Rudy just looked at him with his mouth open, his big eyes goggling. Brian had to laugh at that.
“I got another idea,” Lon said. “There’s a ladder out back of the Hummer. We go up on the roof of the Hummer, we pitch the eggs high, so they hit his roof. He’ll come outside to see what the hell, then we pepper him with ‘em!”
“I don’t wanna go up on this thing,” Brian said. He heard a new sound, then, from the house—a clattering metal sound. Was someone in there? “I heard something…”
“You’re being all scared little bitch on Halloween?” Lon sneered, showing his big mouthful of huge brown teeth with braces on them and too much gums. “’Oh, there’s ghosts in the scary house!’”
“Fuck off!”
Lon looked at him, teeth bared in a different way now. “You want to get your ass kicked?”
Brian, who was thirteen, was almost as big as Lon, and not bad in a fight. “Don’t be so sure how that’d turn out, dude.”
“Oh, come on, Brian,” Terry said. “Let’s do it. Then we can put on the stupid masks and get our goddamn candy and see if Dee’s having a party.”
“I don’t think we’re invited to that. But whatever.” It was some kind of a plan. And he was no fan of McGrue, who’d yelled at him for skateboarding around a supermarket parking lot.
“Goddamn candy, hells-yeah,” said little Rudy, making them all laugh.
Some people thought Brian and Lon were too old to trick-or-treat, but dude, free candy is free candy, especially good after a hit on a bong, and Brian had a mask in his coat pocket of Donald Trump with fangs.
“Come on,” Lon said, and led the way around back. There was a ladder fixed to the back of the house, so workers could go up to that big metal utility box on the backside of the roof. It was tricky getting the four cartons of eggs up, and one fell, busting most of the shells.
But they managed to get three cartons up, and then Lon said, “Whoa! The windows busted out!”
It was true, the back-dormer window had been shattered, and there was broken glass on the roof.
“I think I heard someone in there, before,” Brian said.
“This shit was probably done a long fucking time ago,” Lon said. He had his cheap rubber Scream mask hanging from its rubber band down his back, till it was time for trick or treating, and Brian felt a clutching feeling in his gut from the way the mask was looking at him. Like some evil face just lived on Lon’s back. “They’re gone,” Lon went on, looking inside. “Let’s check it out. Might be some stuff we can sell. My uncle sells metal stuff. Leave the egg cartons on the roof.”
Caught up in a sense of adventure made sharper by Halloween, the others followed Lon inside. Brian hesitated—then decided he had to go along or he’d never hear the end of it.
Inside, those big humming metal drums that pointed out over the valley. And there was another row of them downstairs. “Man, that shit is loud tonight,” Terry said.
Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum. HUM HUM HUM HUM.
They looked around, saw nothing but stuff they were afraid to touch. Lon led them to the exposed-wood stairs going down to the first floor—and they all stared down at the man in the funny old suit.
He had a short white beard, a gray cap, and muddy shoes, and he was adjusting something that looked like an old movie projector on a tripod. A little ways away a microphone-type thing with something like crystals on it hung from a string. It was glowing…
“I told you somebody was in here!” Brian burst out, louder than he intended.
The character tinkering with the gizmo turned and looked up at them. “It’s ready to go!” he called, shouting over the rising hum. “I must open the way! Get out, the way you came! Get out! Stay away! It’ll shut soon and you’ll be all right if you just go!”
“Fucking burglar telling us to get out!” Lon shouted. There was something strange about Lon’s voice. And there was something strange about Lon’s face. It was twitching. And his eyes seemed like an animal’s, and he was breathing really hard.
“That guy might have a gun!” Terry yelled.
Lon was putting his mask on, maybe thinking of scaring the burglar away so he could take all his stuff….
He started down the stairs.
But now Brian was looking at the space in front of the tripod machine. It was glowing. It was an oval kind of picture of something hanging in space in front of the closed front door. Through it, Brian could see another place,
“It’s one of those Halloween gimmicks people put up to scare you!” Bud yelled. “It’s bullshit! It’s like a video!”
But Brian plain did not believe that. It didn’t just look real, it felt real—he could feel that place from here. It was like he could touch those things from a distance. And they felt nasty.
It was some other…real…place—where electric snakes flew around, and a giant slug wriggled by—and a little way further in, there was a man in a cage, waving.
Hum. Hum. Hum. Hum—HURT YOU. HUM-HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU.
“I’m coming, Syl!” the burglar yelled. “I’m coming! Open the repulsor!” He rushed at the oval…and jumped through. He was there, in the place beyond, dodging a flying giant worm, sprinting to the cage—which opened up to receive him. The cage floated upward, carrying the two figures away from the portal.
But something was coming at the portal—like it was outside a window and about to break through to Brian and the other kids. It was reptilian goatish thing saying, “HUM. HURT YOU. HUM. HURT YOU.”
And now it was leaping through, and other things came with it, and Little Rudy was screaming as Lon picked Rudy up and carried him like a sack of potatoes under his arm down the stairs toward the portal…
Was Lon insane going down there?
Brian forced himself to look away and scrambled up the stairs, yelling, “Come on, you guys!”
He heard Bud and Terry and Rudy screaming. But he couldn’t go back. The look on that thing’s face…that much pure evil, that much rage, that much lust for killing…You see something like that, you ran.
In seconds Brian was through the window, down the ladder and sprinting to find the nearest help.
McGrue called Mary Sue again, and again she didn’t answer, and then he remembered that last year she’d taken her grand nieces to a Halloween party for kids at the YWCA and that’s probably where she was tonight. He only had her land-line number, didn’t know her cell. Dammit. She might listen to him—she knew him well enough to know he wasn’t crazy. Cranky, sure. Crazy, no.
He was having a hard time thinking things through right now. He needed to talk to someone. That hum seemed to get louder and louder. McGrue had barely slept the night before. And when he had slept—nothing but nightmares.
If he could talk to Mary Sue…
He hadn’t gone out since he’d seen those things in Tillinghast’s window. He just felt like he was too shaken up. He needed to process what he’d seen. Some kind of trick photography? A prank? But somehow, he knew…it just wasn’t that.
For the dozenth time he thought about calling the cops. And again, he told himself they’d only laugh at him, or they’d investigate and find nothing, because Tillinghast had shut the thing down and gone away.
But Tillinghast was coming back.
McGrue figured he could drive away somewhere. But he had lived next to Mary Sue for years, he liked her, and he couldn’t leave her with that door into hell going on within spitting distance of her house.
So, he lay huddled in his bed, in his bedroom, listening, thinking. The house lights were out except for a lamp in the back bedroom. No trick or treaters bothering him so far.