A tentacled monster the size of an RV writhed toward a voluptuous bathing-suited girl cowering on a beach towel, its beak-like mouth clicking, all displayed in glorious black and white on the number-three screen of Main Street’s The Grand Illusion Cinemas, soon to host a performance by The Chalk Outlines.
DeShaun and Stuart took turns dipping into a massive bucket of popcorn, their eyes glued to the screen.
DeShaun spotted something in the row ahead of them, several seats over. With a sly grin, he nudged Stuart and pointed at a young couple making out.
DeShaun and Stuart shared a look that was at once disgusted, curious, confounded, and mischievous.
Stuart held up a piece of popcorn and squinted to aim, setting up his shot like a free throw.
The popcorn arced and landed amid the young couple’s faces.
The girl pulled away with confusion.
The boy turned toward Stuart and Deshaun and found them focused on the screen, their faces as stony as those of royal palace guards.
From behind, a hand clapped onto DeShaun’s shoulder. “I didn’t do it!” DeShaun shouted.
He stopped on seeing it was just the usher, an older boy from their school named Shuley. “Jeez, pop a Ritalin already,” said Shuley. “I just came to tell Stuart his mom called.”
“Huh?”
“She said you gotta come home right away. One o’ your school chums had some kinda accident or something.”
* * * *
Standing outside the emergency room, Dennis smoked the one cigarette he allowed himself every few weeks, doubting he would finish it, even before Pedro emerged through the automatic double doors. “Damn it! Come on, brother!” rebuked the bass player. “Those damn things are as good as bullets!”
Pedro snatched the cig from Dennis’s mouth, dropped it, and crushed it with his black boot.
Dennis knocked another from the pack and lit it. “What’s the scoop?”
Pedro grimaced. “Stumpy’s gonna pull through. They’re even saying they can reattach. I’m the same blood type so I ponied up a pint.”
“Swell. Now he’s part meathead Mexican. How’s the other kid?”
“Doc’s clueless. ’Cept he’s showing the same signs as a coupla other patients from earlier today, just like your neighbor.”
“Weird.” Dennis blew a plume and squinted at the sky. “Hudson’s doing the Kojak bit.”
“What’d you find out about Stuart?” Pedro asked.
“Ma said he was on his way home from the movies.”
The doors whirred again, and it was Jill. She walked past a couple of townie squares sitting on a bench. They gawped at her strange beauty with no degree of subtlety.
“Please say you’ve got good news!” Pedro demanded.
“They’re flooring it right after their gig. Should have all the gear here in a coupla hours.”
“Phew! That’s goodbye to one headache.”
“Yeah, but we can also say goodbye to getting any shut-eye tonight,” lamented Pedro.
A battered station wagon arrived, easing to a stop at the curb beside them. Kerwin emerged from the backseat, where a massive red Chow dog sat wagging its tail and panting. “What’s new, kiddies?”
“Oh, swell!” Pedro gushed. “Our hero has arrived! I can feel complete now!”
“Ha-ha.” Kerwin waved away his ride. “You’re a paragon of subtle irony, Petey.” He drew a lint roller from his interior pocket, ripped away the top layer, and rubbed the dog hair from his suit. “So all is copacetic, right? I called the sheriff, probably saved the kid’s life?”
“Yeah, you’re a regular Clark Kent,” Jill said with a smirk.
“If I was, I’d spin Earth backward and save all our gear,” Kerwin quipped.
“And the kids too. Right?” Pedro said.
“Oh, yeah! Goes without saying!” Kerwin said.
“Jill got the instruments covered,” Dennis said. “Got stuff coming from her cousin.”
Kerwin’s big grin appeared. “Bombastic! So I don’t have to cancel the record company suit!”
“You cancel the suit, I cancel your face,” Pedro answered.
“All right, no need to be so violent all the time. You kids need anything? Den, you sure this, maybe, wouldn’t be a good time for an exception to the rule?”
Dennis dead-eyed Kerwin. “What are you asking, Kerwin?”
“I mean, just this once. A little”—Kerwin made a drinking motion—“glug-glug, you know?”
Jill grabbed Kerwin’s lapel and raised her fingernails to his face. “You asking for a quick and painful body mod?”
“Easy.” Dennis pulled her away from him. “Everybody’s under a lot of pressure. I got an errand so let’s just take a powder and meet up in a coupla hours to set up, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. That’s a good idea,” Kerwin agreed. “Sheesh. My poor suit has had it today.”
Jill and Pedro gave him the evil eyes as they walked away.
Kerwin, fuming to himself, continued to brush at his coat lapels. “Just wait’ll I bleed you freaks dry,” he mumbled.
* * * *
Out in the house a door creaked, stirring Candace from a dense, dreamless sleep.
The candles had burned out, leaving her in darkness save for a sliver of space between the bedroom door and frame.
She rubbed her eyes, blinked away sleep, and focused on the bedroom door. It seemed to twist. Then she remembered the things that writhed to sinister life when she was walking home. Logic told her they must have been part of a dream. Fear told her it was far worse than that.
From out in the house came sounds of movement. A light clicked on, brightening the sliver and throwing a dim luminescence across the bedroom’s angles.
Candace looked over at the chair beside the bed, where she last saw her father sitting.
In the jagged spill of light, she saw not the beatific smiling figure from earlier but a bloodstained corpse with a stapled-on neon-paper smile.
Candace convulsed, as if she’d just touched a naked wire.
Aloysius’s eyelids snapped open—but there were no eyes behind, only twin glowing crayon smiles, smaller versions of Everett’s artwork.
She felt her stomach churn. Then she heard Everett’s distinctive snicker out in the kitchen. Heart hammering, she turned to get down from the bed. Her gaze fell upon Mamalee.
She was crucified onto the wall behind the bed, two sheets hung behind her to form wings, a halo of orange construction paper nailed into her skull. Mamalee was no longer the ethereal angel who had welcomed her before but a cruel mockery.
Mamalee’s mouth creaked open, ejecting a swarm of huge flies, their machine-like buzzing surely loud enough to draw Everett.
Candace felt tears streaming down her face. She covered her mouth and blasted a muted scream into her palm.
Footsteps in the hall—Everett was coming.
She skulked to the closet, slipping on a piece of debris from the ruined ceiling before ducking inside and easing the door shut, leaving a tiny crack.
Everett entered the room, dragging his bulging pillowcase of tricks, treats, and terrors. He placed a new candle in the little votive and lit it, but only after wasting five matches.
The quivering glow made the corpses ghastlier.
Everett smiled up at his mother and waved, then at his father, before taking a Halloween book from his pillowcase and going to sit on Aloysius’s lap. “So happy,” he whispered.
One of the flies from within Mamalee flitted through the cracked closet door. Candace saw that it had a tiny version of Everett’s face, smiling with the incomprehending dementia.
The real Everett held the book up to Aloysius’s unseeing eyes, then put it in his stiff hands. Everett sat still for a while, as if he could hear his father reading.
Candace kept her hand pressed to her mouth, breathing only in short shudders as she tried to shake away the distortions, the undulating shadows, the Everett-fly that could not, must not ever be real.
She grasped that she had been drugged, that these visions and inconceivable beings were illusion. Yet the insistence of these phantasms was stronger than her will, draining her of vitality and courage.
Everett stood from his father’s lap, stretched his arms, and put the book back in his treat bag. He stood on the bed and hugged his mother’s waist before reaching up to caress her cheek. He took bloody jewelry from his pockets, a necklace, which he clasped around her neck, and a too-small ring, which he shoved onto the first knuckle of her outstretched left hand.
The flies buzzed around his head, but he didn’t seem to notice.
Everett took the earring from his ear and skewered it through Mamalee’s earlobe.
He examined Mamalee’s stomach, then put his ear against the dead woman’s belly, listening. “Canniss?”
He drew a carpet cutter from his back pocket and ripped into Mamalee’s stomach, reaching in, probing the dead woman’s guts. Flies descended to cover the viscera, and Candace strained every muscle in her body to keep from vomiting. The little Everett-fly lapped up these sweet tears, easily evading Candace’s efforts to swat him.
“Hell…” Everett stuttered. “O? Can-niss?”
He shoved his face into Mamalee’s stomach, his voice muffled when he called out, “Can-niss?”
Candace swooned and slumped to her side on the closet floor, just in time to miss seeing Everett hop off the bed and go to his treat bag to take out one of Helga’s arms.