Halloween and Other Seasons

Halloween and Other Seasons

By Al Sarrantonio

Crossroad Press Edition Published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

Copyright 2010 By Al Sarrantonio

This book copy-edited by Patricia Lee Macomber

Cover art b: Antti Isosomppi – www.isosomppi.com

LICENSE NOTES:

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.  This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people.  If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.  If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to your vendor of choice and purchase your own copy.  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright Notes:

“Summer” in
Retro Pulp Tales
, 2006; “Sleeper” in
Flights
, 2004; “Eels” in
Cemetery Dance
magazine, 2003; “Letters from Camp” in
Space Mail
, 1981; “Roger in the Womb” in
Heavy Metal
magazine, 1979;
 “The Return of Mad Santa” in
Fantasy Book
magazine, 1981;  “Baby Boss and the Underground Hamsters” in
Midnight Premiere, 2007;
 “Trail of the Chromium Bandits” in
Razored Saddles,
1989; “The Man in the Other Car” in
Shivers IV
, 2006; “Hedges” in
Shivers III
, 2004; “The Silly Stuff” in
Twilight Zone
magazine, 1982;  “The New Kid” in
Shivers II
, 2003; “Ahead of the Joneses” in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, 1979; “The Artist in the Small Room Above” in
Chrysalis 7,
1979; “The Dancing Foot” in
The Horror Show
magazine, 1988;  “Liberty” in
Westeryear
, 1988;
 
“Dust” in
Quietly Now
, 2004;
“The Pumpkin Boy”, 2004.

ALSO FROM AL SARRANTONIO & CROSSROAD PRESS

MOONBANE:
 

When amateur astronomer Jason Blake and his son are out star-gazing one night, thousands of meteors suddenly fill the sky. Some of them fall nearby, but when Jason and Ritchie go to investigate, they are attacked by a werewolf-like creature, and Ritchie is injured. This is a novel of relationships, of apocalyptic adventure, and very personal sacrifice. Fast-paced and gaining speed with each page, Moonbane is a poetic novel that works on a number of unexpected levels, running the gamut from taut suspense to outright mayhem.

Try any title from CROSSROAD PRESS – use the Coupon Code FIRSTBOOK for a one time 20% savings!  We have a wide variety of eBook and Audiobook titles available.  Find us at: 
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To

Kate, Rich and Emma

SUMMER

By Al Sarrantonio

It was a summer day that was all of summer. Dry heat rose from the cracks in the sidewalks, brushing the brown grass that grew there as it shimmered by. There was a hush in the stilted air, high and hanging, the sun like a burnt coin frozen in the pale and cloudless sky, the trees still, green leaves dried and baked, panting for a breeze.

Rotating window fans moved hot air from outside to inside. Newspapers rustled on kitchen tables, their pages waving until the artificial breeze moved on, then settling hot and desultory back into unread place. The breakfast plates sat unstacked, forgotten; lunch plates with uneaten lunch—curling pumpernickel, wilted lettuce, an inkblot of mustard dry as paper—sat nearby. Morning coffee milled in two mugs, still tepid from the afternoon warmth.

“My Gosh, Mabel, has it ever been this hot before?” George Meadows said from his easy chair; he sat arranged like a man who had eaten a great meal, with his shirt and trousers loosened, but only against the heat.

His wife Mabel, prostrate on the nearby couch, the faded sunflowers of her house dress clashing and merging in a wilted riot with the worn daisies of the sofa print, tried to say something but failed. Her right hand continued to weakly fan herself with its magazine and she tried again.

“Hot as it’s…ever been,” she managed to get out in a croak, and then closed her eyes and ears, discouraging further comment.

“Yep,” George managed to answer before closing his own eyes. He couldn’t resist, he never could, getting the last word in. He rallied to add, even though Mabel was already perfectly aware: “Man on the radio said it might get hotter still.”

~ * ~

Three twelve-year-old boys hated Summer.

They hadn’t always. At one time, Summer had belonged to them. From the first day of school letting out, until the dreaded bell sounded again, they had ruled summer as if they owned it. There had been baseball and bad tennis, and miniature golf and marbles in the hot dust. There had been butterfly hunts with orange black monarchs big as pterodactyls and just as difficult to catch. Trips to the secret pond with jars, and pond water drops under Lem’s microscope to watch the amoebas within. And their own swimming, from dawn to dusk some days, emerging at the end waterlogged beings, raisin boys, to dry and unwilt in the setting sun. And Monk’s telescope at night, the fat dry cold moon sliding across the eyepiece like a pockmarked balloon; Saturn hanging silent and majestic with its golden split ring. Backyard campouts, the walls of Shep’s pup tent lit from within not with fireflies but with the flashlights of boys with comic books, the smell of Sterno and pancake batter the next morning, the metal taste of warm water in boy scout canteens.

Summer had been their time—the time away from schoolbooks and parents’ waggling fingers, the time to be boys. And this year it had started the same—the banishment of black-and-white marble notebooks, pencils thrown under beds spearing dust bunnies, school clothes in the backs of closets.

And out with the baseball glove! Oiled, smelling like new wet leather, sneakers that smelled of dirt, short pants, the dewy morning giving way to a fresh hot feeling and late afternoon thunderstorms scattering the ballplayers with warm wet drops big as knuckles and the temperature dropping and making them shiver. And swimming, and more swimming, and more swimming still, and the cool-warm nights, the sharp cold taste of ice cream, of a bottle of cola drawn from an iced bucket, of a hot dog steaming, hiding under hot sauerkraut. A drive-in movie in Uncle Jed’s pickup truck: two hiding under the tarp until they were in.

Morning noon and night it was summer.

Real summer.

Until:

Something…

…began to change.

It was Shep who noticed it first: in the dangerous tree-house on a mid-August afternoon. They had finished trading baseball cards, arguing over how many cards (always doubles!) to attach to bicycle spokes to make them clack and were halfway through another argument about who was prettier, Margaret O’Hearn or Angie Bernstein, when Shep’s head went up and he sniffed, just like a hound dog might. His leg, swinging through one of the hut’s many floor holes, pendulumed to a frozen stop.

“What’s wrong?” Lem asked, and Monk looked up from his new copy of
Vault of
Horror
with a frown.

“Turn off your brain, Shep,” Monk growled. “It’s summer.”

“Just because you don’t want to talk about girls or leg hair or b.o.—” Lem began, but he stopped dead at the look on Shep’s face.

“Something’s different,” Shep said, and he still held that pointer-at-a-bird look.

Lem tried to laugh, but stopped abruptly, a hiccup of seriousness at the look in Shep’s eyes.

A whisper: “What do you mean: different?”

Shep spoke without breaking his concentration. “Don’t you
feel
it?”

Monk shook his head with finality and went back to his comic, but Lem’s face had taken on a worried look.

Shep was never wrong about these kinds of things.

“I…don’t feel anything…” Lem offered mildly.

Idly, still scanning his
Vault of Horror
, Monk kicked out his sneaker and caught Lem on the shin. A scatter of orange infield dust, dislodged from the sculpted sole, trickled down the other boy’s bare leg.

“You feel
that
, Lemnick?”

“Be quiet—” Shep said abruptly, and it was not a request.

The other two boys were silent—and now Monk sat up, his butt easily finding the structure’s largest hole, which they inevitably called “the crapper.”

Something like a faint hiss, something like the eerie castanet sound cicadas make, passed by his ears and brushed him on one cheek, but there was not so much as a breeze in the early hot afternoon.

“What was—”

“It’s getting hotter,” Shep said simply.

“Maybe it’s because of Hell Cave,” Monk laughed, but nobody joined him.

~ * ~

That afternoon it was too hot to swim. It stayed that way the next three days. They abandoned the tree-house, leaving it’s lopsided openwork collection of mismatched boards and tattooed, badly nailed orange crates, and moved into Monk’s cellar, which was damp but cool.

It had never been too hot to swim before:

Never.

They perused Monk’s comic book collection, which after banishment to the basement was on the verge of mold. Monk had built, from boards too useless even for the tree-house, a lab table in one corner, and they fiddled with the chemistry set, trying to make things that were yellow and then turned red, others that made smoke. They toyed with the rabbit-ear antenna on the ancient television, a huge wooden box with a tiny black and white screen the size of a TV dinner tin—for a while they brought in the monster movie channel, and watched, in a snowy and line-infested picture, the Man from Planet X rampage through the Scottish moors. Monk brought down a bowl of grapes, and they ate some of them, and spit the rest at each other out of their mouths, pressing their cheeks for cannonade.

But their eyes kept drifting to the cellar windows, and the heat and light outside.

“Maybe we should go swimming anyway,” Monk said, finally, on the second day.

They made it halfway to the secret pond, and turned around, dripping and panting.

Overhead, the sun looked hotter, if not larger.

They played darts in the cellar, and set up plastic army men and knocked them down with marbles and rubber bands.