Halloween and Other Seasons (3 page)

The rest went unsaid.

They sat in a circle, and moved closer, the flashlight in the midst of them like a doused campfire.

Shep laughed and said, “We never finished talking about Angie Bernstein, did we?”

Lem laughed too. “Or how your pits smell!”

“Or your mustache!” Shep shot back.

Monk was silent.

“Hey, Monk,” Shep said, “you shaving your lip yet?”

“And using ‘
B
-Oderant’? You smell like creme soda, but do you also smell like a
horse
?”

Monk feigned snoring.

“Hey Monk—”

The snoring ceased. “Leave me alone.”

Lem hooted: “Creme soda boy!”

“Horse pit boy!” Shep laughed.

Monk said nothing, and soon he was snoring for real.

~ * ~

Shep woke them up at seven o’clock by his watch.

At first he couldn’t move; it was hard to breathe and so hot he felt as if he was under a steam iron. He knew it was growing impossibly warmer. He could feel and smell and taste it, just like he had in the tree-house.

“We have to find the end today,” he said, grimly.

They ate and drank in the dark, just like the night before. Now there was no talking. Lem was having trouble breathing, taking shallow ragged huffs at the air.

“Feels…like…we’re…in a…barbecue…” he rasped. “Hard…to…breathe…”

They turned on the battery radio and there was hiss up and down the dial until the one strong local channel came on. It was the same announcer, only now all of the chirp had gone out of his voice.

“…hundred and ten here this morning, folks,” he said. “And it’s September first! Local ponds are steamed dry, and the electricity was out for three hours yesterday. Same all over, now. Ice caps are melting, and in Australia, where it’s the end of wintertime, the temperature hit 99 yesterday…”

They snapped off the radio.

“Let’s go,” Shep said.

~ * ~

Lem began to cry after a half hour.

“I can’t
do
this!” he said. “Let’s go home! I want to swim in the pond, and get ready for school, and look at the fall catalogs and feel it get chilly at night!”

“It’s not much farther,” Shep said evenly. He was having trouble breathing himself. “This is something we’ve got to do, Lem. If we do it maybe we can have all that again.”

Shep pointed the flashlight at Monk, who was trudging silently, straight ahead.

~ * ~

The flashlight began to fail as they reached a wall of fallen rocks. Ignoring the impediment for the moment, Shep used the remaining light to rip the battery cover off the back of the radio and pull the batteries out.

They were a different size, so he put the radio on and let it stay on, a droning buzz in the background.

The flashlight went out, then flickered on again.

“Quick!” Shep shouted. “Check to either side and see if there’s a way around!”

Lem shuffled off to the left, and Monk stood unmoving where he was.

Shep pushed impatiently past him, flicking the flash on and off to pull precious weak yellow beams out of it.

“There’s no way around here,” Lem called out laconically from the left.

Shep blinked the light on, off, punched desperately around the edge of the barrier, looking for a hole, a rift, a way through.

“Nothing…” he huffed weakly.

He turned with a last thought, flaring the flash into life so that the beam played across Monk.

“Maybe there’s a crack! Maybe we can pull the wall down!”

“There is no crack,” Monk said dully, “and we can’t pull it down.” His legs abruptly folded underneath him and he sat on the cave floor.

Shep turned the light off, on again; the beam was dull, pumpkin colored but he played it all over the rock barrier.

“Got to be—”

“There is no ‘Hell’s Cave’,” Monk said dully. “It’s just a myth. My father told me about it when I was seven. This is just an old mine that played out and then caved in.”

“But—”

“
I
made it all happen,” Monk said hoarsely, without energy. “The heat, the endless summer. It was me.”

“What?” Shep said, moving closer. On the other side, Lem sank to the floor.

“It was me…” Monk repeated.

Lem began to cry, mewling like a hurt kitten, and the flashlight beam died again. In the dark, Shep flicked it on, off, on, off.

“
Me
,” Monk said fiercely, an agonized hiss.

Shep hit the button one more time on the flashlight, and it flared like a dying candle, haloing Monk’s haunted face, and then faded out again.

“I didn’t want it to end.” In the darkness Monk spoke in a whispered, monotone. “I didn’t want it
ever
to end.”

“Didn’t want
what
to end?” Shep asked, confused.

“This summer,” Monk answered, sighing. “The three of us. I wanted it to last forever. I didn’t want us to…change. Which is what we were doing. Talking about girls instead of baseball cards, hairy legs instead of monster comics, body odor instead of swimming and telescopes. We used to do everything together and now that was going to change. When we went to Junior High Lem was going to try to date Angie Bernstein and you were going out for track. Then you would go out with Margaret O’Hearn, and the baseball cards and comics would go in the back of the closet, along with the marbles and the pup tent and the canteen and butterfly net. The chemistry set would collect dust in the corner of the basement. I could see it coming. It was all changing, and I didn’t want it to.”

“But how…?” Shep asked.

In the dark, he could almost hear Monk shrug and heard him hitch a sob. “I don’t
know
how I did it. I just wanted it, I fell asleep crying for it at night, I prayed for it every day. Every time you and Lem started talking about girls and body hair and growing up, I prayed for it louder. And then, suddenly, it happened. And then I couldn’t make it go away…”

Lem cried out hoarsely, then settled into low rasping sobs.

It had become even hotter, and then hotter still. The radio, still on, blurted out a stifled cry of static and then was silent.

In the sweaty, close, unbearably hot cave, the flashlight went on with one final smudge of sick light, illuminating Monk’s crying face.

“I’m so sorry…” he whispered.

~ * ~

 “Mabel?” George Meadows croaked. He could barely talk, his words fighting through the heat, which had intensified. His wife lay unmoving on the sofa, her desiccated arm hanging over the side, fingers brushing her dropped magazine. Her housedress was now completely part of the couch’s pattern, melded into it like an iron transfer.  The window fan had given up. The sky was very bright. Puffs of steam rose from the floor, up from the cellar, from the ground below. Somewhere in the back of his nostrils, George smelled smoke, and fire.

“Mabel?” he called again, although now he could not feel the easy chair beneath him. He felt light as a flake of ash rising from a campfire.

His eyes were so hot he could no longer see.

He took in one final, rasping, burning breath as the world turned to fire and roaring flame around him.

And, even now, he could not resist getting in the last word, letting his final breath out in a cracked whisper even though there was no one to listen: “Yep. Hottest ever.”

SLEEPOVER

By Al Sarrantonio

“Chickens were green,” he said.

“They weren’t,” she answered. “They were yellow. Frogs were green.”

“That’s the sky,” he said, grinning slyly to himself. He had a secret grin even when his lips didn’t smile. “The sky was green. Grass was blue.”

She shook her head back and forth, almost violently. “You got ‘em mixed up, Ty. It’s the other way ‘round. Grass was green, sky blue.”

“It was the way I say,” he replied, and his eyes were hard enough that he meant it.

“No, little brother, it was the way I remember.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she looked at the ground. “I think…”

~ * ~

They were on a plane of black smooth glass. Where the sky—which was maroon and devoid of clouds—met the horizon there was a faint curved thin fuzzy line, like a charcoal-drawn heat wave. The temperature never seemed to change, though sometimes Ty complained of being cold at night. Willa pressed up near him when this happened, but always reluctantly. There was a part of her that was sure he claimed cold just to get attention.

Ty was seven, as close as Willa could remember. He had been seven when they woke up one morning in this place which had, during the night, replaced the second floor bedroom of cousin Clara’s big white house with the white picket fence. Sometimes Willa had trouble remembering some things about the white house now—such as if the garage doors had needed painting or not, or if the mailbox post at the road was crooked or straight. But there were other things that Willa did remember—the sharpness of the red metal flag on the mailbox, which felt like it might cut your finger when you raised it to tell the mailman there was mail to be taken, or the tart ammonia smell of the cat litter box when it hadn’t been cleaned, or the way Aunt Erin and Uncle Bill’s smiles lit up their faces when cousin Clara said something clever. She remembered Clara’s science project, the working windmill, with it’s gold first-place ribbon hanging from it (it had been gold, hadn’t it?—Ty would now say it had been tan, or orange)—that was displayed prominently on the fireplace mantle.

But she couldn’t remember if the fireplace bricks had been red or white.

“I’m hungry again,” Ty said, and this time Willa knew he was looking for nothing but attention. They hadn’t been hungry since they had found themselves here. They hadn’t gotten dirty, or had to brush their teeth, or even had to go to the bathroom.

Which had led Willa to conclude—

“And we’re not dead!” Ty said, reaching over to jab her in the ribs. “We’re just…
here
!”

“And where is that?” Willa responded.

Ty began to cry, true frightened sobs, which made Willa pleased and then, instantly, sorry. She reached over to brush the hair away from his forehead. “It’s all right,” she whispered, “We’re not dead.”

But he was consumed by one of his out-of-control times, and clung to her, shivering. She could feel the wetness of his tears against the skin of her arm, soaking into the upper cuff of her nightdress.

“Ty, it’s all right—”

“No it’s not, it’s not! We’re dead, we’re
dead
!”

“I was only joking—”

“You were right, you were right! We’re
dead dead
dead
!”

The arm that wrapped around Ty began to tremble, and Willa felt her own tears rising, though she kept them down.

“There’s only one other thing we could be,” she said in the faintest of voices, and only to herself.

~ * ~

A while later the light show began, as it did every night before sleep came.

First came the yellow streaks, which crossed in parallel pairs overhead, cutting the maroon sky in half. Then the maroon sky split into two parts, like an overhead dome opening, and the darkest sky Willa had ever seen met the black glass plain and they could see nothing. But this lasted only a moment, not enough to keep them in darkness: for the lights of what looked like a billion stars came on overhead, coming brighter and brighter like novas until their light merged into one overwhelming brilliance like the Sun. They were blinded by the light and closed their eyes, seeing a round retinal afterimage against the insides of their lids, and when they opened their eyes again the world was as it had been, with maroon sky and black glass underfoot and the fine line of fuzziness at the horizon.

“I’m sleepy,” Ty said, and curled up on the black glass and closed his eyes, which is what he always did after the light show. Willa fought it but also found herself tired, and then they slept, and always when they woke up they expected to find themselves back in their sleeping bags in cousin Carla’s bedroom in the white two story house that, Willa was almost sure, needed painting and had an old clock in the kitchen that had a crack in the face and was a little fast.

But always, for nine sleep periods now, they found themselves here.

~ * ~

After this, the tenth sleep period, the same thing happened.

Only—

Something was different this time.

They were not alone.

In the near distance were two shapes huddled on the ground, one of which began to wail.

Ty roused himself and looked at them wide-eyed. “The sky was blue, I’m
pretty
sure…” he whispered.

“Yes,” Willa said, though she wasn’t positive anymore. In her own dreams the white house had been gray, the clock in the kitchen a minute slow.

The two figures saw them and began to approach, at first tentatively, then running.

“Help us!” the one in front sobbed.

Willa held on to Ty, and the two of them stood waiting.

The two figures stopped ten feet away.

They were children: two girls, younger than Ty. One had blonde hair and the other’s hair was red, curly all over.

They stared at Ty and Willa, then looked up at the sky, then back at Ty and Willa.

The red-haired one began to moan, but the other one got out: “Where
are
we?”

“Where
were
you?” Willa asked. “Before you came here?”

“In bed!” She had a breathy, annoying voice. “Asleep!”

“Where?” Willa demanded.

“
At
Janna’s house
!” Seeing the probing look on Willa’s face, she rushed on desperately: “In Kentucky! In the U.S. of A.!”

“What were you doing at Janna’s house, in Kentucky?” Willa persisted, almost unkindly. “Why were you there?”

“We were having a sleepover!” the breathy girl answered, and then she too began to cry.

Ty joined them.

“Be quiet!” Willa shouted, staring sharply at Ty, and then at the newcomers.

All but the red-haired girl complied.

Willa looked at Ty. “They were in Kentucky. We were in New Hampshire. That means nothing.”