The moon blinked out of the clouds, and Jody saw what was, indeed, a red fox, regarding him with wary interest.
The fox became suddenly alert. As the moon’s nightlight was stolen again by clouds, the animal bolted away, seeming to jump into the gray and then darkness.
Jody stood rooted to his spot, trying not to cry.
Something was out there.
Something large and dark.
The bed of leaves shifted with heavy, creaking steps.
Something ice cold and long and thin brushed along his face in the darkness.
“I want to go home!” Jody blurted out in fear and despair.
The cold air was suddenly steamed with warmth.
Cold braces closed around Jody’s middle from behind.
He shrieked, and wrenched his body around.
He was blinded by something larger and brighter than the moon—a face staring down at him made out of a jack o’lantern, warm wet fog pushing from its triangular eyes and nose and impossibly wide, smiling mouth. A slight, mechanical chuff issued along with the sour, oily-smelling steam.
The slender mechanical steel arms tightened around Jody.
He shrieked again, a mournful sound swallowed by the trees and close night around him.
As he was carried away he saw, as the moon broke forth from the clouds again, on the forest floor, caught in gray light, the smashed leavings of a dropped pumpkin.
2
Another damn Halloween.
Len Schneider was beginning to work up a deep and real hatred for holidays in general, and this one especially. Halloween, he knew, meant nothing but trouble. He’d moved to Orangefield for lots of reasons—among them the fact that it had a real town with a genuine small-town feel—it was the only place he’d lived in the last twenty years that didn’t have a Walmart and wasn’t likely to get one. The people seemed friendly enough, but he’d found, as a police detective, that people were pretty much the same everywhere, from the inner city to Hometown, U.S.A. “People Are Funny,” Art Linkletter used to say, and one thing Len Schneider had learned after eighteen years in law enforcement was that they were anything but.
And now this thing came along—the thing he’d left Milwaukee to get away from…
“When was the last time you had a missing kid case?” he’d asked Bill Grant, the other detective on Orangefield’s police force. Grant had been at it a long time, too, but all of it in this town. In the year and a half Schneider had been here, he’d found Grant polite but almost aloof. No, aloof wasn’t the right word—it was almost like he wasn’t completely there. The two packs of cigarettes a day he smoked didn’t seem to help, and the emphysemic cough that went along with them, along with the booze he drank, had turned him almost sallow.
Schneider thought he was haunted himself, by what had happened back in Milwaukee—but this guy looked like he was haunted by real ghosts.
He’d tried to get Grant to open up a few times, once over a bottle of Scotch, but all that had happened was that he’d opened up himself, letting his own bile and anger out. He wondered if Grant even remembered, though he had a feeling he did. Behind the hollows of those eyes the cop-mind still worked—and Schneider had been told that Grant was very good at his job.
He had found out on his own later that Grant had begun to change after a case involving a local children’s book author, Peter Kerlan. Something about Kerlan’s wife being eaten alive by insects…
Grant was leaning back in his chair, his fingers idly drumming the neatly arranged desk in front of him. The man’s skin looked almost jaundiced. Just as Schneider was about to repeat his question, Grant said, without moving his eyes or head, “We’ve had a few over the years. They almost always turn up.”
“Ever anything…”
“Like yours?” Grant almost snapped. The confirmation that Grant not only remembered The Night of Scotch but had absorbed and catalogued everything that had gone on, startled Schneider.
“Yes, like mine,” Schneider replied evenly.
“Not unless you go back a long way. Long before you or me.”
Schneider waited for elaboration, but there was none.
“Any chance you’d like to take this one?” Schneider tried to keep his voice light, but knew he may have failed.
Another silence hung between them, and then Grant’s voice came out of the emaciated face again: “None.”
Schneider was swiveling toward his own desk with a sigh when he caught Grant leaning forward, his eyes finally giving him attention. He swiveled back, his hands on his knees.
Grant was staring at him, a bit too intently. His own yellow fingers had stopped drumming, and lay perfectly still on his desk blotter. Schneider suddenly saw the intelligence in the sunken light blue eyes.
“It’s got nothing to do with you,” Grant said, carefully. For the first time his gaze fell on Schneider as something more than a concept—Grant was actually looking at him. “It’s just that this one has that…aura around it. And, frankly, I couldn’t go through that again. There are things that happen around here that are perfectly normal, and then there are other things…”
“If you’re talking about the Kerlan murders—”
“That,” Grant shot back, “and other things. Usually around this time of year.”
“All right then, Bill.” Schneider moved to swivel back to his desk, but Grant’s eyes held him.
“There are worse things than a kid getting killed,” Grant said quietly.
Sudden anger flared in Schneider, but he saw that Grant seemed to be looking inward, not at him anymore.
Grant seemed to catch himself, and his sallow neck actually reddened. He fumbled with the small notebook that lay neatly on his desk, opened and closed it.
“I’m sorry, Len,” Grant said, his voice lowered almost to a whisper. “I can imagine what that case of yours was like in Milwaukee. That kid’s parents, especially his father going insane. Wasn’t he some kind of genius or something?” He shook his head slowly from side to side; the flush of color had left his features. “There are some things you never forget. Sometimes I think about myself too much…” For a brief moment his neck reddened again. “Sorry…”
Then Grant leaned back in his chair again, his fingers drumming lightly on the neat desk.
The interview was over.
There are worse things than a kid getting killed…
“No, there aren’t,” Len Schneider said to himself, and loud enough for someone else to hear.
~ * ~
The kid might have been eleven or twelve. Without a face, it was hard to tell if he had been good-looking or not—sometimes by that age, you can tell how the features will set through the teen years. He looked like he was sleeping when they dug him up—resting his hand under his head; the face, or where it would have been, was turned into the dirt so that it looked like he had nuzzled into a pillow. The hand was covering a ragged hole in the boy’s head where his brains had literally been beaten in. He was still fully clothed, except for his shoes and socks—later they found that he had been undressed and then redressed by Carlton, who had kept the footwear—along with one of the boy’s toes—as souvenirs.
Jerry Carlton had almost boasted about it at his trial—his shaggy hair had been cut and combed, his red tie knotted, his eyes covered with mirrored sunglasses which, thank God, the judge had made him remove. He smiled through the whole proceeding, and played with his watch. He could fix a tractor, a television set, could build just about anything, and had murdered five boys in three states calling himself Carlton the Clown. He’d worn a different clown costume for each murder.