Theater Macabre (9 page)

In one of the bedrooms lay a soiled mattress, sagging in the middle from the weight of heaving young bodies, the homeless, and the rain.

In another, a bureau had been relieved of its drawers, and the glass from its oval mirror, though some enterprising soul had collected the fragments of the latter, and, together with multicolored pieces of glass from shattered beer bottles, used them to fashion a curious and senseless mural of slivers on the opposite wall. The resulting creation looked like a symbol of destruction.

She moved on.

The bathroom had been consumed by moss and mold, the tiles lost beneath a green skin, the tub overturned, claw feet pawing stiffly at the air.

In what appeared to be a child's bedroom, she stopped.

Intruders had defiled the room. It reeked of them, had their signatures on the wall in large dripping letters. In a splintered cradle to the left of a shard of moonlight, a doll had been painted to look like a whore. One of its eyes had been removed and replaced with a bottle cap stuffed without care into the rubber socket. Condoms were scattered like shed snake skins among stacks of old newspapers, empty bottles, and soiled, crumpled up sleeping bags.

The sudden and unexpected offense she took at the disrespect these interlopers had shown to the memory of whoever had once called this place home forced her to question any ties she might have had to them.

Had she once lived here?

Or—a less pleasant thought—had she
been
one of the defilers, perhaps the conscientious one, vainly trying to persuade her friends not to do what they had in mind, but helpless to do anything but play along when they ignored her?

If that were true, it suited her to think that she might have been the sole voice of reason, the good apple among the bad. But why should that be any more of a plausible possibility than any other?

Somewhere in the shadows of the room, a child began to sing.

Evelyn's breath caught and she took an involuntary step back, a hand to her chest.

She listened.

The singing was soft, faint, and not at all sad. Instead it was a cheerful, festive song, perhaps even with a trace of mischief, a song that could only be created by children in defiance of authority, and only heard in the absence of that authority.

Evelyn cocked her head.

"Everything's dark, nothing is bright," the child sang, "No one can stop us on Halloween night."

Evelyn smiled.

"This is our night, this is our street, give us some money, or candy to eat."

The singing grew louder, and now Evelyn realized it was not coming from the room at all. It drifted through the empty window frame and over the sill from somewhere on the street outside.

Children were coming.

A firefly of excitement dispelled the suffocating gloom within her, and she started back toward the stairs.

The skin of the house settled onto its skeleton as she walked, and abruptly, as if waiting for her to stop trying so hard, she remembered something and the firefly became a swarm that lit her from the inside out.

She had not come here alone. There had been others.

There had been a joke. No, not a joke exactly. A game. Chad and...what was her name...Jessica! Yes, that was it. Chad and Jessica, and someone else whose name she could not recall but had faith that like the others it would come in time. A game, the rules of which eluded her for now, but there had been laughter and singing and she had not been alone. Remembering this much made her vigil all the more bearable. Yes, they had brought her here and left her alone, but they would be back. That, she suspected, had been part of the game. A dare, perhaps. Stay a while in the scary house on...

She closed her eyes, saw still frame pictures of leaf-lined streets, damp pavements, cars with autumn leaves snagged in their windshield wipers...

Seldom Seen Road.

She felt tension drain from her shoulders she hadn't realized was there. Sighed, wished she had a cigarette or perhaps a magazine, something to do to kill the time.

A game. A dare.

Trick-or-treat
.

Yes, pebbles in a drainpipe. The answers were coming, the memories falling to land behind her eyes. Slowly, so slowly, but they were there. She was the bait, the lure for the children who looked upon this old, rotting house as a plaything, a catalyst for false fear they would giggle about later with sticky fingers and chocolate teeth as they sat bathed together in the blue light from their television spook shows. Yes. A joke. Nothing more.

Chad, and Jessica, and...Alex! She could almost see them, hear them. Good friends, close friends,
loving
friends who had nominated
her
to be the ghost this year.

Ah yes...The Tradition.

Every year. Every Halloween. But who was it last year? She smiled; it faded fast. Who was it last year? She was afraid to think for too long lest she discover she was the bait then too, or force remembrance back into the recesses of her mind.

Who...?

No, there had been others.

Scare the children, but reward their fear.

Give them something good to eat
, she thought in a sing-song voice.

She bit her lip, felt it bleed, and winced.

I don't have any candy.

Something pretty then.

She hurried back to the room with the ruined bureau.

The singing grew louder.

"Want to be dared, want to be chased..."

She plucked the glass mosaic from the wall, startled by sudden sobs as they dug under her fingernails.

"Be sure to stay away from the girl with glass in her face."

She froze as the singing died on the breeze, the last of the words lingering like a held breath in the empty hallways.

Chad and Jessica, and Alex. Close friends, dear friends. And she was right, she realized as more of the glass came away, as one of her nails lifted off and fell with a tiny sound to the floor, she
had
been the sole voice of reason.

She had begged them not to bring her here.

She had begged them not to leave her here.

Bleeding.

The remains of the mosaic shimmered through the tears. Panic and hurt doused the fire, leaving only fat rotten flies buzzing lazily around her stomach.

They had hurt her.

Slowly she moved to the stairs, the glass digging into her hands, jutting from beneath the few nails that remained, pricking her lips from where Chad had, after taking her by force, driven shards of his broken beer bottle up into her gums because she wouldn't stop screaming.

Her sobs became a wail. She staggered on the steps. Some of the glass fell as she sagged against the wall.

"Oh God," she whispered.

Movement downstairs distracted her and she looked up, cleared her vision with her hands, forgetting the glass she still held, uncaring when the shards tore across eyes that had not needed to see for exactly eleven years.

A shadow appeared in the front door. The leaves of an overgrown bush hissed and scraped against the crumpled siding. The shadow moved on. A child whispered fearfully, then was silent.

Alone.

Evelyn listened, then allowed herself a smile, allowed it to warm her away the chill..

It was perfectly natural to forget, she told herself. They had hurt her, betrayed her, but still, still somehow she had loved them, perhaps because she had never believed that they would allow her into their circle. She knew she would do whatever they asked of her, within reason, and even through the corruption into which they had led her, she steadfastly clung to everything that had made her who she was.

And here, despite the anguish, or perhaps as a result of it, in the house on Seldom Seen Road, she was whole again, waiting for them to come back.

She descended the steps, pausing midway down to inspect the glimmer of light on her wrist. The moonlight illuminated her bracelet and her smile grew. Silver snakes biting each other’s tails as they chased a pearl. She did not need to remove the trinket to know what the inscription on the back said. It was a proclamation of adoration and acceptance by people she had envied and worshiped and longed for so many nights when she had had no one.

Friends forever.

She shuddered with delight, her ankle snapping as she shifted stance, and she winced. It had sounded like a branch breaking and would surely give her away if the children heard. The nature of the game was of course to stay quiet, to stay invisible until they came, singing and whispering and daring each other to brave the cavernous husk of a house no more haunted than their bedroom closets.

Quiet.

She waited.

In the moonlight, the dust danced. Excitement coursed through her at the sight of three new shadows growing long in the doorway as she watched. In the dark it was easy to imagine terrible things. In the dark it was easy to be afraid, to draw ghosts from listing doors and gaping floors but hadn’t they chosen her for her imperviousness to such foolishness? Of course they had. They had laughed and clapped and devised this chilling plan for the children in the feeble light of the October dusk and she had known then it would be unnerving but had known too she could bear it. After all those years of solitude, of social ineptitude, there was nothing left that could frighten her.

But how thrilling the idea of frightening them, returned all these years later to see if she abided by the rules, even when they had taken it upon themselves to change them.

The memory of the blood from her hands pattered on the steps, disappeared when they struck.

“C’mon,” someone whispered, and she watched him move into the doorway, nothing but a moving patch of tar untouched by the scythe of blue light above his head. “What’s taking so long?”

Evelyn froze, afraid to breathe. She must wait until the right moment and prayed she would know it when it came.

Another shape crept into the hall, following the first. “Jesus, I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

A boy and a girl.

Chad, Jessica...

“Now that we're here you want to leave? You kidding me?”

"Let's just go back to the party."

"Fuck that. Besides, I want to see her."

The girl stopped moving. "It's just an old house. There's no her to see."

"If she's a myth, then why are you afraid?"

"I'm not afraid, this is just dumb, that's all. Probably get a lung disease from all the crap floating in the air."

A third figure entered the room. "Fuck, it stinks in here."

"The hell kept you so long, we thought y—"

Evelyn moved, just a little, but the step creaked and the shadows looked up. She willed herself to be invisible, just as she had through her torturous teens when the good-looking boys and the beautiful popular girls had come her way, just as she had when her mother burnt her with cigarettes for having her no-good father's eyes. Just as she had when she'd cut herself and the other girls had wanted to see so they had another reason to think she was a freak.

Invisible. It used to be so easy. She closed her eyes and hugged herself tight, her glass-shard teeth sinking into her lower lip:
Please don’t let them see me. Please don’t let them see me...Please...

A hushed whisper. “Did you hear that?”

“It was just the stairs creaking. Don’t you freak out on me too, man.”

The girl: "I didn't freak out, asshole."

“Whatever. Let's just see what there is to see and then we can go get toasted at Joy’s place.”

In the swollen darkness, Evelyn smiled. They hadn’t seen her. She had maintained the suspense, and wouldn't they be so surprised to see that she had waited for them all these years. She listened, could taste the fear in them. Did they expect she'd be angry, still?

No, she wasn't angry. Could never be angry at the only people who had ever loved her.

With a sigh, she stood and raised her fingers so that the moonlight found them.

She just didn't want to be alone anymore.

“Hey, Rick...Hey,
shit! What is that?
”

She descended with deliberate drama, drawing on all the horror movies she had ever seen, locked in her bedroom all those many dark and dreary nights. The memories were there, cavorting with gleeful abandon behind her eyes.

“What are you talking about, Stan? I don’t see anything!”

I see you. They see me. All I want is love.

“Rick I mean it...what is that? Look, on the stairs, there’s something there!”

Evelyn began to hum the song she had heard them sing. The song of the splinter girl she had once found cruel, but now knew was their way of immortalizing her, of rejoicing in the person, the woman, she had become.

"It's a joke, it's Mike...it has to be. Jesus..."

In an instant she was at the foot of the stairs and smiling. They smiled back for a moment and then their harlequin faces slid back to reveal the unsmiling terror-stricken faces beneath. They did not look the same, but then she could hardly recall what they had looked like all those years ago. They hadn't grown older, but neither had she.

She felt the dust shift around her as they drew in breath to power their screams, to unleash the chorus that would spoil the game.

Love me again
, she whispered and rushed forward through the moonlight to embrace them.

And there were no screams at all as she held them tight, tighter still, the splinters finding their hearts, the moonlight finding their eyes, as Evelyn wept and sang and rejoiced in their reunion.

Friends forever.

Turrow

On Palace Street trees stand guard like frozen torches, their crowns flames of autumn beneath the darkening sky; the wind is a wet animal, its hide smelling of the dampened earth in which it has lain waiting for weeks beneath a blanket of sunlight. The air crackles with the ghosts of storms past, and storms to come. Clouds rush by fast enough to blend the sky into a stretched sheet of mottled tin. The rain comes down.