact, multiple skin grafts seem to have made those hands even more monstrous—and doubtless left wide scars on hidden parts of his body where the transplant skin had been borrowed. He wears no bandages to hide the damage received in the fire. Scars and red bumps cover his hands and his fingers are fused together.
But he still waves those hands in the air as he talks, as if they aid his expressiveness. He’d offered his right hand when I first stepped into the room, and it would have been impolite for me to refuse.
As we shook, it felt like I gripped a charred steak, crusted over and giving off excessive heat. In the medical portion of his file, a doctor notes Naylor’s complaint that the nerve endings remain raw, and he suffers pain as if his hands are still on fire.
Several psychiatric evaluations interpret these complaints as psychosomatic.
Detective Stephens: Thanks for agreeing to meet with me.
Harrison Naylor: Didn’t realize I had a choice. [Laughs.] Kidding. I wouldn’t turn down any visitor. Every day here’s pretty much the same, so it’s nice to have company.
Stephens: I assume you don’t object that I’m recording this?
Naylor: Fine, yeah. Oh, I catch your inference. I must be comfortable with voice recordings, since I made so many of them myself. Well, I couldn’t very well write or type with [indicates his hands]…with these.
Stephens: You probably expect you’ll get something out of this meeting as well. Answers.
Naylor: I was hoping you might fill in some gaps. That’s what the new guy said, at least.
Stephens: I’ll reveal what I can. But there’s a process we’ll need to fol—
Naylor: Oh, here we go.
Stephens: —need to follow. I will tell you things. I promise. But we have to talk first. I don’t want the details in these folders to influence your initial comments.
Naylor: You’ve got my initial comments. Hours’ and hours’ worth. I’ve waited so long, and they tell me nothing here. Nothing. It’s all word games and activity time, meals and pills and lights-out on schedule.
Stephens: I understand this has been frustrating for you. For me as well.
Naylor: For you. [Takes a long breath, is visibly calmer.] They taught me that here. Counting to ten.
Stephens: Good. I wanted to go through the different theories, if that’s all right.
Naylor: Sure.
Stephens: Okay. Um. First, I guess, the theory that you did it yourself.
Naylor: Did what? I’m not trying to be cute here. I’ve had no confirmation of the events I described on those recordings. As if they never really happened, and hell, I’d probably like to believe that. Find a way to convince me. I won’t resist.
Stephens: The fire, of course. You’ve already admitted some role in that. But also the alterations to apartments in buildings five and six, including the basement lounge. The decorations. The elaborate stagings. The bodies.
Naylor [an inappropriate relief, as if a weight has been lifted off his shoulders]: They never said. A fire, yeah, they couldn’t hide that the fire happened. That my wife and kids are gone. But they never confirmed the other stuff.
Stephens [relenting]: I can confirm that now.
Naylor: The man on the stairs? The pirate girl?
Stephens [opening a folder, sliding photographs across the table]: The concrete construction of the basement helped shield the rest of the building from fire. Smoke damage, mostly.
Naylor [searches through the photos like viewing vacation shots; a kind of distracted excitement]: Here, just like I said. The thing in the birdcage. The sludge in Mrs. Huff’s chair. My upstairs neighbor guy, feet nailed to the floor and pumpkins on his hands.
Stephens: There’s one I haven’t shown you.
Naylor: [pause] The Tammisimo apartment. Those four teenagers. I don’t want to see that one.
Stephens: Stay with me, Naylor. You asked for proof…
Naylor: Careful what you ask for. Right?
Stephens: We were discussing any role you played in these deaths. The fire at the end. You made that happen.
Naylor: I think so. Of everything, that seemed most like a dream. I remember the motion of my hand, grabbing the streamer and guiding it toward a candle. But maybe something coerced me. A voice in my head. They were all there? They all died?
Stephens: The whole community attended the Halloween party. You were the only survivor.
Naylor: And that automatically makes me guilty, I guess.
Stephens: How did you get out?
Naylor: I really don’t know. I woke lying on the ground outside the building. The basement was in flames and the fire trucks began their work. Smoke everywhere, and I felt the heat on my face. On my hands.
Stephens: You mentioned being exhausted. Earlier that day, I mean. Your shoulder muscles ached and your hands were sore like you’d spent the day building things.
Naylor: Shawna’s list. I did some plumbing work. I made a lot of shelves.
Stephens: And possibly some work with saws and knives. Redecorating. Moving equipment around. Tying knots.
Naylor: If I’d killed those people, if I’d made all the changes to their apartments, set the bodies up in that way, then why was each room a surprise when I entered? They shocked me. Horrified me. I’d have to have a split personality for that theory to make sense, and nobody’s ever mentioned that possibility. Nothing like that in my files, is there?
Stephens: No. But you mentioned coercion before. A voice in your head. Some form of possession, maybe?
Naylor: Out of the question. I’d have known.
Stephens: You had access to all the storage rooms. A master key that opened every apartment.
Naylor: Shawna had that, too. Keys can be borrowed. Copied.
Stephens: Okay, then. How do you explain this? So many of the rooms contained references to things only you would know about. In-jokes with your family, like Mr. Stompy or Para-tweet.
Naylor: I’ve wondered about that, too.
Stephens: The ideas and images all came from your mind, to some extent. If you weren’t responsible for the murders, for the changes to each apartment, then it was someone else hoping to cast suspicion your way. Or trying to send you a message. Someone who knew you best. Someone in your family.
Stephens: Which brings us to the second theory: that your wife was responsible.
Naylor: As a parent? We both were.
Stephens: No, I meant that she committed the murders herself.
Naylor: In my darkest moments, I might have believed that. I don’t anymore.
Stephens: And yet, you mentioned how much she changed in those days leading up to Halloween. Setting up surveillance cameras, spying on her own kids. Her attitude toward you was different as well.
Naylor: Any relationship goes through rough patches. She was a good wife, and an even better mother. Really conscientious. Hard worker, too. They loved her at ComQues.
Stephens: Actually, she was fired.
Naylor: That’s not true.
Stephens: October twenty-seventh. Immediate termination, including cutoff of her account access.
Naylor: But I overheard her using the headset, interacting with customers. She’d tell me about some of the calls in the evening, how she solved their network or software problems.
Stephens: I’m afraid that was a show, put on for your benefit.
Naylor: I can’t believe it. She took such pride in her work…
Stephens: Your wife kept a kind of diary on her computer. We’ve been able to recover parts of the encrypted file. Look, uh. Is there any reason she might have been seeing a marriage counselor?
Naylor: What? Of course not. I’ve said we had a rough patch or two, like any couple. We were fine. We were always fine.
Stephens: I’m not exactly sure if she really did see a counselor. It’s just that…
Naylor: Those printouts. Can I read them?
Stephens: I’ll show you excerpts. They’re written to a marriage counselor, presumably at the counselor’s request. We can’t locate the actual therapist, however.
[Stephens passes some pages. Pause while Naylor looks them over.]
Naylor [finished reading]: Look, this doesn’t seem like her at all. Calling those kids “assholes.” Yeah, that’s a word I’d use, but Lynn? Never. And the way she threatens them?
Stephens: It doesn’t fit your image of her.
Naylor: Not her at all. It couldn’t be.
Stephens: Let me tell you why your wife was fired from her job. She used inappropriate language with customers. ComQues records their customer service calls, and they provided some examples.
[Click:]
Lynn Naylor (recording): I’m not going to put up with your shit much longer, understand? I know where you live. I have all the information I need to ruin your life.
[Click:]
Lynn Naylor (recording): Oh, you’re crying like a baby now? You’re one of those assholes who dish it out but can’t take it. Well, fuck you.
[Click:]
Lynn Naylor (recording): To fix this problem, I need your permission to access your computer remotely. Can you click on “Yes” when the dialog window pops up? Great. But, oh, maybe you shouldn’t have done that. I’m opening your image viewer. Here’s a picture of a woman’s throat being slit. It could be your wife. Let me increase the resolution for you. That’s what will happen if you ever talk to me again like you did a few minutes earlier. Don’t dare complain to my supervisor. I’ll know if you do.
Naylor [stunned]: That’s her. That’s really her. She sounds like she’s out of her mind.
Stephens: Your wife had access to your keys. She knew about all the other tenants. From conversations with you, she knew the in-jokes about Mr. Stompy and Joanne Huff and even the Durkinses’ pet bird, and she could have altered each apartment accordingly.
Naylor: So you’re saying it was Lynn. My wife was responsible for all of it.
Stephens: That’s not what I’m saying at all. Your own account provides enough information to make your wife a plausible suspect. In the final gathering, you imply your wife is the hooded figure at the front of the crowd, a leader of some ominous ceremony. The situation with her employer adds further suspicion. That Mrs. Naylor was seeing a marriage therapist, or pretending to—either way—points to some imbalance in the household. All combined to push her over the edge. You’re in the institution, but she was the crazy one.
Naylor: That’s…[pause] I think that’s right.
Stephens: You needed your wife as a plausible suspect. It’s better than believing the alternative.
Better than suspecting your own children.
Naylor: No. Listen, I’ve covered this ground. I’m not afraid to face the possibility. It just never made sense. They’re little kids. Good kids.
Stephens: You taught Mattie about Halloween. About hanging witches, versus burning them. About making your own Halloween displays, like you and your friends did at boarding school, decorating the dormitory despite the headmaster’s wishes. Mattie and Amber grew close. They shared things you’d told them, and they overheard a good bit more. They learned things from…other sources. Let’s consider the hanging man you found in the empty apartment. The private detective. I think he represented a kind of test run. To adopt your metaphor, it was an early attempt at the “first stop” of a haunted-house ride. That’s why it didn’t make sense. The lemon.
Naylor: I know what you’re going to say. Again, they were little kids.
Stephens: The tableau was set to mimic autoerotic asphyxiation. Strangulation during self-pleasure, to heighten sensation. Those who practice it might put a lemon or lime in their mouth, and if they start to pass out, the main danger during this solitary practice, they’ll bite down on the fruit wedge and the bitter taste will jolt them awake. In the bathroom of that empty apartment: A strangled body. A lemon nearby, as if some textbook mentioned it was necessary. But the rest of the scene’s botched, since the man’s trousers are fastened. It’s like whoever put it together knew some of the ingredients but missed the big picture. Too young to understand what the man would actually be doing…
Naylor: Absurd.
Stephens: You just don’t want to believe it. Obviously they put the bird in your oven. Mattie and Amber together, I’m guessing. Your wife was right to punish them equally. But she had another reason. She kept the children home on Halloween day, not—
Naylor: I explained that.
Stephens: —not from her choice, but because the kids had been suspended. In our post-Columbine culture, schools can’t be too careful, even with little kids. Nobody knows where they got it, but Mattie and Amber brought an antique book to school. It described lurid rituals, featured photographs and diagrams of people being tortured or sacrificed. The main argument of the book was that violent deaths brought power—the more imaginative the deaths, the better. And for these to happen on Halloween…
Naylor: Where is this book?
Stephens: I hope it’s been destroyed.
Naylor: All inference. You’ve got no real proof.
Stephens: Mattie’s drawer. The locked drawer you set up for him. In your wife’s diary, she mentions opening it. Being horrified at what she discovered. [Rustling of papers.] We found these drawings.
Naylor [unbelieving]: These are…These are…
Stephens: Blueprints, essentially. The man on the stairs. A bare foot, with an X marked where the nail should go. A partial list of chemicals that may have contributed to the liquefaction of Joanne Huff’s body.
Naylor: These are…in Mattie’s handwriting. His drawings, too, with help from Amber.
And these letters here…
Stephens: Not letters. They match the symbols painted over the Tammisimo’s wallpaper.
Naylor: I still can’t…It’s impossible.
Stephens: It makes sense now, doesn’t it? Despite your protests and excuses?
Naylor: No.
Stephens: The different apartments, your kids’ fingerprints were all over them. And the way the knots were tied, as if by smaller hands. The knife cuts slanted at an upward angle, indicating someone standing low to the ground.
Naylor: I refuse to—
Stephens: Before the basement fire, two small robed figures stood at the front of the room, on either side of your wife. When they turned around…I know what you saw.
Naylor: You couldn’t.
Stephens: Yes, I can. I’ve seen them, too.
—end of recording—
I turn off the recorder myself. I see how agitated Naylor was getting and I’m afraid of what might happen next.
He surprises me.
This man I’d come to know so well through studying his case, listening to his voice over and over, his confidence and cleverness and self-deception. So much bluster and personality, striving for an ironic detachment even at the edge of the most horrific discoveries.
Now, his eyes well up with tears.
“Mattie? Amber? You saw them?”
I nod in the affirmative. “Last Halloween.”
“Oh.” The catch in Naylor’s voice really gets to me. It reminds me how much I love my own children. “They’re alive.”
“I’m afraid not.”
Then I explain what happened in my own gated community last year. Out of concern for our children’s safety, we’d also decided to curtail holiday celebrations. No exchanges of candy, no door-to-door trick-or-treating. We all agreed.
After dark, our doorbell rang.
I answered it. Two children stood on our front porch. They wore black robes, hoods pulled over their heads.
I began to explain the rules to them, when my wife came up behind me. “Oh, what’s the harm,” she said. She’d bought several bags of “fun-size” candy before the community’s collective decision to cancel Halloween. She pulled open a sealed bag, then dropped small boxes of Runts and Bottle Caps into each of their plastic pumpkins. “Let’s see your masks,” she said.
The children pulled back their hoods.
The Halloween Children.
That night, so many of my neighbors died in their houses in ways too elaborate and horrible to explain. Yet a few families, like my own, were spared. I assume because we’d been the only ones to give them candy.
“I know what you saw,” I tell Naylor. “Their masks. So realistic, like children with adult faces. Your own faces. Harris and Lynn Naylor.”
I will never forgot how sinister they looked on our porch, at the threshold of our home. Adult expressions staring up from smaller robed figures, the angle wrong as if they stood in a deep pit, as if part of their bodies fell through the earth into a darker realm.
If Naylor revealed this detail to his therapists, they might have told him it was a displacement, a projection. He saw his own face on Mattie, Lynn’s face on Amber, and that “dream image” represented how parents often feel responsible for their children’s actions. You shape your children’s view of the world, and you see yourself in them. In what they do.
You’re all guilty. You’re all the Halloween Children.
What created them? The tension in the home, the corrupting ideas that swarmed thick in the air, horrors disguised as entertainment. Distrust, competition, favoritism. Surveillance that expects to uncover the most vile behavior. Combine that with an ancient holiday, a strange isolated community, whatever ghosts and demons—literal or otherwise—linger in various rooms.
I don’t tell him all these theories. I have a more important question.
“Assuming it is your children,” I say, “do you know how we might stop them from coming back again next Halloween?”
He considers my question, his mind seeming to drift back over everything he described in his narrative, revising each section in light of what I’ve explained. He’s calm now. He has accepted the truth.
His voice drops into that whisper now, the one he’d use on the tapes when his hand reached into uneasy darkness.
“You know how I treated my family,” he says. “The favoritism I had for Mattie, which I couldn’t help…but maybe I could have hidden it better. You probably know about my past, too, what I did to my parents before I left home, and why I was sent away to a special school. I remember it as an accident, and the police records support my version.” He’s actively crying as he continues. “Maybe if the bad stuff can just stay buried. If we could manage not to bring it forward, not to pass it along to our kids like poison, and they pass it to their kids, and on and on.”
I’m genuinely moved. My own eyes well with tears, and I cross to his side of the table. Strange as he is, crazy as he is, I like this man.
“Maybe if we could just love our children,” he said. “Love them.”
I’m crying now, too. He stands and I give him a reassuring hug.
I feel a strange rub along my neck, the drag of a warm wet rag over my throat and a scratch like dry husks.
His scabbed-over hands, attempting to strangle me.
They have no grip, but he pushes them against my windpipe. I can feel several scabs pop and a warm thick liquid runs over my neck and down my collar.
I shove him away, scramble backward, and push the red emergency button on the wall. Harris Naylor begins to laugh.
“The Halloween Children,” he says, and there’s fear in his voice, and a parent’s admiration, too.
He continues to laugh as the attendants rush into the room to subdue him.