All Hallows' Eve (3 page)

She heard Tim's voice through the ear-piece: "Okay, now, arms and legs inside the wagon; we don't want any injuries"—the "okay" being his signal that he had heard her and was on his way; the rest of what he said maybe necessary and maybe not for this particular wagonload of customers, but spoken to disguise his acknowledgment of her message.

Ashley lay down on her bale of hay, positioned beneath the murderer with the upraised knife. The hay smelled good but—packed tight—was hard and prickled like crazy. The front of her peasant dress was saturated with theatrical blood, and the customers would assume she was simply another mannequin in this tableau of death until—just as the wagon passed—she would jump up and fling herself at those riding on the back, screaming madly and making as though to grab them.

She pressed the top button on the remote control that turned off the red setup light, and took off her headset to hide it behind the bale of hay, where the customers wouldn't see it. The attached wire pulled the battery pack out of her pocket before she remembered to remove it, and it clunked to the floor. If she broke yet another one of those things, Nikko would throw a fit. In school he was quiet, never-having-a-contrary-opinion Nikko, and she had been
so
interested in him, even though he was a couple years older. But here he was the "family" part of Cristanis Family Farm, and his father let him run the haunted hayrides pretty much on his own, where he was an ogre—never mind that he didn't wear a costume. Ashley had just turned sixteen, and this was the first year she could work here, along with the seniors and college kids. Nikko may have turned out to be a disappointment, but it would be humiliating to get fired after only one week.

Ashley held the ear-piece up to her ear and could hear the background noise of people squealing on one of the wagons, so she knew it still worked. Those performers who never got close to the customers, like the witches in the grotto, could pull the hair of their wigs over the headset and wear their wires more securely fastened beneath their costumes, but she—and the ghouls who chased the wagon—had to take the headset off at performance time.

As Ashley lay in the dark, she heard a rumble, which she would have assumed was the sound effects from Gina and Jordan doing their magic-cauldron act further up the trail, but it seemed to come from the wrong direction, more from the west, beyond the orchard.

Not thunder,
she hoped. The weather forecast had said there was a possibility of storms, but that wasn't supposed to be till later, after closing. There were few enough days for the haunted hayrides. You couldn't have them in September: That was pushing the season and people weren't interested—or not enough to make it worthwhile being open; and you obviously had to stop after Halloween. It was a shame to lose nights to bad weather.

She had just convinced herself that she had imagined the rumble, when it came again. Closer this time. Definitely thunder. She could hear the tractor, too. She thought they'd come in—the thunder wasn't that close, but then, through the open doors, she saw a flicker of lightning. The lightning was diffuse—high up and far away—but she could hear the tractor swing around, even before she picked up the headset and heard Nikko announcing, "Tractors, return to the loading area. Tractors, back. We've got weather."

Of course, the tractors couldn't be out in the open fields during a thunderstorm where they'd be a sitting target for lightning, but the storm wasn't moving in that fast. Still, Nikko's father was a worrier, and that was one area of the operations Nikko had clear instructions about. Pulling the hay wagons in the cold was okay, even in the rain. But not during a storm.

Ashley heard Kat, in the witches' grotto, ask, "Should we come in?"

"Weather stations," Nikko told them, which meant he was hoping the storm was just skirting the area, so they were supposed to take shelter in the outbuildings but be prepared to start again. Nikko certainly wasn't going to be handing out refunds unless he had to.

Ashley reached for the remote control to get the light on and accidentally pressed the bottom button, the one that controlled both the light and the special effects.

A shuddering moan came from the speaker hidden in the hanged man.

The severed head winked.

The legs of the man tied to the chair jerked while the speaker in his body emitted pathetic sobs, which would eventually subside to whimpers, then a death gurgle—which nine out of ten people on the wagons never heard because
they
were too busy screaming in terror.

Ashley's knife-wielding murderer shouted, "Die, wench, die!" but only once before she cut the power.

This time she pressed the middle button on the remote control. There was only a single hundred-watt bulb for the whole barn, which provided the perfect balance of light and shadow for the show. It was enough to read a book by, at least for a little while, for those who were serious enough about their homework to bring it on the job with them just in case of unusual delays, but that certainly didn't include Ashley. It was enough light to play on a Gameboy, for anyone who had the foresight to bring one. Ashley lay back down on her bale of hay and did a few stomach crunches, but that got old fast, with the tight bodice of her peasant's dress instead of sweats.

There was a flash of lightning, distinct this time, and a roll of thunder only a few seconds later.

Nikko's tinny voice was coming through the ear-piece, and Ashley picked it up from the floor and put it back on. He must have asked if everyone was secure, because people were counting off.

"Ashley, in the barn," she acknowledged when it was her turn. She had hoped one or two of the ghouls—Ramon, if she'd had a choice, or even Karl—would have decided to take shelter in the barn, but they'd gone to the orchard shed, where there was a supply of cocoa, cider, apples, cheese, and doughnut holes. It's hard to compete for a teenage boy's attention when there's food involved.

"Shouldn't be long," Nikko assured them as Ashley, lying on her side, did vertical leg lifts. "Radar shows one area of disturbance just about directly overhead, but the rest is skimming off to the north. Just hang tight." That, despite the fact that the thunder was moving in much closer. Through the open door of the barn, Ashley got periodic glimpses of trees and sky as clear—for fractions of a second—as though it were full day.

"One Mississippi," someone counted off, "two—"

The thunder was no longer rumbling, but cracking.

"Hey, Ramon," she heard Dan ask—Dan, who, because he rode Riley as part of his Headless Horseman routine, got to wait out the storm in the Cristanis Farm's smaller barn, the one by the house—"how many vampires does it take to change a lightbulb?"

Ashley missed the answer due to static, which was probably from dropping her headset and/or the battery pack once too often. She jiggled the wire that connected them, and by then somebody else was off on a different joke—evidence, if she had needed it, that Dan's joke hadn't led to uncontrollable laughter.

"Here comes the rain," Nikko announced, and in another moment it started, as suddenly as someone turning on the shower, sharp and distinct-sounding, like an infinite number of thrown pebbles.

Ashley considered getting up to close the doors, but the rain was beating against the back of the barn, not blowing in.

Lightning flashed.

"One Mis—"

The thunder sounded like a tree breaking in half directly overhead.

"You doing okay, Ashley?" one of the Spagnola sisters asked—she couldn't tell whether it was Hannah or Lily.

"Sure," Ashley said, "nice and dry," thinking,
It couldn't have been one of the guys who asked?

"Of all the places on this farm to be," Hannah or Lily started, but Nikko interrupted, "C'mon, girls."

"Just saying," whoever it was finished.

Ashley knew what that was all about: The sign out front might say
CRISTANIS FAMILY FARM
, but all these years later people still called it "the old Roehmar place." When Nikko's grandfather bought the place, in the seventies, it had sat empty for almost a decade because of the notoriety of what had happened there. He had the original house torn down—the house under whose floorboards the bodies of a half dozen boys and young men had been found. The bodies had been discovered when Morgan Roehmar, the original owner, had a lover's spat with his live-in woman friend. She told police about the occasional smell, which coincided with the disappearance of the high school cross-country runner in 1968, and the young Latino farmworker, who had supposedly never shown up in 1969.

Two generations of Cristanises lived in the new house, built on the opposite end of the property, and farmed the land. Two generations of Cristanises found it harder and harder to make ends meet.

Nikko's father had resisted the haunted-hayride idea, but the success enjoyed by several of the other farms in the area had persuaded him. He finally agreed, but had two rules:

• Avoid lawsuits.

• Don't cash in on real tragedy.

He forbade anything hinting at Morgan Roehmar and his obsession with good-looking boys, which was why the hayride's one dismembered body was a woman (Anne Boleyn, in case anyone asked), who'd lost her head to an ax, rather than a chain saw. And there definitely was no display suggesting a police shoot-out on a farmhouse's front porch.

Like anybody who'd lived in the area for any time at all didn't automatically connect this farm with murder.

And like the edginess of something-really-bad-happened-here wasn't the real reason Cristanis Farm's haunted hayride did better than any other in the area.

The reason the Spagnola sisters were harassing Ashley was because this barn, built by Nikko's grandfather when he had still had high hopes for the land, was constructed on the one section of the farm that wasn't given over to the new house or its front lawn, or apple orchard, or crop fields—the spot that had been cleared already because that was where the original Roehmar house had stood.

"I'm doing fine," Ashley assured one and all through the headset.

And she was, too.

Until the light went out.

There must have been a lightning strike that hit something important causing all the lights in the area to go out: After one moment of startled silence, Ashley could hear the chatter as everyone connected by the headsets whooped, as though this was just another special effect thought up by Nikko.

Another flash of lightning, and Ashley blinked because of the brightness of the lightning—and in the darkness afterward saw someone framed in the doorway of the barn.

"Ramon?" she called.

No answer.

Could Karl or any of the others be touchy enough to remain silent because she'd guessed wrong?

She reached down to the far side of the hay bale she was lying on and scrabbled for the flashlight the Cristanises provided for walking from one site on the farm to the other. Just as her fingers closed on the flashlight, she felt the tug of the wire that attached the ear-piece to battery pack. And then she didn't feel it and knew that she'd pulled the wire loose, but that was not her immediate concern.

She pressed the flashlight's switch and swung the light toward the doorway.

Where no one was standing.

She could make out the bales of hay, the farm implements since—besides the haunted hayrides—this was a real working barn, the posed dummies, the hanged man spinning slowly in the breeze. But there was no one in the doorway.

As there shouldn't be.

Maybe it was some weird afterimage left by the lightning and induced by the Halloween atmosphere on the farm or by thinking of the guys Morgan Roehmar had murdered. Or she'd seen the hanged man and, trick of the shifting light, he'd seemed farther away, in the doorway.

Or maybe whoever it was had stepped away into the darkness outside.

Still sitting on the bale of hay, Ashley flicked the flashlight so the beam of light hit the battery pack, the wire that should have been stretched out to the earpiece lying limp on the floor.

Aiming the light back at the doorway, she set the flashlight next to her and picked up both pieces of the headset. Glancing up repeatedly to make sure whoever it was—if there
was
a whoever—couldn't sneak up on her, she tried to thread the jagged end of wire back into what she thought was the appropriate hole of the ear-piece, but there wasn't even static.

Okay, so there was no calling for help.

If
help was needed.

Ashley sincerely hoped her paranoia was in overdrive.

Still, it was no good to try to simply
hope
danger away. If someone was lurking out there, ignoring him was not going to make him go away. She picked up the flashlight and moved to the doorway of the barn. The rain was still beating down, giving the air a fresh, clean smell, but making a muddy puddle of the entryway.

No footprints in the mud.

Was the force of the rain enough to wash away footprints in the time—surely no more than thirty seconds—she had delayed, to check the headset?

She shone the flashlight into the darkness outside, but most of the light bounced off the sheets of rain, not making it to the trees several hundred feet away.

A well-timed bolt of lightning lit up the entire area just as a simultaneous crack of thunder jarred her teeth—and there wasn't a trace of anyone.

Of course, whoever it was—again,
if
there'd been a whoever—could have circled around to the back of the barn.

But there wasn't anyone, Ashley told herself. The tractor drivers kept a count of how many people were in each wagon, because Nikko would have frowned on their losing a customer. Who would be wandering around the farm on such a miserable night? The workers had all sought shelter; the customers were presumably accounted for.

Still, she pulled the barn doors shut, which was only a sensible precaution in case the wind shifted, but she was very aware that the latch and padlock were on the outside because there was never any reason to lock yourself into a barn, only to close it up after yourself. On this side there was just a piece of twine fastened to one door, whose loop end slipped over a block of wood nailed into the other door—protection against the wind swinging the doors wide open, but hardly security against someone wanting to get in.