A Short Story for Halloween

Carl’s Floridian Halloween

by D.L. Morrese

Carl had a weird affliction, or maybe it was a skill. It might even be considered a talent. He wasn’t sure exactly what to call it, but sometimes it came in handy, like last week during an American History test when he was stumped by one of the questions until George Washington whispered the correct answer in his ear.

Carl wasn’t schizophrenic. Admittedly, he did sometimes hallucinate, sort of, maybe, but he wasn’t delusional. He knew that the ghost of the first American President hadn’t really showed up to help him with his test. He wasn’t real. He was a product of Carl’s own imagination, just like his dead aunt who sometimes gave him good advice, or the talking dog who had warned him against plowing his bike into a parked car that one time. Carl figured that some hidden corner of his brain was finding creative ways to inform him of things his conscious mind had forgotten or overlooked. He knew it wasn’t normal, but provided he could distinguish between what was real and what wasn’t, it wasn’t a problem. In fact, it could be very helpful.

It usually only happened when Carl was feeling especially stressed or confused or distracted, which was often enough, but not every day. Most of the time, Carl was an average seventh grader with a normal imagination that didn’t conjure up phantom helpmates. But sometimes, it did, and the weirdest time yet was, appropriately enough, during Trick-or-Treat.

Halloween in Florida is not like most other places. In Michigan, where Carl had been born, it can be cold in late October. Winter cold. Sometimes, there’s even snow. It doesn’t make sense to put a lot of effort into a costume if the only way to keep from freezing is to cover it with a coat.

A great costume makes more sense in Florida because it can be seen, and he’d seen a lot of them tonight. His friend Rhianna was a zombie, although she wasn’t really either of those things. She was dressed as a zombie in a long, purposely torn dress and a carefully mutilated wig she got from the thrift store. Artistically applied makeup added blood-red gashes to her cheeks and made her face deathly pale under hollows painted around her eyes. It was a great costume, and he told her so, but she wasn’t really his friend. She was his friend’s sister, which made her more of an accessory of a friend than one in her own right.

Carl peeked into his bag, which had previously been a pillowcase and would be again when the night was through. “We’re not getting much,” he said to Todd.

Todd and Carl had met soon after his family had moved to suburban Orlando last year. They were the same age and went to the same school. They lived in the same neighborhood, played the same games, and read the same kinds of books. They shared secrets and spent a lot of time at each other’s houses. Carl liked having Todd as a friend and didn’t really mind that he was encumbered with an older sister. She either ignored him or criticized him, depending on her mood, but she didn’t find him interesting enough to hold her attention for long. She had her own circle of friends with her tonight: a skinny Tinkerbell who looked about twelve, and a classy vampire who could have passed for eighteen. Like Rhianna, they were fifteen. Their names were Sam and Kat, both abbreviated from the somewhat longer versions their parents had given them. Todd, in his Stormtrooper armor, and Caribbean pirate Carl, followed as the girls strolled down the sidewalk, closely enough to comply with the instructions Todd’s mother gave them to stay together, but not so close they couldn’t pretend not to be, should the social need arise.

“We just started,” Todd told him, his voice muffled by the plastic helmet covering his face and head. “There’s lots of houses doing it, really. You just have to keep going. There’s one on the next street over that’s always good. The guy who lives there is weird, but he gives you two or three things instead of just one.”

Fewer than half, maybe no more than a quarter of the homes on the street signaled the promise of a treat with glowing porch lights. Most were dark, although the flicker of a video screen or the soft glow of a reading lamp behind lace curtains implied that the houses weren’t empty. Many of the people in the neighborhood were old and retired. They probably didn’t pay much attention to holidays, anymore. If any of them had kids, they were already grown and long gone.

Some places had their lights on, though. They were the homes of people who remembered their own Halloween joys during the previous century and wished to preserve the tradition. A few were even decorated.

Rhianna turned onto the straight concrete walk of the next house where a plastic jack-o-lantern, hanging from a low branch of an invasive camphor tree, welcomed them with a wide, battery-powered smile. Four adults, seated on folding lawn chairs, chatted together near the front door. That was another difference. Up north, people huddled safe and warm inside until you knocked or rang the bell. Here, they often waited for you on porches or in driveways. The distinction between outside and inside was always a bit fuzzier here, though. People sat out in the evenings pretty much all year long. He’d noticed that before.

“Trick or treat,” the three girls chorused, holding out their bags.

The sharp, nervous yap of a small dog came from inside the house as a jowly woman, wearing a strained smile and a flowered blouse over elastic-waist mom-jeans, distributed miniature chocolate bars to the waiting girls. Todd and Carl repeated the traditional threat and received their due treat to avert a trick, not that anyone ever did that anymore. His father had told him about some of the stunts that kids used to play when his father, Carl’s grandfather, was a kid. But flaming bags of dog poop were a thing of the past, and no houses ever got egged or TP’d, not even those of people pretending not to be home.

After passing a couple of darkened houses, they paused at the one on the next corner. Landscape lighting illuminated a birdbath and a pair of palm trees in a well-tended lawn. A No Solicitors sign stood sentry by the walkway to the closed and unlighted front door. Carl assumed they weren’t handing out candy here.

Kat reached into her bag and pulled out a random candy bar. “Do you think this is vegan? I’ve decided to be vegan.”

“I doubt it,” Rhianna said. “It’s probably full of lactose and cholesterol and GMOs.”

“And a bunch of calories and gluten and sugar,” Sam added.

Like most kids their age, as well as many adults who were old enough to know better, their knowledge of chemistry and biology was heavily misinformed by advertising and fad diets. Carl was no more certain of the candy’s ingredients than the girls were, but he liked candy, so he figured they couldn’t be all bad.

“If you don’t want it, I’ll take it,” Todd said.

Carl made the same magnanimous offer, but Kat ignored them both and dropped the candy back in her bag.

A gray van, its drab color even more muted by the yellowish streetlights, rolled past the stop sign, barely slowing at the corner before turning right.

“They’re supposed to stop at these things,” Rhianna said, glaring at the retreating taillights. “Don’t they know there are kids walking around out here?”

There were kids in the van, too, which might explain why the woman driving it was distracted. They were probably from one of the nearby condominiums or apartment blocks. You couldn’t do Trick-or-Treat in some those. They had rules against it, so parents drove the kids to the subdivisions where they could dress up and beg for candy with their house-dwelling friends from school.

“Which way do you want to go now?” Sam asked, her head turning left and right.

Todd pointed. “That way. The next street over has the house with that guy who always turns his front yard into a cemetery.”

“Yeah, I remember that one,” Kat said. “He dressed up like a vampire last year.”

“The fangs looked real,” Todd said. “Maybe he really is a vampire.” His tone was half-joking. It was also half-nervous, which seemed odd since he was so eager to go there. Carl understood, though. He knew vampires weren’t real, but that didn’t stop them from being scary, and scary could be fun in small, safe doses.

“Don’t be such a child,” Rhianna scolded him. She was older and wiser than he was by almost three full years. “Vampires are pretend. Besides, he dressed up like a wizard a few years ago.”

“You have to admit; he is a bit weird,” Sam said.

“Why? Because he dresses up for Halloween? A lot of adults do that.”

This was true. Some of the parents walking around tonight were in costume. They usually waited on the sidewalk while the kids under their ostensible care ventured forth to collect their sugary bounty. Carl had seen a coven of witches, a scattering of superheroes along with their villainous counterparts, and a Minnie Mouse who had been leaning on a mailbox while smoking a cigarette when he passed her.

“He’s not a creeper,” Kat said. “They put those in an online database, and he’s not on it.”

“You checked?”

“Yeah. Last year.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s weird.”

They all laughed.

There were only two houses before the next corner, and neither faced this slightly wider road. They were oriented backyard to backyard so that, although they were next to one another, they had different street addresses.

Rhianna, in the lead, turned right. Several houses showed welcoming lights for Trick-or-Treaters.

“That’s it,” Todd said, pointing.

The L-shaped, single-story house he indicated was three doors down and on the other side of the street. All the houses in the neighborhood were similar, but the subdivision was old enough for each to have acquired a unique personality due to the efforts of its serial owners. Fake beams gave this one a kind of Tudor cottage look, which few others had. Two large live oaks, wearing long, gray-green beards of Spanish moss, passed their long years on either side of its driveway. They were probably here before the houses were built thirty years ago. Beyond them, a lamppost cast a soft white glow. It wasn’t one of the tall ones with large lights that the city owned. Those were spaced every second house on alternate sides of the street. This one was much shorter and stood where the sidewalk met the narrower concrete path to the home’s front door. A man was sitting there, reading a book under the porch light.

Behind the lamppost was a graveyard. Mist from a fog-making machine, hidden somewhere in the landscaping, drifted over it. Headstones of painted Styrofoam looked almost real in the misty, dim light. In front of the largest of them, a plastic skeleton was frozen in the act of crawling from its grave.

It was cool and creepy.

“Okay,” Rhianna said. “We can do that side first and then cross the street and come back to do the houses on this one.”

The two houses before the one with the graveyard were participating, but each only supplied one small piece of candy, and Carl’s bag remained far from full. They could stay out another hour, though, so he was sure he’d end up with a good haul. He already had enough sugar-laden treats for a week of sweet stomachaches.

As they got closer to the front yard cemetery, Carl noticed more spooky decorations. A ceramic skull grinned at passersby from its perch atop a shallow, concrete birdbath. Its eye sockets glowed blue from a lamp inside. A large, plastic bat was hanging upside down from a low, twisted branch of one of the gnarled live oaks. A battered witch’s broomstick leaned against the trunk. A framed skull face with shifting eyes was hanging from a wall, and something like a tall scarecrow, wearing a dark, hooded cloak that fluttered in the almost nonexistent breeze, was standing near the mailbox.

The guy who lived here must really like Halloween.

As Carl and the rest arrived, six younger kids were just leaving. An adult Batman eating a lollipop and a Catwoman pushing a stroller met them by the short lamppost. As the chattering gaggle headed toward the next house, the scarecrow’s head turned to watch them.

It wasn’t a decoration! He was about to tell Todd, when the hooded figure turned back and seemed to look directly at Carl. He couldn’t be sure. There was only a suggestion of a face. Something like a black stocking mask appeared to be covering it.

Carl paused in appreciation. What a great costume! Simple, but effective, although he couldn’t be sure exactly what it was meant to be. It looked a bit like the classic personification of Death except for the lack of a long-handled scythe. Whatever it was meant to be, it was definitely spooky, but if the guy wearing it was a parent, who was he waiting for? Carl and his companions were the only kids here now.

“Come on,” Todd said. He was already halfway to the front door.

“Great costume, mister,” Carl called to the man by the mailbox. When he turned back, the girls were retreating with fuller bags and Todd was stepping forward.

The man under the porchlight stood from his chair to hand out his offerings. He was wearing a white shirt, white gloves, and a black cloak. A large pendant with a ruby-colored stone was hanging from a red ribbon around his neck. He had short, dark hair, gray around the edges. Carl guessed he was about sixty-five, or a well-maintained seventy. Next to him was a small table covered by a black cloth. It held a big, orange bowl of mixed candy and a hardback book, waiting to be reopened at a cloth marker. The mist from the fog machine was thicker here. It had a spicy smell like cloves and cinnamon—a bit like apple pie but not as sweet.

“Good evening,” the vampire said in a vaguely Eastern European accent. Todd was right. The fangs did look real.

“Trick or treat, Todd said.

“Same here,” Carl said, opening his pillowcase bag as he stepped next to his friend.

The vampire’s eyes locked on his. “You must say it.” He used the same accent he had for his greeting, like that from an old black-and-white movie. He really did get into this Halloween thing. Unfortunately, Carl wasn’t sure what he wanted him to say.

“It?”

“The words.”

Carl offered one. “Please?”

The vampire smiled. “That’s a good word and quite appropriate in many circumstances, but this day has a special tradition. There is an agreement to be made. You must say the words.”

Carl beamed as he finally realized what the man meant. “Trick or treat.”

“Quite right. I accept your proposal. Now, we must decide on the appropriate payment.” He dug into a bowl of mixed candy, pulled out three fruit-flavored things for Todd, and dropped them in his waiting bag. “And for you, my polite young pirate,” he said to Carl. He paused to look at him a moment and then reached back into the bowl, pulling out three chocolate bars with nuts in them. They were Carl’s favorite type of candy. It had to be a coincidence.

“Thanks!” Carl said.

“You are most welcome,” said the vampire.

“I like your decorations,” Carl added.

“It is kind of you to say so,” the vampire said.

Carl was about to turn away when the sound of rustling branches and sudden movement startled him. Something quick and furry bounded from the bushes by the door and landed in the vampire’s chair just as he was about to sit back down. Between the almost too realistic vampire, the spooky surroundings, and the sudden appearance of the thing from the bushes, Carl almost had what his parents had referred to as an ‘accident’ when he was ten years younger. Fortunately, he was older now and had sufficient control to preclude such embarrassment.

The vampire seemed surprised, but not as shocked as Carl was.

“What is it, Granny?” the man said to the squirrel chattering from his chair. It was a gray squirrel, smaller and lighter-colored than the fox squirrels that were common around Carl’s old home in Michigan, but otherwise much the same. This one must be at least partly tame. The vampire guy probably fed it. Some people did. Other’s treated them as pests.

“Granny?” Carl said.

“That’s just what I call her,” the man said, his vampire accent suddenly forgotten. “Her name in Squirrel is unpronounceable. Actually, I’m not sure it’s really her name. It may just be the sound the other squirrels make when they want her attention, but since she normally answers, it’s much the same. I call her Granny because she’s twelve-years-old. That’s quite elderly for a squirrel. Hawks, owls, cats, or cars kill most of them long before that, but Granny is a clever old girl. She’s good at spotting danger. Something’s upsetting her.”

The squirrel was the same age as Carl, but it was old, and he was just a kid. It seemed unfair, somehow.

The man peered out into the darkness, searching for the cause for the squirrel’s anxiety.

“Is it your pet?” Carl asked.

“No,” the vampire replied distractedly. “But she lives here. He pointed up at the twisted branches of one of the live oaks. “Up there, actually.”

The suburban rodent uttered a raspy, repeating noise somewhere between a cough and a bark. It sounded impatient, insistent, as if frustrated by the man’s lack of comprehension.

“Yes, there’s definitely something bothering her. I doubt it’s an owl. I haven’t heard one tonight, and she knows how to avoid them. Did you see anything nearby that might be spooking her?”

Florida is home to several predators—bears, bobcats, alligators—but Carl had never seen anything larger than a raccoon in the neighborhood, and only one of those. It had been messily harvesting edible sundries from a trashcan one night, but that was over a month ago.

“I don’t think so.”

The squirrel continued to chatter while the man scanned his front yard with intense scrutiny. He paused, gazed out toward the road, and inhaled deeply, as if trying to catch a scent. A bemused expression came over his face.

“Did you notice anything odd? Something that didn’t seem to make sense?”

“Well, there was that guy near the mailbox.” Carl said it as if it were a joke. It seemed ridiculous for a squirrel to be spooked by a guy in a costume.

“What guy?” Todd said. “I didn’t see anyone.”

“By the mailbox. He was just standing there. I thought he was a Halloween decoration, at first.” Carl turned to point him out, but the trunk of one of the large trees was blocking his view of where the man had been.

“We have to go,” Todd urged his friend. “Rhianna is way ahead of us, and my mom said we were supposed to stay together.”

“What did he look like?” the vampire asked Carl.

Carl realized that he didn’t know. In fact, he only assumed it was a man because the cloak hung straight down without any obvious curves to suggest otherwise.

“It was just some guy in a long, black cloak.”

Todd moved to the side to look around the tree. “I still don’t see anyone,” he said. He started walking toward the sidewalk. “Come on, Carl, we need to catch up with the girls.”

“No!” the vampire said. “Stay here.” The order carried authority and the promise of dire consequences if he failed to comply. Todd pulled up short as if he were on a leash.

Apparently satisfied that his warning had been heeded, the man turned his attention back to the young pirate. “Tell me, Carl, what did the man’s face look like?”

“I didn’t see it. He was wearing something like a stocking mask, a black one. What difference does it make? It was just some guy in a good costume.” It was only now that Carl began to wonder if the mysterious figure was a result of his creative imagination, but if it was trying to tell him something, he had no idea what it was.

The agitated squirrel twitched its tail and scolded the vampire with another round of chattering.

“Yes, Granny; I know.”

“You know who he is?” asked Carl, more than a little confused.

“It’s more a what than a who, depending on how you look at things, but I’m fairly sure I do. Now, I need to decide if I should attempt to do something about it.”

“But who is he?”

“A figment of your imagination; a fairly substantial one, it seems. What did you see him doing?”

“Nothing. He was just standing by your mailbox, and then he kind of looked at me.” If this was a case of his peculiar ability, it was not like any of his previous experiences. His imaginary helpers had never been so enigmatic before. “I suppose I could have imagined him,” Carl admitted. “I, um, I do that, sometimes. But he looked real.”

“Oh, he’s real enough,” the vampire said. “What he represents is, anyway. I’m fairly sure of that. He’s a harbinger, a premonition, a portent, an anthropomorphic personification of existential foreboding.”

Carl considered himself to be reasonably logical, and his parents had always encouraged him to question things that did not seem to make sense. What the vampire said sounded like pure BS to him. His dad had a different, more polite word for such things. Carl had never heard anyone else say it, but he used it now.

“That’s gibberish.”

“Quite true. Well spotted. You’re obviously a bright young man. Let me rephrase. That man out there is a subjective manifestation of an intuitive probability assessment. He’s an unconscious insight into the quantum uncertainty of causation. That’s also gibberish, but it’s probably a bit less so. For what it’s worth, Granny agrees with you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course not. I’d blame television, but it goes back much further than that. Now hush, while I consider this.”

Todd began to fidget. “Come on, Carl. The girls are already on the other side of the street.”

“Be still!” the vampire ordered. “One way or another, this should only take a few more minutes. Consider the time an investment.”

Todd stayed where he was, but he obviously wasn’t happy about it.

The man pondered a moment longer, and then said, “I suspect you have a rare talent, but it’s one you have little control over yet. Hmmm…. For you to interact with it, I think we’ll have to apply a narrative form that suits this setting.” Carl didn’t have a clue of what the man was talking about. “Unfortunately, I can think of only one thing to try,” the vampire continued. “It may not work.”

“What happens if it doesn’t?” Carl asked, now spooked far beyond the point of enjoyment.

“Some part of you has noticed something important. If you fail to act, the result will be something you won’t like. I can’t be sure of much more than that.”

“So, what do I need to do?”

“I think your best bet is to offer the faceless man a treat to forego whatever dire circumstance he represents. That bag of candy in your hand may suffice.”

“All of it?”

“This is no time to be stingy, Carl. Trust me on this.”

“And something bad will happen if I don’t, right?”

“Almost certainly.”

“But you said he isn’t real.”

“I said no such thing. I said you imagined him. That’s an entirely different thing. Reality is far more complex than most people realize. What he represents is real, and the manifestation standing by the road is real enough for you to deal with. Go deal with it. Your friend should wait here.”

“Come on, Carl,” Todd said. “This is creeping me out. And it’s stupid. We’re missing out on a lot of free candy.”

Somehow, Todd’s voice sounded different, and it wasn’t just because of the mask. There was a sense of distance to it, as if he was talking from the other side of a room, or maybe over a phone rather than from right next to him. It was eerie, and it somehow made Carl feel that what he was about to do was far from stupid. It was deadly serious.

Carl grasped Todd’s shoulder. “Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

Carl raced to the curb, hoping the faceless man would be gone, that he had never actually been there, that Carl had simply imagined him, and that the guy dressed like a vampire was just going a bit too far with his spooky Halloween act.

He suspected none of these would be the case, though, and it came as no surprise to see the faceless man still standing there. The headlights of a passing car did not so much illuminate as outline him, as if his dark shape was standing against a lighter background.

The shadowed absence of a face turned toward Carl. He had never been so scared in his life, and it took him a moment to remember what he came here to do.

He held out his bag of candy, partly as an offering and partly to put something between him and the cloaked figure.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said nervously.

What do you want, small human?

The voice was as cold as a morgue and as hollow as an empty grave. Carl got the impression that the words travelled from the faceless man to his ears without disturbing any air molecules in between.

“Please, sir. Take this treat.”

I am not here for treats.

“It’s a treat to prevent a trick.”

I do not trick. I am the herald of fate. I foreshadow the unfolding of events.

“What events?”

Tonight, in this place, twelve years of life are due.

A chill shot up Carl’s spine. He was twelve, and he very much wished to be thirteen next year. His hand shook as he again proffered his bag of candy.

“It’s a tradition. It’s Halloween. I give you a treat and you leave, right?”

You wish to bargain?

“Yes, I suppose so.”

The figure’s arm moved, and a ghostly hand paused by the bag.

Your offering is insufficient. Twelve years are due. This is nonnegotiable.

Carl’s mind raced. He didn’t want to die, and certainly not now. He hadn’t really planned his future, but he expected he’d have one.

“Could you come back in like eighty years? I’ll pay you then.”

The years are due tonight.

Carl searched his mind for an idea but couldn’t find one. He looked up and down the street. A group of younger kids across the road was heading this way. Rhianna, Kat, and Sam were one house behind them, passing under one of the large streetlamps. The gray van he saw earlier, or one much like it, turned onto this street, its headlights sweeping the front yard of the house on the corner. What he didn’t see was anything that might help him.

Todd yelled behind him. “There’s Rhianna!”

His friend raced toward the road, heedless of the approaching van. He probably couldn’t see it because of the Stormtrooper helmet.

Carl saw the catastrophic near future in his mind. He froze as if something had paralyzed every muscle and nerve in his body. Fractions of seconds passed like sluggish minutes as the inevitable began to unfold before his startled eyes. He knew what was about to happen and could do nothing to prevent it.

Unexpectedly, a fast and furry object flew out the tree and bounced off his chest. It wasn’t big or heavy, but it did make him stumble. His numbed feet became tangled, and he tripped, tumbling into Todd just as he was about to pass him. They both fell, spilling their bags of candy and landing on the ground by the curb.

The van passed.

Carl struggled to his feet. His knee hurt from hitting the concrete, and his three-cornered pirate hat lie squashed in the road. When he went to pick it up, he noticed the squirrel. It was unmistakably dead. The van had crushed its head.

He looked up and saw the van swerve into the wrong lane and stop. Kids from the group across the road began piling inside. The driver probably didn’t even realize she had just killed the squirrel, and may not have cared if she did. Road kill was as common as sunny days around here.

The dark figure drifted toward him and hovered. If it had feet, they didn’t reach all the way to the ground. A faint, brief breeze rustled the branches overhead.

The sum is correct. The offer is accepted.

Carl heard a scraping sound behind him, and turned to see what it was. Todd was trying to brush grass stains from his white plastic armor. He seemed unhurt. When Carl turned back, the herald of fate was gone.

“Whoa, that was lucky,” his friend said. “If you hadn’t bumped into me, I could have been killed.”

“It was not luck,” the man dressed as a vampire said, slowly walking toward them. “It was a choice. Fate is made of them.” He looked at the squirrel’s body with moist, sad eyes.

“I’m sorry about your squirrel,” Carl said.

“What squirrel?” Todd asked. He was busily scooping the spilled candy into his bag. He missed some of it. He really couldn’t see well with his head inside that helmet and probably wasn’t aware of most of what had just happened.

“Granny made a choice,” the vampire said. “I can only guess about her reasons for it. Squirrels can be impulsive creatures. Go, now. Join your friends. I will do what needs to be done here.”

He stepped to the body of the squashed squirrel and unceremoniously picked it up by the tail. Carl watched as he walked back toward his house and then looked around for the cloaked figure. There was no sign of him. Carl was certain he hadn’t been real, at least not in a physical sense, but what mattered was that he had been there when he was needed to provide a warning. Carl just wished his imagination hadn’t been so ridiculously creative about it.

“Was that weird vampire guy carrying a dead squirrel by the tail?” Todd said.

“It was Granny,” Carl said. “I think she just saved your life.”

“That was you, Carl. You’re the one who stopped me. Come on, here’s your bag. We’ll split the candy when we get back to my house.”

Carl took it without looking. He was still watching the retreating vampire as he closed his front door behind him.

Todd grabbed his arm and tugged to get him moving. He seemed totally unaware of what had just happened, or at least unbothered by it. Carl glanced at the bloodstain on the road and then at his undamaged friend. How much of all this had been real? The cloaked guy couldn’t have been, but the squirrel probably was. And what about the vampire guy? He had to have been real, didn’t he? He was definitely weird, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially not on Halloween.