Halloween: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre (2 page)

THIRTEEN

H

Stephen Graham Jones

Here’s how you do it, if you’re brave enough.

First you go down to the Big Chief theater. That’s the old one

behind the pizza place nobody goes to any more, the one my dad

says he used to work at in high school, each of the ovens so deep, like a line of mouths to Hell.

The tops of his forearms have these smooth scars to prove it.

I’ve always wanted to write a word on that burned skin, then wait, see if it’s one of those prayers that make it through, get answered.

But this isn’t about him. This is about the Big Chief.

It’s just got two screens, and they’re right beside each other. If you’re in the first one and there’s a war movie in the second, you can hear the machine guns and dogfights and heroic last words bleeding through. It’s one big room, really, you can tell. They just hung a thick curtain right in the middle so they could show two movies, double

their money.

My dream’s always been for them to roll that curtain up one

night, show us the big picture.

Maybe someday.

It’s been there for forever, the Big Chief. According to Trino’s

uncle, a kid got castrated there about fifteen years ago. In the last stall of the bathroom.

Maybe that’s why this trick works.

[17]

[18] THIRTEEN

See, first you go there, get your ticket, your popcorn, and settle in. It doesn’t matter what row, or which theater, one or two. And if you’re watching a horror movie—it’s supposed to
only
work with horror movies—what you do is, right when it’s most scary, right when whoever’s with you is probably going to make fun of you for closing your eyes, you close your eyes. And hold your breath. And don’t let any sound in, kind of by humming all your thoughts into a dial tone.

And then you count two a hundred and twenty.

Two minutes, yeah.

That’s the real trick.

And if you’re getting scared, if you can feel it starting to work, you can breathe out all at once, even though you could have gone five or ten seconds longer.

It’s safest to do that, really.

Just breathe out, laugh, maybe hunch over into a coughing fit.

Spilling your popcorn’s an especially good tactic, even—who would

do that on
purpose
, right?

And then look back up to the screen through your tears. See that

the movie’s still up there, right where it should be.

Your laugh’ll be kind of forced, but your smile, that’s a hundred

percent true.

That’s where the movies should be, up on the screen.

If you make it to a hundred and twenty, though,
then
open your eyes?

The screen’ll look just exactly the same. And your friends’ll still be sitting there by you, waiting for you tell them what it was like. To see if it worked.

How it works is that, when you’re not looking, or listening, or

breathing—it’s like how you’re supposed to hold your breath when

your parents are driving by the cemetery. If you don’t, then you can accidentally breathe in a ghost.

That’s sort of how it works at the Big Chief.

With you not breathing, playing dead like you are, it makes like

a road, or a door, and the movie seeps in. Way in the background,

like at the edge of town, not everything changing all at once. Nothing that dramatic.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES [19]

But the movie’s there. It’s there because you invited it. Because you left a crack it could come through, because you made a sound like a wish, and the darkness just washed that direction, to cover it up.

Ask Marcus Tider.

If you can talk to the dead, that is.

Marcus moved here last year, but he didn’t come to eighth grade

with us in the fall. If all the girls’ collected hopes and dreams had anything to do with it, though, it would have been one of us in his place. Just so they could have him to take them on dates all through high school. Just so they could pin all their hopes and dreams on him, bat their eyes every time he passed, and then sigh into their lockers.

But Marcus—at his last school, it had been big, like 4A, and

they’d been a rich district, the kind that has a pool. Meaning they had a swim team. And Marcus was too blond and too perfect not to

have been captain.

He could hold his breath forever.

It was only a matter of time before he ended up at the Big Chief.

He wasn’t even scared of the movie, either, said horror was

stupid, all make-believe. We were all there to watch, except for right at the end, when me and James ran out to the parking lot, to see if we could catch the movie starting, off on the horizon. Just see one star dimming out, another winking on.

There was nothing.

Inside—we heard later, had forgot our ticket stubs, couldn’t talk

our way back in—Marcus just opened his eyes, looked around at

everybody waiting for him to say how scary it had been.

He’d just shrugged, looked back up to the movie, and, like he’d

timed it all out, that was when the monster lunged close to the

camera, its tentacles whipping all around.

Everybody but Marcus flinched back into their seats.

City kids always think they know stuff we don’t, all the way out

here. And maybe they do.

But we know some other things.

Two weeks later, we all figured he’d cheated somehow. That he’d

peeked, or sneaked a breath using some swimmer trick. Or that he

hadn’t believed right.

[20] THIRTEEN

The Big Chief doesn’t care if you believe or not, though.

For Valentine’s Day four months later, Marcus threw blood up

into his construction-papered shoe box, already floating with secret admirers.

None of us said anything.

He had a tumor inside him. Mr. Baker explained it in Life

Science right before spring break. He hauled out the movie to show us, finally got the projector going, and when we saw it, that tumor, it was what we were already expecting: a tentacled monster, lashing out for whatever it could grab onto, pulling that bit of meat towards its center. But it could never get enough.

By Memorial Day, he was dead.

We sat in our back yards and ate the hamburgers and hot dogs

our parents had grilled for us, and they didn’t ask us about Marcus.

His parents moved away for July fourth, their rearview sparking

with the fireworks we felt compelled to light.

Their house is still empty.

And now that movie’s over.

This is a double-feature, though.

Marcus was just the example, the test case.

Grace, though.

Everybody loved Grace, me most of al . You know how when you

know you’re going to grow up and marry somebody? That’s who she’d

always been for me, all the way since fourth grade. I would have stepped in front of a truck for her. And I wouldn’t have closed my eyes, either.

We were supposed to have gone to homecoming together, but

I got sick, then ended up locking the door to my room, my Exacto

knife hovering over my stomach, because I’d been too close to the

Big Chief that night Marcus held his breath, I knew. I had a tentacle monster inside me too.

I never cut deeper than a scratch, though.

My parents went on to homecoming without me—it had been

their first date, fifty-thousand years ago—then knocked on my door when they got home, so I could knock back on my wall, and the next morning I was fine. Mom drove me over to Grace’s to give her the

three-streamer corsage I’d been saving for since summer.

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES [21]

“There’ll be bumps in the road,” my mom said, pulling us away

from Grace’s house. “You’ve just got to keep going, right?”

I nodded, hated myself.

To make up for it, two weekends later I saved up enough to take

us both to the movies, and get a medium popcorn.

This was going to be
our
story, I told myself. Not my parents’.

That’s why I’d gotten myself sick. Fifty-thousand years from now,

Grace and me were going to come to the Big Chief, to remember. It

was going to be better than any stupid football game.

Her mom dropped us off, slipped Grace a five for concessions,

then went home to sit at her kitchen table some more. According to Grace, since her dad left five months before, all his money mounded in front of the television like that was going to make up for him being gone, that’s mostly what her mom did: sit there and stare, like she was trying to backtrack to where this part of her life had started.

My parents felt sorry for her, they said, and then would hold each other’s hands, like to show they were different, they were better.

I held the door of the Big Chief open for Grace, already had our

tickets.

It wasn’t a horror movie, either.

After Marcus, none of us went to the horror movies any more,

even though it was almost Halloween and there was always one

playing. We were still watching them after lights out at home, of

course, but on videotapes we’d smuggle from our big brothers’ rooms, handle with extreme caution, like, if we dropped them, if that plastic cracked, the blood was going to come out.

We were still getting our scares, I’m saying.

But, with Grace, it was a love movie, where the girl looks and looks like she’s not going to get the guy, then, surprise again, she does.

I could sit through it. For her.

Maybe it would give her some ideas, even.

The theater was just usual-full for a Friday showing. Maybe six or eight seats between everybody, some movie with screaming playing

next door.

I sat between Grace and that scary movie—her word—and held

the popcorn on my knee for us, and, I admit, I kind of got into
our

[22] THIRTEEN

movie. The girl’s dad in this one was trying to find her the perfect husband. He felt he owed her or something, because her mom wasn’t

around to help her. But he was overdoing it, was pulling in everybody from his office, where he was boss, and then his friends’ sons, and on and on, when the guy the girl really loved was the guy who fixed the copy machine at her dad’s office.

I mean, I got into it, but I was also tracking the movie next door, of course. Trying to time to the screams. Trying to imagine if we

were over there, how tight Grace would be clinging to me. How her

knee would probably be up on my thigh and she wouldn’t even be

aware it was happening.

But this wasn’t bad, either.

She kept having to bat the tears from her eyes, and had pretty

much forgotten the popcorn altogether. Not me. I never forget the

popcorn.

With the Big Chief, too, if Willard’s working the counter, he’ll

even slip you a free refill if you promise not to make a mess he’ll have to clean up later.

Right when the movie was winding up for its final pitch, I whispered to Grace about our empty box, slithered out to the lobby for more.

Willard fixed me up, and even let me peek into the other theater.

It was mayhem in there. Chainsaws and werewolves, it looked

like—no, werewolves
with
chainsaws. The chocolate and peanut butter of the horror world. I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath until my eyes started burning.

It was all older kids in there, though. If I’d taken Grace in there, there would have been a timer over my head, just counting down to

when the first senior leaned forward, whispered advice to me that

Grace would have to pretend not to hear. And then things would

just get worse and worse, and it’s not like I could fight any of them and win, so it would be a coke-throwing thing, and I’d probably get banned for the month again.

No, the love movie was the better choice for us. Definitely.

I got back just in time for the end.

Instead of a marriage, it was back to the office. The dad had hired the copy guy into the office, and now, with everybody watching, was STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES [23]

promoting him up and up and up, to next in line to run the place,

the girl just standing there beaming, crying, her whole world coming together just the way it should.

Grace was crying right along with her.

From where I was I could see her cheeks, shiny and wet, her eyes

closed to try to hold the rest of the happiness in.

When I brushed her arm, climbing back into my seat, she jumped,

and started coughing like she was going to throw up.

She ran out hiding her face and I followed, and Willard fixed her

up with water and she hid in the Ladies until just before the horror movie let out.

And that was it.

My dad was waiting for us at the curb like every time, the car

filled with his menthol smoke, and I held the door for Grace again and she just kept batting her eyes.

“Good movie?” my dad asked back, meaning completely different

things, and I nodded just to shut him up.

Two weeks later it was Halloween.

Because we were in eighth grade, none of us dressed up, of course.

And because the Big Chief was the Big Chief, none of us went there either. Not yet. Soon we’d be high schoolers, though, we knew, and none of the high schoolers ever died from holding their breath.

The kid who got castrated, he was supposed to have been thirteen

or fourteen. Maybe that was why they were safe. Why we weren’t.

Anyway, because of what happened at the last Halloween party

for our class (my dad’s menthols, Lucas’s dad’s beer, some light bulbs in the basement somehow unscrewed), this year the guys were

going one way, the girls another. Most of the girls had signed up to chaperone the first- and second-graders trick-or-treating.

Where the guys went was the old graveyard behind the convent.

Of course.

I called Grace before, to just mention it casually, where we were