Hallowed (4 page)

Very little conversation took place on the way to Eerie’s.  After perusing my classic rock CD collection and finding it severely lacking, Claudia cranked up the hard rock station out of Austin, playing groups with names like “Ludicrous Confusion” and “Toxic Dogs”-- the ones that were more concerned with the volume of the distortion than with lyrics.  It was clear she didn’t want to make small talk.

When we got there, she leapt from the car like a kid at the gates of an amusement park and disappeared inside.  I didn’t see her again for another fifteen minutes.  In that time, I made my way methodically up one side of the first aisle, turned and went down the opposite side of the same aisle.  After I was sure I didn’t miss anything, I started on the second aisle.  Such is my way.  Not only do I have to look over the whole store item by item, but I have to do it completely before I even start selecting my purchases.  I’d brought a notebook along just to make sure I wouldn’t forget anything, making a note of the price in the margin when I found a close match.

The items get pricier as you get deeper into the store.  The first aisle was mostly the cheap stuff, mostly because it was the closest to the door and most at risk of being shoplifted.  Make-up kits.  Individual pieces of costumes.  Hats and stockings and wigs.  There was a complete aisle dedicated to plastic hand-held accessories: swords, axes, maces, spiky balls on chains, broomsticks, scepters, plastic crucifixes.  The bulk of the warehouse is made up of costumes.  Kids costumes. Adult costumes.  Funny costumes. Scary costumes. Sexy costumes.

The latex masks were behind a manned counter along the rear wall of the store.  The yard decorations including the smoke machines (which I spent a little time comparing) and the plastic cauldrons were toward the left hand wall.  The coffins and the electronic gizmos that creaked and screamed and leapt out at you were down the right hand wall.  These have riveted me since childhood.  I found it physiologically impossible to pass a label marked “press me” without following the instruction.  I was such a sucker for a welcoming red button that they could’ve put one on the far side of a guillotine and I would have reached through the frame just to press the damn thing.

But the things that have always fascinated me the most are the dioramas with the moving parts.  The little miniature towns with ghosts hovering over graveyards and witches riding brooms over haunted castles.  The little lights going off and on behind windows.  The cheesy sound effects.

Oddly enough, this was where I found Claudia.

She had that glassy-eyed intensity that I suppose I must have, like she was trying to solve some sort of mystery the scene had posed.

She straightened visibly when I sidled up beside her and that brief evidence of a childlike sparkle in her eye disappeared.  Her eyes seized on my notebook.

“What’s that?”

“My shopping list.”

She grabbed it out of my hand and glanced through it.

“You have got to be kidding me?  You drew a blueprint of your house and yard?  And I have the reputation of being the weird one.  Life has a certain irony.”

She started away with my notebook in her hand.

I raced after and snagged it back.

“What are you planning to do with all of this?”

“Decorating for Mom’s Halloween party.  She has one for all the neighborhood kids every year.”

“When you say ‘kids,’ do you mean those young enough to get nightmares from the Disney version of ‘Legend of Sleepy Hallow’?”

“Kids. Yeah.  Little kids.  It’s a tradition with her.  She always thought that there weren’t enough kid-friendly activities for them to do, so ...”

Claudia grabbed an unattended basket that was sitting at the end of an aisle.  “And this is what you do every year?”

“Well, yeah, since I can’t trick or treat anymore, I’ve poured my energies into scaring the crap out of the newbies.  It’s how I give back.”

Claudia shook her head and rolled her eyes.

“I’m going to a séance.”

“Yeah right!  Your mother would never let you…”

Claudia swung around and nearly collided with me.  “She doesn’t
know
, so the story is I’m going to be with you and your family at this thing.”

“Hey, it’s your funeral, but if she calls over there, don’t think I’m going to lie for you or anything.”  I scoffed and started past her down the next aisle.  “I’m going to be at the party witnessing the fruits of my labor.”

“What a way to spend Halloween!” she replied, running with the basket and hopping up on the bottom rail and sailing past me.  “Fine, but what are you doing after this blowout party?”

I reached out and jerked the basket to a stop, before it hit a couple of ten year olds dashing around the corner.  “Scaring the daylights out the kids who show up at the door,” I told her proudly.  “Though, I haven’t figured out if I’m going to reprise my vampire from last year or go with zombie makeup.”

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”  When I didn’t answer, she just shook her head at me and started up the next aisle.  “Okay, I’m not promising you anything, but maybe I can talk the others into letting you come to the séance.  That way it wouldn’t be total bullshit when I tell her that I’m with you.”

I looked up at her to gauge her sincerity.  “Back it up.  What makes you think I’d go along with this?”

Claudia leveled her dark eyes at me.  I felt a momentary weakness that I’d never felt before.

“You don’t seem totally hopeless, Paul.  I figure you could hang with me and my friends.”

“What friends?”

“Friends.”  She started away again.

I pushed the basket after her.  “From Dallas?”

“Of course.  Where else would I find cool people?  The village of Haven?”  She gave an ironic laugh of dismissal.  She stopped at the smoke machine display and chose the one I’d already decided to get.  “This one has a timer
and
a remote.”  She set it in the basket and snagged the list from me again.  “What else you got here?”

I moved on, pushing the basket in front of me and wondered if I was going to cave in or stand my ground.  I was curious, I had to admit.  A séance. What went on at those things?

Claudia followed behind, making little mewing sounds when she approved of something on the list and blowing raspberries when she didn’t.

“Okay Okay.  Give it back now.”

“You’re going to need my help if you want to save this from becoming completely lame.”

“What are you talking about? My vision is perfect.  I’ve had years of experience.”

“See, this is your problem.  You’ve got this thing too fixed in your mind.  Anybody who’s been over on previous years will know where to expect the scares.  Just like a bad horror movie that telegraphs exactly where the cat will jump out.”

She was starting to make sense.

“First of all, I don’t see anything for the entryway.  You’ve got to punch up the entryway because it’s the first thing they’ll see when they enter.  It sets the whole tone of the evening.”

“I figured the porch and the yard…”

“The porch and the yard should be the appetizer.  Something to whet their appetites.  The main course will be the living room.  You guys have that amazing chandelier that we could play with and tons of electrical outlets.”  It was the first time I recognized excitement on her face.  For a moment, she looked nothing like the girl I saw writing elegies in the stadium bleachers a week ago.  She looked like an excited teenage girl.  I felt that peculiar weakness in the pit of my stomach again and chalked it up to hunger pangs.

“This might turn out to be fun after all,” she said, punching me on the arm.  “Let’s go shopping.”

When we left the store, we were two hundred and sixteen dollars lighter.  Mom had contributed one hundred.  I added another.  Claudia was good enough to fork over the change.

On the way home, we didn’t need the radio.  Our plans for Halloween were all we could talk about.  The way Claudia was tossing around ideas, I had little doubt that she had thought about this before.

“I’ve always wanted to open up a private Spook House maze,” I confessed enthusiastically.

“It’s called a Haunt,” she corrected.  “If I ever designed one, mine wouldn’t be the ridiculous one-size fits all maze, where lines of people are packed into narrow hallways like cattle into a chute. Those things never scared me beyond the age of five because I could always tell behind which corner the idiot in the costume would be hiding.”

I had to agree there. “Yeah, those things never work.”

“Not the way they have them set up.  If you want a maze to work, you have to think outside the box.  You have to make it interactive.”

“It’s been done, y’know.”

She gave me a look consisting of one part interested, one part leery.  “What? Don’t tell me you know someone who’s done it?”

“Not personally, but I heard about this millionaire guy in Austin, who throws this big private party every other Halloween at his mansion,” I told her.  “It’s all interactive, y’know, like Dungeons and Dragons.  Only thing is, you can’t buy your way in.  You have to be invited.  Some people wait in line for weeks just to get a chance.”

Her eyes went out of focus, and she stared out into space.  Oddly enough, she started humming some familiar tune in the back of her throat.

“Yeah, getting an invite is like finding the golden ticket in a Wonka bar,” I murmured, scrutinizing her carefully.

She picked up the string of the previous conversation, completely ignoring my question, “But for a Haunt like that to work, there has to be the threat that you could be hurt.  Everybody knows that in those typical Haunts those idiots with the costumes aren’t allowed to touch the customers.”

“Yeah, but now you’re edging out into actual reality.  If you can be hurt, then it’s no longer a game.  It’s life.”

“Bingo.”

“That’s harebrained.  Do you have any idea what insurance for a type of operation like that would cost, if you could find anyone at all to back it, that is?”

“But see, you’re missing the point.  Nothing would actually happen, but they have to
believe
that it might.  Just like that old B-movie ‘the Shocker.’  The producers wired some of the theater seats up to a small electric current…”

“No way!”

“…Then started the rumor that there was a creature loose in the audience.  Can you imagine the buzz a movie like that would generate nowadays?”

“Hell, the lawyers wouldn’t let a producer get away with that now.”

Claudia sat in silent contemplation for a few moments before asking, “Who is this millionaire guy?”

“Oh, Folliott?  He’s the guy who designed that video game Oberon.  Not even thirty yet, he’s like one of richest people in Texas, and he’s not even in the oil business.”

“And he still does this every other Halloween?”

“No, he stopped it about ten years ago,” I said with melancholy in my voice.

Claudia sat humming again as she stared out the window. I started to ask what it was but decided to let it go.  A few days later it occurred to me that I’d heard it on one of Dad’s classic rock stations.

It was a song called “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

When we got home, it was all I could do to keep Claudia from cracking open the boxes and start setting everything up that very evening.  I convinced her that it would be more prudent to start next Saturday, so we could have the whole day.  To my surprise, she suggested that we get together to discuss the plans on Friday night.  When I explained that I was playing varsity games with the band every Friday night, she threw up her hands.  “You over-achievers really piss me off,” she exclaimed.  We agreed on Thursday night, since I wasn’t scheduled to work at the grocery that week.

Mom invited Claudia to stay for dinner and let drop that she was preparing lasagna on Saturday, which happened to be Claudia’s favorite.

The atmosphere during the meal was peculiar.  I didn’t care for the way Mom was assessing me and Claudia, almost as if she were trying to catch us at something.  Dad, on the other hand, seemed his same indifferent self.

Mid-way through dinner, Claudia turned to Dad and bluntly stated: “I heard you got shot.”  Most people might have beat around the bush a little first, but not her.  “Are you okay?”

“I got grazed s’all.  I was lucky.”

“So how come you’re retired? I mean you’re not really over the hill yet.”

“Truth is, I retired because the Sheriff’s Department felt I was unfit to return to duty.”

From her expression, I could tell she suddenly realized she’d touched on a sensitive subject.  “Well, that’s silly.  Why would they think that?”

The silence grew longer and longer until I thought Dad had just ignored her question.  Finally it was Mom who answered. “The department wouldn’t release him to go back to work.  So they gave him an early retirement and full disability.”

I caught Claudia’s attention and gave a short shake of my head.  Ignoring me, she continued to eat in silence.  A few moments later, she asked, “So, do you miss it?  The station stuff?”

“Not really.  Twenty-nine days out of the month it was sheer boredom.  It was the one day when you’ve got to bring calm from chaos that they pay you for.”  Dad sighed and slid his cornbread through a puddle of gravy.  “Maybe it’s different in the big city, but y’know, I wouldn’t have traded my job here for a more interesting one in Austin or Dallas for any amount of money.”

“You knew my father, right?” Claudia asked.

The temperature at the table dropped a few degrees.

“Me and your mother went to a different school than your father and Jack,” Mom said to Claudia, glancing furtively over at my father.

Claudia turned her attention to Dad.  She waited a few moments for elaboration and when her patience wasn’t rewarded, she asked, “So if you went to the same school, you must have known him?”

A curious expression passed across my father’s face.

“He graduated the year before me,” he answered.  “We didn’t really travel in the same circles, hon.”

I could hear the grandfather clock marking off time in the living room.

“I should probably get going.  It’s getting late.”

She stood and I rose with her.

“I’ll take you back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.  I live the next block over.  If you keep this up, somebody’ll think we’re friends or something.”

I dropped back into my seat.  “Good point.  Seeya.”

She thumped my ear on the way past.  “Later.”

Claudia went around and gave Mom and Dad both hugs.  The moment she left the room Mom snapped, “Paul Andrew, you’re not really going to just let her walk home by herself, are you?”

“Mom, Haven is the single dullest place in the entire state of Texas. I think she’ll be okay.”

My Dad looked on the verge of making a comment when a look passed between my parents and not another word was spoken on the subject.

Less than a week later, when they’d found the first body in the town of Abner—a mere stone’s throw away from us—I would recall this conversation and reflect on how truly naive I had been.