A bike swims into the light toward me. Front tire and paper bags visible first, then the paperboy, skinny and white. He pedals by, no eyes in the empty sockets. No clothes covering the bones of his arms. The skeleton’s hand dips into the bag, comes up with another paper, and flings it at the old man’s house. I duck as it goes by. The bike hits a bump. The bones clack together like dice in a cup. The welds on the bike are lumpy and big. It’s Bragg’s bike.
My knees go loose, and I think that it can see the four-quarter tip that doesn’t belong to me in my pocket, but it rides on until it’s under the streetlight among the foggy forms, where it becomes mist itself and disappears. Did I imagine it? I don’t think so. Ghosts are ghosts, no matter what day of the year it is.
Tomorrow is Friday, October 31. Halloween and Samhain, when the ghosts have their powers behind them, when the bigger evils are let loose. Bragg knows my house. He knows my house and he hates me.
Mike says, “So, what are you going to do?”
I grip the phone tightly against my ear. The lights in my room are out. Through my open bedroom window the full moon pours down on Bragg’s slice of Ireland, little bits of fog creeping along the ground through the oak he’d planted in the spring that weren’t any higher than my waist then but now reach at least to the top of his makeshift henge ten feet up, and although their leaves fell off a week ago, the branches seem muscular, bulging at the joints like the welds on Bragg’s bike. The moon transforms everything into black and white. Straight shadows, alive and dark and writhing in the mist. I think of Bragg lying in his coffin. Not dead, though. Just gone for a bit.
“I’m reading,” I say. “Samhain is the one night of the year when the other world becomes visible to mortals, and evil is allowed to come out. I’ve learned a lot about it, but not much about what to do to protect myself. One of the books says people used to put out the fires in their homes and then relit them from Druid bonfires lit on that night, or they slaughtered cattle.”
“That keeps away evil?” Mike sounds like he’s trying not to laugh. I’d laugh too, if I heard this from anyone else, but I’d seen what happened in Bragg’s yard.
He says, “I can come over, if you want. My folks are playing bridge. They won’t even know I’m gone.”
“No, I’ve got to figure this out for myself. You don’t need to get involved.”
“Sure, Scotty,” he says. “Is your mom going to let you go trick or treating this year? My dad says he thinks I’m getting too old for it, but I figure as long as I’m not in high school, I ought to be able to.”
I close my eyes. Did he hear anything I said? The afterimage of Bragg’s moonlit yard moves across my vision like a negative. “I’ve got bigger things on my mind.”
Mike says, “Yeah, I forgot. Well, see ya.”
The door to my room clicks, and I open my eyes just in time for the lights to come on.
“For crying out loud, Scotty,” says Mom. “You’ve got the window wide open.”
She leans across me, the softness of her belly pressing against my arm as she pulls the window down. Mom’s big. When she sits on the edge of my bed, the springs complain. “Did you get your homework done?”
This is one of her classic strategies when she wants to talk about something else. I always have my homework done.
“Yeah, right after my paper route,” where, for all I know, a skeleton is still delivering the news.
“Reading again?”
A pile of books I’d gathered in the past year sits on the desk in front of the window: a pocket guide to Irish mythology and another one of Irish folk and fairy tales, and a third one called Mythologies by William Butler Yeats. The rest were in a box under my desk.
She turns the Yeats book over in her hand. “You’re just collecting these for fun, right?” She clears her throat. “You’re not getting involved in a cult or anything like that, are you, not like the Bragg boy? You’ve been so distant lately.” Behind her glasses, she looks concerned.
I watch her for a second, not sure what she’s asking, then I realize she doesn’t know that Bragg scared me. She might even think we were friends.
“He wasn’t in a cult, really.”
Mom puts the Yeats book back on the desk. My notebook is open with some of my writing about Stonehenge and druids and Samhain, and beside that are the binoculars I’d used to watch Bragg. “He was into something.”
She looks at the books again. “I wish you’d spend this much time on your algebra.” With a grunt, she stands up. The bed slowly fills in the space where she’d been sitting. “You’re a good boy, Scotty. A little weird, but a good kid. I’ll get the costumes out of the closet. Nothing like a thorough scarefest to bug the Christian right. Some of that good, old-time religion.” She laughs and runs her hand through my hair before going out.
The books don’t help. I’d marked all the references to Samhain. It was the same old stuff. The spirits of those who’d died the proceeding year wandered the earth on that one night, and a passage opened for more evil things. Bragg’s demon from last year, I figure. Druids tried to ward them with offerings of food and drink, but I couldn’t see Bragg stopping to snack no matter what I set out. They built wicker men to be burnt, but that wasn’t to stop the dead. Lots of stories about evil spirits, fire-breathing goblins, and really creepy warnings, like if you hear footsteps behind you on Samhain, you shouldn’t look around because those are the footsteps of the dead, and if you look into their hollow eyes you will die.
Mom knocks this time as she comes in, carrying an armful of masks. She dumps them on the bed. “Everyone used to go trick-or-treating on Halloween when I was a girl.” A clown mask slides off the quilt onto the floor. She picks it up as she sorts through the pile. A werewolf, a vampire, a Richard Nixon, an alien, a pirate. “I always liked dressing up.” She puts a mask on and turns to me. It’s a princess face with a tiny crown that might fit a five year old. “In old times folks wore masks on Halloween to scare off the dead.”
I think about Bragg lying in his coffin, face pointed toward a heaven he’d never see. “What could be scarier than the dead, if they were walking around, I mean?”
Mom looks at me for a second, then she laughs so hard I think I’m going to have to call an ambulance. After a bit she settles down and takes off her glasses to wipe the steam from them. “Nobody has ever asked me that before. That’s the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about the costumes.”
I pick up the werewolf mask and put it on. The latex tastes dusty. “Maybe the masks weren’t to scare the dead, but to hide from them.” Suddenly, that sounds very true to me because the holiday rituals came from somewhere, from something. Mom doesn’t believe in anything, but she didn’t see what I saw in Bragg’s backyard. She didn’t hear his curses or take a breath of the green fog around him. In the olden days, they believed, though. And why would they wander around outside on a night that the dead were supposed to be loose? Wouldn’t they go to a church or hide in their houses? No! Because if they did, the dead would know where to find them. Instead, they put out the fires, disguised themselves, and walked, so they wouldn’t be home when the dead came. I can feel Bragg’s hand on my collar. His knuckles dig into my chest, and it’s all I can do to breathe. He says, “I know your house.”