Halloween Hangover

Flash Fiction # 3

John Carpenter’s Halloween

Critter walked quickly through the alley, kicking aside gravel, dried dog turds and beer cans, black hood pulled over his ears, Frankenstein mask shielding his face. The wind sent crumpled Halloween candy wrappers and dead leaves scuttling across the pavement, coming to rest in dirty puddles and against wire fences. 5:04. Night coming soon. He hurried down the block, past silent houses, caved in pumpkins on the front steps, rotted flesh spilling out. From somewhere he smelled woodsmoke. A sign of life. It was bizarrely comforting. Then he thought about Kailee again, and a hole opened itself in his stomach, expanding past the limits of his body, until howling darkness filled the air from mud to dirty wool sky.

I remember living underwater.

Five weeks she’d been gone. Critter weaved across the gas station parking lot and through the fallow field. In a few minutes he’d be home. His feet crackled through dried grass and leaves, broken wheat. Dark smeared itself across the sky. Truth was, he’d never even seen the ocean.

I was never cold. Nothing hurt. We slept tangled in the sea forest. When the fish were gone, we slept for years, entwined together. Years of beautiful dreams.

Critter shivered. Just a week ago it was in the 70s, but now winter nipped at his ankles. The wind shivered the leaves and wheat and grass. Rustling. Hissing. The whole field was alive.

In my dreams now I’m back there, in the forest. Sunlight shining through curtains of green, through the translucent bodies of tiny fish. I’m never alone. The others are with me always.

I’m never alone.

Kailee had been reincarnated into a human body by mistake. In the back of her closet were several jars of sand from a beach in the Caribbean she’d traveled to as a kid. She snuck the sand back in her shoes and pockets, in the bottom of her backpack. I knew that was the water I once lived in, because I could hear the others whispering to me beneath the waves…

Critter gasped as a black shape scampered over his foot. Just a leaf. Just a leaf. He picked up the pace, headed toward the lights of the strip mall at the edge of his neighborhood. This evening he wouldn’t cut through the copse of trees; it wasn’t worth saving five minutes when the dark was falling so fast.

When Critter and Kailee had been together for six months, she took one of the jars of sand from her closet and poured just a bit through her fingers, onto the floor, then used her hands to mix it with a cup of salt. She knew by instinct what to do; she was touched by another world. Her candle lit, a blue so dark it was nearly black, like the midnight zone. She showed Critter which shapes to form from the salt. Which shapes to make with your mouth. Not words, not exactly. The rituals required you to be gentle with your hands, with your breath. And he was, but not as gentle as her.

The way she stroked his face, when he took off the mask for the first time, like it was a miracle. Like he wasn’t a freak. He was special.

Critter scoffed at himself. Special? Goddamn. He sighed. Nobody was fucking special. Except maybe her.

She’d been the only spot of color in his grey life, and now she was gone.

The parking lot of the strip was full of cars but nobody was outside, only the leaves skittering across the parking lot. He leaned against the brick wall of the laundromat to catch his breath. Sweat trickled down his back. His backpack seemed to weigh more than it had at school. Inside the laundromat, clothes swirled in the giant washer, fluorescent lights blinked, but he didn’t see a single person.

He jogged past the bail bondsman and the closed discount store, attracted to the human roar of The Jib, an always rowdy dive bar. In front of the door cobwebs still dangled, studded with disembodied plastic hands that clacked against each other. A yellow x marred the grey glass- caution tape. A skeleton pirate tipped his captain’s hat to Critter.

Critter had always loved Halloween; it was the one night of the year he didn’t feel like a freak. This year he’d worn a skeleton body suit, even though his mother said it clashed with the mask. His little brothers, 8 and 5, helped him make the intestines with paper towel rolls, tape and red paint. Then he’d taken Ross and Rad out trick or treating, and the neighbors who didn’t know who he was all smiled at him. For the first and only moment since Kailee’s death, he felt okay. For a moment. Once he was back in the safety of his own room, he’d poured a ring of salt and sand (after she died, he snuck into her house while her family was away and stole the jars from the back of her closet) on the wooden floor, sat down cross-legged in the center, and lit a candle. He threw a lock of Kailee’s neon blue hair into the flame, wept as the smell of burning hair filled the room. Then his mom started banging on the door, what on earth is that smell and he got flustered and probably the shapes he conjured weren’t exactly right.

But Halloween was over. Now that it was a week into November the sidelong glances had started again. His parents stopped bothering him after his therapist told them that the mask was a coping mechanism, a sort of armor that allowed him to function in a world he found excruciatingly painful. They weren’t bad people, his parents. Mostly, they gave him his space. Mostly, that was what he wanted.

Critter stood in the doorway, breathing hard, watching the shadows moving behind the glass.

Critter hated that he’d never really believed Kailee, not entirely. Yes, he truly loved her, loved the smell of her hair, smoke and cake, loved her skinny body- she was always cold, cosseted in many layers of black even in the summer. Undressing her took forever, all the skins to shed. He wanted to live inside her head, inside her dreams.

But no, he’d never really believed that she was a mermaid.

Wracked with sudden sobs, Critter left the Jib doorway, hustled by another closed discount store.

Three blocks to his house.

Before Kailee died, they’d made plans to go to California, where he would see the ocean for the first time.

Critter cut through a construction zone, darted past piles of pipe and lumber. He pictured child Kailee swimming in the sea, flying back across the ocean with her shoes full of sand.

She’d been the only spot of color in his grey life, and now she was gone.

A clatter right behind him. Critter whirled around; nails rolled across the dry grass. The wind must have knocked something over.

One block.

The streetlights glowed here. Halloween lights, purple and orange, blinking. Soft lights from inside his neighbor’s houses. He wanted to run, but forced himself not to.

A squelching noise on the sidewalk. The fish he hooked with his father in the ponds of his youth, hitting the bottom of the boat. The labored breathing of a body unused to air.

Critter turned, but there was nothing, nothing that he could see through the tears. He tapped the flashlight on his phone, arced the beam across his path. Nothing moved. Faint noises from someone’s television. That must have been what he heard. Jumping at shadows like a baby.

He’d hated hooking the worms, cried doing it enough times that his father, rather than telling him to man up as he sometimes did, or getting lures to use, had merely stopped inviting him and went fishing with his work buddies or Critter’s brothers now instead.

His parents weren’t bad people.

Critter was in front of his house now. Nobody was home, parents at work, brothers at soccer practice, but the porchlight was on. The house would smell like coffee and casserole.

Baby…..

His skin goosepimpled. It was and wasn’t her voice at the same time. Slowly, slowly, he looked in the direction of the sound.

A dark shape, close to the ground. Then she wriggled into the pool of light from the streetlamp.

No.

Her skin was deathly pale, even more than it had been in life. Eyes huge, blind white, full of neither hate or hunger, but a mindless burning. The bones of her face lengthened, to make room for long serrated teeth.

No.

Her body was pale and wrinkled, desiccated. Like the prune fingers you got staying in the bath too long. And her hands….shrunk to nubs on shortened arms. Mid-transformation.

As she dragged herself slowly forward on those terrible baby arms, Critter began to hyperventilate. Vomit rose in his throat. The bottom of her was the worst of all. A tail of sorts, but it looked as if her legs had been cut off above the knee and fused together. The proportions all wrong. Covered with some sort of glowing, translucent flesh. Shadows writhing inside her.

Then he was running up the stairs, struggling the key from his pocket into the lock.

Behind the door, Critter shook. He fell to his knees.

Swear you’ll never leave me. Swear you’ll never leave me alone.

Critter slammed his head against the door until blood ran down his face. Red clouded his vision. There were lights on, deep in his house. The familiar outlines of his living room, the stairs, his kitchen. But now it all looked alien to him.

I swear.

Outside, a loud wheezing, slow plop of flesh laboring up the steps one by one…….

Critter stood. Heart pounding with fear and love, he opened the door.

BUY ME A COFFEE!