Nevertheless he stepped forward. Something had to cure him of his agony. He stayed on the treacherous pavement of the side street, for the roadway was skinless, a mass of bricks and mud. Houses pressed close to him, almost forcing him into the road. Where their doors and windows ought to be were patches of new brick. The far end of the street was impenetrably dark.
When he reached it, he saw why. A wall at least ten feet high was built against the last houses. Peering upward, he made out the glint of broken glass. He was closed in by the wall and the plugged houses, in the midst of desolation.
Without warning—quite irrelevantly, it seemed—he remembered something he’d read about years ago while researching a noveclass="underline" the Mosaic ritual of the Day of Atonement. They’d driven out the scapegoat, burdened with all the sins of the people, into the wilderness. Another goat had been sacrificed. The images chafed together in his head; he couldn’t grasp their meaning—and then he realized why there was so much room for them in his mind. The aching nightmare was fading.
At once he was unable to turn away from the wall, for he was atrociously afraid. He knew why this nightmare could not have been acted out without him. Along the bricked-up street he heard footsteps approaching.
When he risked a glance over his shoulder, he saw that there were two figures. Their faces were blacked out by the darkness, but the glints in their hands were sharp. He was trying to claw his way up the wall, though already his lungs were laboring. Everything was over—the sleepless nights, the poison in his brain, the nightmare of responsibility—but he knew that while he would soon not be able to scream, it would take him much longer to die.
PUMPKIN HEAD
by Al Sarrantonio
Born May 25, 1952, Al Sarrantonio is another of a growing conclave of horror writers who live in the Bronx. Lovecraft foresaw such things. For six years Sarrantonio edited science fiction, fantasy, horror and westerns for Doubleday, before leaving his position there this past year to become a full-time writer. His career is off to a quick start, with sales to Heavy Metal, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Analog, Amazing, Twilight Zone Magazine, Whispers, Fantasy Book, Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine, as well as to such anthologies as Shadows, Chrysalis, Ghosts, Terrors, and Death. He has just finished work on two horror/fantasy novels, The Worms and The Wood, and is assembling a collection of his short fiction, entitled Toybox. All of which proves that reading too much of this sort of thing can warp a pure young mind.
An orange and black afternoon.
Outside, under baring but still-robust trees, leaves tapped across sidewalks, a thousand fingernails drawn down a thousand dry blackboards.
Inside, a party beginning.
Ghouls loped up and down aisles between desks, shouting “Boo!” at one another. Crepe paper, crinkly and the colors of Halloween, crisscrossed over blackboards covered with mad and frightful doodlings in red and green chalk: snakes, rats, witches on broomsticks. Windowpanes were filled with cut-out black cats and ghosts with no eyes and giant O’s for mouths.
A fat jack-o’-lantern, flickering orange behind its mouth and eyes and giving off spicy fumes, glared down from Ms. Grinby’s desk.
Ms. Grinby, young, bright, and filled with enthusiasm, left the room to chase an errant goblin-child, and one blackboard witch was hastily labeled “Teacher.” Ms. Grinby, bearing her captive, returned, saw her caricature, and smiled. “All right, who did this?” she asked, not expecting an answer and not getting one. She tried to look rueful. “Never mind; but I think you know I don’t really look like that. Except maybe today.” She produced a witch’s peaked hat from her drawer and put it on with a flourish.
Laughter.
“Ah!” said Ms. Grinby, happy.
The party began.
Little bags were handed out, orange and white with freshly twisted tops and filled with orange and white candy corn.
Candy corn disappeared into pink little mouths.
There was much yelling, and the singing of Halloween songs with Ms. Grinby at the piano, and a game of pin the tail on the black cat. And then a ghost story, passed from child to child, one sentence each:
“It was a dark and rainy night—”
“—and… Peter had to come out of the storm—”
“—and he stopped at the only house on the road—”
“—and no one seemed to be home—”
“—because the house was empty and haunted—”
The story stopped dead at the last seat of the first row.
All eyes focused back on that corner.
The new child.
“Raylee,” asked Ms. Grinby gently, “aren’t you going to continue the story with us?”
Raylee, new in class that day; the quiet one, the shy one with black bangs and big eyes always looking down, sat with her small, grayish hands folded, her dark brown eyes straight ahead like a rabbit caught in a headlight beam.
“Raylee?”
Raylee’s thin pale hands shook.
Ms. Grinby got up quickly and went down the aisle, setting her hand lightly on the girl’s shoulder.
“Raylee is just shy,” she said, smiling down at the unmoving top of the girl’s head. She knelt down to face level, noticing two round fat beads of water at the corner of the girl’s eyes. Her hands were clenched hard.
“Don’t you want to join in with the rest of us?” Ms. Grinby whispered, a kindly look washing over her face. Empathy welled up in her. “Wouldn’t you like to make friends with everyone here?”
Nothing. She stared straight ahead, the bag of candy, still neatly wrapped and twisted, resting on the varnished and dented desktop before her.
“She’s a faggot!”
This from Judy Linthrop, one of the four Linthrop girls, aged six through eleven, and sometimes trouble.
“Now, Judy—” began Ms. Grinby.
“Faggot!” from Roger Mapleton.
“A faggot!”
Peter Pakinski, Randy Feffer, Jane Campbell.
All eyes on Raylee for reaction.
“A pale little faggot!”
“That’s enough!” said Ms. Grinby, angry, and there was instant silence; the game had gone too far.
“Raylee,” she said, softly. Her young heart went out to this girl; she longed to scream at her, “Don’t be shy! There’s no reason, the hurt isn’t real, I know, I know!” Images of Ms. Grinby’s own childhood, her awful loneliness, came back to her and with them a lump to her throat.
I know, I know!
“Raylee,” she said, her voice a whisper in the party room, “don’t you want to join in?”
Silence.
“Raylee—”
“I know a story of my own.”
Ms. Grinby nearly gasped with the sound of the girl’s voice, it came so suddenly. Her upturned, sad little face abruptly came to life, took on color, became real. There was an earnestness in those eyes, which looked out from the girl’s haunted, shy darkness to her and carried her voice with them.
“I’ll tell a story of my own if you’ll let me.”
Ms. Grinby almost clapped her hands. “Of course!” she said. “Class,” looking about her at the other child-faces: some interested, some smirking, some holding back with comments and jeers, seeking an opening, a place to be heard, “Raylee is going to tell us a story. A Halloween story?” she asked, bending back down toward the girl, and when Raylee nodded yes she straightened and smiled and preceded her to the front of the room.