In the bedroom Mamalee hummed, taking books from shelves and placing them in a box as she had a year ago, and a year before that. The last book was a large family Bible with cracked corners, its pages crumbling at the edges.
Furrowing her brow, she smoothed her hand across its tooled leather face, its gothic gold letters, and opened it, knowing she would find the same pictures tucked between its pages as she had ever since Everett was a baby.
A family portrait against a background of blue sky and clouds, the bright-faced young couple with infant Candace and toddler Everett holding one of his many monster dolls.
Mamalee stared at the image but did not see it, instead reliving the memory of Aloysius sitting at the kitchen table with his eyes closed, trying not to hear the screams of a little boy echoing throughout that long-gone first house, in counterpoint with the booming baritone chants of a man yelling in Latin.
Mamalee slammed the Bible shut and dropped it in the box, as if it burned her hand. After a thought, she took it and tossed it in a trash box.
She heard Aloy come in and putter around in the kitchen. Staring at the big Bible, she wondered if God and Aloy shared her disillusionment, the same sense of failure at having children so inexplicably broken that it rendered their protective love meaningless, reduced their lofty wishes for a beautiful future to mere sketches in the sand at the edge of an ever-erasing ocean. “Aloy? How is Everett?”
Wait…
The sounds were faint, yet somehow chaotic, not like the grim sense of order that characterized Aloy’s comings and goings.
She switched to a higher pitched, more playful tone. “Bravo? What are you doing, bad doggy? Daddy left the door open, didn’t he?”
Mamalee went down the narrow hall, already missing the pictures she had aligned chronologically on the wall a year previous. “Bravo, you sneaky…”
Entering the kitchen, Mamalee felt a sensation like walking into a swarm of hornets.
Though his back was to her, there could be no doubt that the caped, mussy-haired figure standing at the kitchen drawers was Everett.
He turned. She saw that he had stapled one of his masks on again and was collecting sharp things. The points of mismatched steak knives and meat skewers jutted from both ends of his fist.
“Oh, God,” Mamalee cried. “Everett.”
She backed out of the kitchen. “Where is your…”
Seeing blood on his hands, she erupted into tears. “Oh, baby. What did you do?”
“Mama can fly!” rasped Everett, as he took a step toward her.
“No.” She turned to run and heard Everett take off as well, snickering at the new game. Mamalee squealed as she bashed her way past the boxes in her path, bolting for the front door.
As she lunged for the knob, a steak knife twanged into the wood beside it, sending a jolt of immobilizing terror up her spine.
She saw Everett raising another knife and cut to her left, protected by the foyer wall, screaming all the way, not only out of terror but to drown out Everett’s ghastly laughter. Mamalee ducked into her bedroom and squeezed her eyes shut as she slammed and locked the door.
She pressed her back to the door—then stepped away as she imagined a knife piercing it, and her.
The rocking chair had been a gift from Aloysius when Everett was born. She slid it toward the door and jammed its back under the knob.
“Everett!” she cried. “This is wrong! And I want you to know, I’m sorry, baby!”
She watched the doorknob, unnerved by the silence beyond. Then came a soft shuffling—he was walking away to…
The window opposite the bed was open. “Oh!”
She went to the window and tried to close it, sinking her hips, hoping the extra girth she had acquired over the years would be enough to budge it. “Come… on!”
Just the barest movement—but enough to create downward momentum, closing the heavy frame to within less than an inch.
She scanned out the periphery of the window, from one side to the other.Her eyes and ears strained for any warning as she went back to the door.
Then came a muffled thumping. Her senses scrambled to determine its location.
With the realization came despair. “Attic.”
The ceiling exploded downward, raining plaster, insulation, and Everett. Giggling madly, he landed in front of her on his face and hands, like an angel ousted from heaven.
Mamalee screamed, turning to the window she had just struggled to close. The opening was almost too narrow for her fingers to get under, but once she did, the window refused to rise even a centimeter.
She dared a glance at Everett and saw him shaking off the plaster debris. He pushed the pieces of insulation and thin particle board out of the way. “No time for puzzles.” He collected his knives from the floor, muttering, “Pick up sticks!”
Mamalee hammered her palms against the bottom edge of the window, whooping like a lottery winner when it slid up three inches. She pushed and pushed again, until the window shuddered along its rails enough for her to crawl through. Terror and adrenaline drove her shifting and wriggling through—and plunging to the ground outside.
Mamalee struggled to her feet, tears streaming. “Have to stop him…”
She lunged at the window, fingers forming steely claws to match the window’s rigid fit—but this time it slid shut with unexpected ease. She fell face-first, bumping her chin on the frame. Stars whirled in her vision, pain lit up her jaw—then the window shattered behind her. Fingers hooked into her hair, maddened giggles stabbed her ears.
Mamalee cried for help, as she clawed at Everett’s hand. With another burst of reckless strength, she yanked herself away, leaving Everett with a handful of curly blond-gray hair as she fell forward. She stumbled up quickly on arms going numb from exhaustion, and she found herself facing the window.
The black shape of her son burst through it like a giant bat, and he landed on his feet a few feet away. “Evvie can fly too!”
Mamalee screamed as Everett hurled his handful of knives, most of them landing in her chest, neck, and stomach. “Toys can fly,” he noted.
Mamalee fell to her knees, staring with horror at her injuries, then at Everett. “Oh… my sweet little…shnoogens…” She fell to her back.
Everett came and stood over her, wearing a wide grin.
“Oh baby…” she sputtered. “I know. I know it’s not your fault.” She coughed blood.
Everett knelt beside her as he took from his pocket a crumpled construction paper mask, a madly distorted red-cheeked angel, and positioned it on her face.
“Okay, Evvie. That’s fine, that’ll be…”
He smashed the stapler into the mask, affixing it to her forehead. She tried not to cry out too much, not knowing if it would offend or encourage him. “Just please, baby. Not Candace, all right? Not Candace.”
Everett took on an expression of wonder. He patted her stomach. “Cann…niss?”
Mamalee played along. “Oh…oh yes, baby! She’s right there in mommy’s tummy!”
Everett reached into his pocket and withdrew another crumpled mask to show Mamalee: a green, bug-eyed alien, complete with pipe cleaner antennae.
Mamalee maintained a bloody smile as Everett placed the mask over her stomach and stapled it there.
Mamalee kept up the charade. “Yes, good boy! Now Candace has her own Halloween mask!”
Everett, his madness-soaked eyes burning into her, raised a second alien mask, larger than the first. “Canniss.”
Mamalee realized her last-ditch ruse had failed. “No! No, Everett! She had nothing…”
Everett pushed one of the knives into Mamalee, silencing her.
* * * *
McGlazer considered the tiny feeling of paranoia and dread flitting in his brain like a black-light firefly. Walking along Main Street en route to the sheriff’s department, he saw the trees in their waist-high brick planters along the sidewalk dance in an onrushing breeze.
Were there… knives hiding among the leaves, pointing themselves at him?
McGlazer felt his heart pump in his ears and a familiar domineering thirst on his tongue.
He said a prayer and went to the little tree—to confront it?
No knife leaves. Nothing unusual.
The cool wind carried an artificial scent of pumpkin from the café that recalled the eerie blast of cold he had felt in his office just before the frustrating tease of briefly seeing the specter—and the subsequent near-suffocation by sweet.
Wouldn’t that be a joke of a headline? town minister dies in confection-related mishap.
He felt better. Whatever the cause of the brief fugue, it had dissipated. But though the grayish shade in his office and the leaf knives could be dismissed as hallucination, the guided-missile sweetmeat was as real as the gritty sore throat that had him grimacing with each swallow.