All Hallows E-Book

Christopher Golden

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 513

Beschreibung

Perfect for fans of Stephen King and the 1980s nostalgia of Stranger Things. A gripping suburban nightmare from the New York Times-bestselling, Bram-Stoker Award-winning master of horror fiction. It's Halloween night, 1984, in Coventry, Massachusetts, and two families are unravelling. The Barbosas have opened their annual Haunted Woods attraction in the forest behind their house—the house they're about to lose. The Sweeneys are fighting about alcoholism and infidelity on their front lawn. Up the street, high-school senior Vanessa Montez is about to have her secrets exposed during the violent end to the neighbourhood's block party, while down the street, the truth about Ruth and Zack Burgess turns out to be even more horrifying than the rumours ever were. And all the while, mixed in with the trick-or-treaters of all ages, four children who do not belong are walking door to door, merging with the kids of Parmenter Road. Children in vintage costumes with faded, eerie makeup. Children who seem terrified, and who beg the neighbourhood kids to hide them away, to keep them safe from The Cunning Man. There's a small clearing in the woods now that was never there before, and a blackthorn tree that doesn't belong at all. These odd children claim that The Cunning Man is coming for them...and they want the local kids to protect them. But with families falling apart and the community splintered by bitterness, who will save the children of Parmenter Road? New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author Christopher Golden is best known for his supernatural thrillers set in deadly, distant locales...but in this suburban Halloween drama, Golden brings the horror home.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Christopher Golden and Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Tony Barbosa

Vanessa Montez

Barb Sweeney

Vanessa Montez

Barb Sweeney

Vanessa Montez

Rick Barbosa

Barb Sweeney

Charlie Sweeney

Rick Barbosa

Tony Barbosa

Alice Barbosa

Rick Barbosa

Vanessa Montez

Rick Barbosa

Barb Sweeney

Julia Sweeney

Vanessa Montez

Tony Barbosa

Rick Barbosa

Zack Burgess

Julia Sweeney

Charlie Sweeney

Barb Sweeney

Ruth Burgess

Vanessa Montez

Tony Barbosa

Rick Barbosa

Donnie Sweeney

Barb Sweeney

Ruth Burgess

Rick Barbosa

Tony Barbosa

Rick Barbosa

Vanessa Montez

Tony Barbosa

Alice Barbosa

Julia Sweeney

Donnie Sweeney

Rick Barbosa

Billie Suarez

Alice Barbosa

Vanessa Montez

Barb Sweeney

Sarah Jane

Chloe Barbosa

Tony Barbosa

Donnie Sweeney

Barb Sweeney

Brian Sweeney

Donnie Sweeney

Barb Sweeney

Vanessa Montez

Steve Koenig

Julia Sweeney

Chloe Barbosa

Tony Barbosa

Julia Sweeney

Tony Barbosa

Barb Sweeney

Vanessa Montez

Tony Barbosa

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Christopher Golden andavailable from Titan Books:

Road of Bones

Titan anthologies featuringChristopher Golden:

Dark Cities

Cursed

Hex Life

Christmas and Other Horrors

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All Hallows

Print edition ISBN: 9781803364520

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803364537

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: Sep 2023

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Christopher Golden, 2023. All Rights Reserved.

Christopher Golden asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Bracken MacLeod

TONY BARBOSA

In the woods behind Tony Barbosa’s house, the autumn leaves screened out so much daylight it seemed like dusk had already arrived. The paths through these woods had been his happy place for all the years he and his wife, Alice, had owned their house, and never more so than in October and November, when neighbors set fire to raked leaves during the day and the scent of their wood-burning stoves lingered on the chilly air at night. Alice had never been fond of autumn, had no real love of Halloween, and felt uneasy anytime he cajoled her into walking the trails that meandered through their woods. Too creepy, she said. He should have realized the first time she’d said it that their marriage would run into trouble.

He wiped a sheen of sweat off his brow and let out a breath.

Tony and Alice had enjoyed about two years of smooth sailing before they hit their first rough seas. The births of their two children had kept them afloat for a long time, but circumstances had become so difficult that he worried they were sinking now.

“Sinking,” he said quietly to himself. “Or sunk?”

“Dad?”

He turned to see Chloe headed toward him down the path, a big cardboard box that looked even bigger in the arms of a girl so short. Chloe had inherited big brown eyes and thick hair from her dad, but the diminutive stature she got from her mom.

“You talking to yourself back here?” she asked.

“First sign of madness,” he admitted. “But you’re not really crazy until you start answering yourself back.”

“You’re only half-crazy, then. Good to know.”

Tony felt the twinge of melancholy he always got when he looked at his now-seventeen-year-old daughter. She was a good kid—smart and confident and ambitious. Her mother’s daughter, really. Tony wished he could take credit. He and Chloe had been close until she turned twelve and decided her parents were idiots. The teenage animosity had lasted for years but had finally dissipated over the summer. Now she was just trying to navigate the sometimes whiplash-inducing back-and-forth of her parents’ relationship.

She set the box down. “What’ve we got here?”

“Open it. Let’s find out.”

Chloe tore into the box like it was Christmas morning instead of Halloween, but in the Barbosa house, October 31 was just as important as December 25. Sometimes even more so. During what Alice lovingly referred to as their daughter’s “hormonal years,” prepping the Haunted Woods every October was the one thing that had brought Tony and Chloe together. Barbosa’s Haunted Woods had taken on legendary status in town, enough so that the neighbors tended to get a little miffed about the traffic it brought to Parmenter Road.

When it had drawn mostly people from their own neighborhood, they’d all loved it. But now that the Haunted Woods brought people from all over town, dozens of cars clogging the street just as trick-or-treat was wrapping up for the night, some of the Barbosas’ neighbors weren’t as thrilled as they once had been.

Now it didn’t matter anymore. Tonight would be their swan song.

Chloe pulled a bunch of Bubble Wrap out of the box, digging deeper. “Hey! This is cool.”

She revealed a thin, almost skeletal hand and what appeared to be some kind of face mask, and at first, Tony didn’t recall having ordered them. With all the haunted attraction props they had accumulated over the eleven years they’d been doing this, he had plenty of skeletons and scary masks. Then Chloe stood and walked to the nearest oak tree, and it clicked for him. The rough pattern on the arm and the mask were imitation bark, the gray-brown hue meant to match the trees. When Chloe held the demonic tree face in place and the skeletal evil-tree arm up to the side of the oak’s trunk, Tony grinned like a little kid.

“That is going to freak people out,” he said. His most glowing review. After all, that was their great ambition.

They’d been putting the whole display together as a team since Chloe was six. She had loved it even then, never scared of the terrifying props. Her little brother, Rick, was thirteen years old and in the eighth grade, and he still refused to even walk through the Haunted Woods. Once it had been fear that drove the kid, but Tony thought now it was simple disinterest. Either that, or Rick thought of the Haunted Woods as “Dad and Chloe’s thing,” with himself and his mom on the outside.

And maybe that was okay. Tony and his daughter had Halloween and scary movies and the Haunted Woods, but Chloe had zero interest in going fishing with her father and brother. As a first-generation Portuguese American kid growing up in Quincy, on Boston’s south shore, Tony had gone fishing with his father, Silverio, almost every Saturday morning from the time he could hold a fishing pole until the day he got married. When Ricky had been born, Tony’s dad had been first to the hospital, beaming with pride. A machinist, he’d worked his body to ruin to support his family and always seemed exhausted to Tony, but that afternoon, holding his grandson in his arms and crowing about the day he would be able to take both his son and grandson fishing, Silverio Barbosa had never seemed more vividly alive.

Less than a year later, cancer had taken him. He had never taken his grandson fishing.

But even now, with Ricky a teenager, old enough to demand they call him Rick, Tony took the boy fishing on Saturday mornings. Sometimes they settled into silence, enjoying the solitude, and sometimes Tony reminisced about his dad and his childhood and tried to share what little wisdom he felt he’d acquired in his life till now.

So if Rick didn’t want anything to do with the Haunted Woods, wanted to leave that to his sister, that was more than okay. It was nice for Tony and Chloe to have something just for themselves, especially since Chloe was older, and while her grandfather had shown up at the hospital after her birth and pronounced her the most beautiful child he had ever seen, Silverio Barbosa had never declared any intention to one day take her fishing. Born in another time and another culture, he viewed that as entirely something the men did. Tony sometimes wondered if he had done the wrong thing, excluding Chloe from his fishing excursions with her little brother, but when it started, he had viewed it as time to bond with Rick and time for Alice to bond with Chloe.

He didn’t know what was right. He just tried to do his best by the people he loved.

This year had been a little different. It would be the last time, the end of the Haunted Woods, so he and Chloe had tried everything short of physical violence to get Rick involved and excited. He had made excuses, his disinterest clear. In the end, Tony didn’t mind—this thing had always been his and Chloe’s, and it seemed right that it would end that way. He hadn’t explicitly told her this would be the last one, but she lived in the same house, had eyes and ears and a little intuition. She knew how long he had been out of work before he’d finally found a new job in August, knew not to answer the phone to avoid the bill collectors. Tony and Alice casually mentioned to neighbors that they were “considering downsizing,” so maybe people wouldn’t realize they hadn’t had a choice. Chloe could see the writing on the wall.

“How many of those did we order?” Tony asked, admiring the tree demon again.

“There are three sets,” Chloe replied, studying the contents of the box. “The eyes glow—there’s a switch. If we get some soft blue lights angled just right and put them on those trees at the third bend in the path—”

“With one of the fog machines—”

“It’ll be perfect.”

Chloe had a smile full of mischief. Her eyes gleamed with delight that matched his own. People came to Barbosa’s Haunted Woods, donated money to whatever charity Tony and Chloe had chosen that year, and took a walk along the path that would scare the crap out of them.

“Happy Halloween, kid,” Tony said.

“Happy Halloween, Pops.”

He hoped she wouldn’t look up at him right then. She knew him too well. His little girl might not be his little girl anymore, but she’d see his pain. The pain of the kind of failure it took to raise your kids in a home like this one and then lose it.

“I’m still trying to get this banshee moving properly,” he said, turning to go back to his current task. As visitors rounded the second turn in the path, the banshee should have come shrieking along a thin wire, pale green funeral rags fluttering around its wraithlike body, but something had gummed up the wire and the banshee kept hitting a snag. There were two of them—the second one, near the exit from the Haunted Woods, was working perfectly, which made this even more frustrating.

“The scream is scary all by itself,” Chloe replied.

“Yeah. But I didn’t buy them for the scream. I bought them for the shock.”

The same could have been said for most of the props and animated mechanisms he’d accumulated over the years. Growing up, his love for Halloween had always been more about the experience than the candy. Running across neighbors’ front yards with a little bucket or pillowcase, he’d felt a delicious thrill no movie could provide. In those days, just like now, some neighbors would do nothing at all and some would way overdo it, but there had been a few who got it just right—a fog machine and creepy music, a little fake cemetery, an animatronic figure that would move or unleash an evil laugh at just the right moment.

On the street where he’d grown up, there’d been a family called the Shipkas, and Mr. Shipka had a scarecrow he would tie to the lamppost at the end of their driveway that he had hooked up to a speaker system. He hid inside with a microphone and peeked out the window, waiting for kids of just the right age and the perfect combination of innocence and fear. As they passed the scarecrow … it would talk to them. And the voice he would use …

A kid named Ed Korski had literally pissed himself. Tony had been there—both of them ten years old at the time—and once his own initial fear had passed, he had first laughed and then felt awful for Ed, who’d run home with his head down and skipped the following Halloween. Tony’s guilt for laughing had eventually subsided, but his fascination with the power of that moment—the rush of feeling so afraid and the relief when he had realized it was all just meant for fun—had stayed with him.

At sixteen, he’d begun working at the Haunted Farm over in Amesbury every autumn. It had been a glorious mix of scary attractions, a spooky hayride, a walk through “demon woods,” and an old barn converted to a “horror circus,” complete with clowns so scary that every night, people screamed. After the screaming would come laughter, and both the terrified patrons and the workers responsible would go home buzzing from the experience. When Tony was twenty-one, the farmer who leased the land to them every year passed away, and his kids wanted to sell the farm. The Haunted Farm lost its home, and the organizers discovered it was simply too much trouble to find a new one. They allowed it to die, but not before auctioning off every last plastic spider, bloody chain saw, demon mask, and fake gravestone. Tony had bought as much of that stuff as he could afford and stored it in his parents’ basement until he and Alice moved to Coventry. The house on Parmenter Road had the perfect backyard; the woods already had trails worn through them by decades of local kids.

Barbosa’s Haunted Woods was born.

Now it would die.

But Tony would make its last Halloween glorious.

“Coming through!” Chloe said.

Tony stepped off the path and let her by. She hurried past with the big shipping box in her arms.

“You want help with those?”

Chloe glanced over her shoulder, purple hair a veil across the left side of her face. “You think it’s my first day on the job? I got it. You get that banshee flying.”

Then she was gone, around the next bend. The trail snaked through the half acre of woods behind the house, up and down the incline amid the trees. Fall had arrived, but there were still enough leaves on the branches to screen out the view from one part of the trail to the next. Where the trees weren’t thick enough to keep people from seeing through to another part of the path, he’d curtained off the areas with black cloth. Where even that wasn’t enough, fog machines pumped dry ice mist into the air. In the dark, you could hear the screams, of course, but with the leaves and curtains and mist, and the way they staggered admissions, you could rarely see anyone else in the woods. Much creepier that way.

Tony loved his props and took great care of them. The most unsettling one was the glowing-eyed creepy doll with the cracked porcelain face who rocked back and forth on an antique carousel horse. There were zombies in cages, hooded witches, and hideous scarecrows with jack-o’-lantern heads. But what made Barbosa’s Haunted Woods so great were the volunteers. Many of them were local actors, but even the amateurs took the night very seriously. Props were one thing, but people made up like zombies and demons and whiteface clowns were what really got the screams going. The best were the spots where hissing zombies lunged up out of graves to claw at the feet of passersby.

His grandfather had drummed it into his skull that nothing could ever be perfect, but Tony had disagreed. Nothing could stay perfect, but if you were lucky and diligent, you could steal a few perfect moments in your life. This afternoon was one of them. Whatever else might be wrong, he had made the Haunted Woods as perfect as it could be, and he and Chloe would always have this memory.

With a huff that cleared his head, he turned his focus back to the guide wire for the banshee. He ran his fingers carefully over the wire. The spot where the prop kept snagging didn’t seem to be tree sap, so he guessed it must be bird shit. Disgusted, he wiped his fingers on the rag hanging from his belt. Bird shit might be zero fun, but it was a hell of a lot easier to clean off than sap would have been.

Tony turned and scanned the path for his toolbox. He kept a little bottle of industrial cleaner in the box. It wasn’t environmentally friendly, so he used it sparingly, but one little squirt and a scrub with the rag ought to do the trick.

Somewhere over his left shoulder, a branch snapped, Chloe coming back.

“That was quick,” Tony said, crouching to dig around the toolbox. He snagged the squirt bottle and when he straightened up, his knee cracked louder than the broken branch. “Jesus. I’m getting old.”

Chloe didn’t argue with him, and that sort of stung. He was only forty-five, after all.

Tony turned, ready to feign insult, but his daughter was nowhere in sight. He glanced into the woods, toward the spot where the snapping sound had originated. Black cloth curtains rippled, blocking his view, but behind that cloth, dry leaves rustled and crunched as someone scuttled away.

“Funny girl.” Tony grinned. Occasionally, he and Chloe would try to spook each other back here in the woods while they were setting up their scares.

A whisper came from behind the black cloth.

It wouldn’t be dark for hours yet, but the shadows were deep back here, and the curtains made them deeper. Tony chose his steps carefully, creeping toward the edge of the path. He would have loved to scare the crap out of Chloe, but the leaves were crunchy. If he tried to grab her, he’d end up pulling down the curtain, and there was no time to rehang it.

That whispering came again, almost like the hiss of a snake.

“Okay, let’s save the fooling around for when the job is done,” he said. It was one of his reliable bits of wisdom. His kids called them dad-isms.

Still Chloe didn’t respond. He wanted to keep things light so as not to spoil the fun, but they had work to do if they were going to be ready in time. Tony stepped off the path, not bothering to try to soften the crunch of leaves underfoot. He reached for the curtain.

“Are you talking to me?” Chloe asked.

Blinking in surprise, he turned to find her twenty feet away, coming around a bend in the trail. She had the cardboard box in her arms, but he could tell it was empty by the way she carried it.

Tony looked back to the black curtain, which danced lightly in the breeze. He reached out again to pull it aside, even as Chloe kept speaking to him, wondering why he’d gone suddenly silent.

From behind the curtain there came a grunt and another crunch of leaves, followed by light footfalls and the snapping of little branches. Tony whipped the cloth aside and saw the back of a retreating child, a little girl darting deeper into the woods. Or he assumed it was a girl, no more than ten, dressed in a costume he recognized immediately. With her faded, old-fashioned dress and a wig made of red yarn, she had to be planning to trick-or-treat as Raggedy Ann. In the dark woods, she almost looked gray, the red wig nearly black except the moment she passed through a shaft of sunlight. But then she lost herself in the trees and the shadows, and in seconds, even the rustle of leaves from her running footsteps had gone silent.

“Friend of yours?” Chloe asked.

Tony laughed softly. “I’m gonna guess one of the neighbor kids trying to get an early peek at what’s in store for tonight.”

“A little young to be out in the woods on her own.”

“Maybe on a dare,” Tony said. He knew it probably wasn’t good parenting to have let that girl run around the neighborhood unsupervised, but secretly he approved. He loved the idea that she must have been excited enough about tonight to sneak around for a look. It made him think maybe she was a little bit like he’d been as a boy.

“Check this out,” Chloe said as she knelt and reached for something just beyond the drawn-back curtain.

When she stood, Tony saw that she’d retrieved a fallen Raggedy Ann doll. He reached out and took it from Chloe’s hands to examine it. The doll must have been an antique, he thought. It was so worn and yellowed with age, and one of its eyes hung loosely, ready to tear free at the slightest provocation.

“Part of her costume, I bet,” he said. “Gotta belong to her grandmother or something. This thing’s ancient. Maybe this was her inspiration.”

“What do you mean?”

Tony smiled again as he looked down at the old doll. “I haven’t seen a kid in a Raggedy Ann costume in years.”

“You know everything old comes back around eventually,” Chloe said.

Raggedy Ann in hand, Tony nodded. “True. Let’s make sure Mom and Auntie Helen keep an eye out for her tonight. When she comes here, I want to give this back to her. It’s in rough shape, but it’s probably worth something. I’m sure her parents won’t be happy that she’s lost it.”

“I’ll remember,” Chloe said. She took the doll back from him and laid it on top of his toolbox. “Now get back to work, old man. Daylight’s wasting.”

Tony gave her a wistful grin, bent over, and kissed the top of her head. “I love you, kid. Thanks for doing this with me.”

Chloe brightened. “You kidding? This is our day, Pops. We’re gonna scare the shit out of them.”

Tony laughed as she picked up the box again and headed toward the house. He plucked the rag from his belt, took his squirt bottle, and went to clean off the banshee’s guide wire. He heard the breeze rustling through the branches, but other than that, the path was quiet. Tonight, though, it would be very different.

Tonight, the woods would be full of screams, and he intended to cherish every last one.

VANESSA MONTEZ

When she spotted the little girl putting her hand in Winnie the Pooh’s mouth, Vanessa wondered if Pooh would bite it off. For better or worse, that was how her brain worked. She’d take something ordinary and boring and think, Andthen …, and something awful would happen. It was a little fantasy game she’d played in her head ever since she could remember, mostly to combat the mundaneness of growing up in Coventry, not to mention having John and Lucy Montez as her parents.

Her parents were so boring. She loved them to death. They were literally her best friends and she hugged them every chance she got, but they were forty going on ninety, content to be together, sort of a world unto themselves. It would’ve been charming if it wasn’t such a snooze. Not that Vanessa wanted any drama between her parents. God knew she’d seen enough of her friends going through it with their families. By the time she hit sixth grade, some of her friends’ parents were already separated or getting divorced, and Jennie Collins’s dad even died that year, which was deeply messed up. Then divorce started going around like it was contagious. Kids gossiped about one another’s parents, but Vanessa kept her mouth shut, afraid of jinxing her mom and dad.

But there they were, a few years later, and more quietly in love than ever.

Sometimes boring could be wonderful, that was an inescapable truth. But at the end of the day, it was still boring, and Vanessa Montez hadn’t been built for that.

Especially not now that she had her driver’s license.

“Steve, how bad do you really need this?” she asked, rolling her eyes. “You know it’s, like, poison. You’re waiting in line for poison.”

“I do, I do,” he replied, grinning that stupid grin he’d been winning arguments with since he was four years old. “But it’s delicious, cheesy poison.”

Steve Koenig was a junior, at sixteen too young to have his driver’s license, but when Vanessa had gotten hers last week, Steve had been even more excited than she was. He’d assumed that she would be his chauffeur from that moment forth, and though Vanessa bitched about it, truth was that she had assumed the same thing. She might be a year older, but she could never stay mad at him. Steve knew her like nobody else. Knew everything about her. Some people thought their friendship was weird, that boys and girls didn’t get that close, but Vanessa had never cared much what people thought.

Hence the way she clapped her hands and cheered for the girl working the register at Orange Julius when she finished taking payment from the chubby grandpa in front of them. The old guy should absolutely not have been eating that chili cheese dog. If the cheese and the disgusting animal parts inside the hot dog didn’t kill him, the farts the chili gave him later might make his wife stab him in the throat.

Vanessa hoped.

“Well done, Sheila!” she cried, with the slow clap of sarcasm. “You got this.”

Sheila shot her the middle finger—which her manager would surely frown upon—and smiled at the next customers in line, a pair of twelve-year-old boys who had been stealing glances back at her. One of them looked over his shoulder while his friend ordered, and Vanessa growled at him, then smiled. The kid blushed and stammered a little when it was his turn to order.

Vanessa liked twelve-year-old boys. They were fun to mess with. In a couple of years, they’d be assholes, she was sure, but for now they entertained her.

“Would you take a chill pill, please?” Steve whispered in her ear. “Go and play with Winnie the Pooh.”

She scowled. “Eat me. I’m just trying to encourage Sheila to hurry. I’m bored.”

“You’re always bored. And you’re gonna get her to spit in my food if you keep it up.”

Vanessa smiled. “The closest you’ll come to kissing her.”

“You’re gross. Go play with Pooh.”

“Like you don’t want to kiss her.”

Steve flushed pink. Their little sparring match had ended as such matches always did, with him embarrassed. She knew he didn’t have any particular lust for the Orange Julius girl, but he was a sixteen-year-old boy, which from what she’d always heard meant he spent half his waking hours and all the sleeping ones with a boner hard enough to hammer nails. Steve was different from most of his species, though. Still horny, yes, but sweet. Uncertain and shy, no idea how to talk to girls other than his lifelong best friend, and awkward as hell anytime Vanessa drew attention to that fact.

“Vee,” he said, a raspy whisper.

She nodded and whispered as well. “Okay, okay. I’ll play with Pooh. Get me a soft pretzel.”

His eyes widened. He started to berate her for wanting something to eat after giving him no end of shit for having to wait in line, but she laughed and walked toward the center of the food court, where the costumed Winnie the Pooh was waving and nodding and just generally being adorably fluffy for the amusement of parents and little kids. It wasn’t a Halloween thing—Pooh Bear was a promo for the toy store deeper into the mall and sometimes wandered around in an attempt to lure unsuspecting consumers to his toy-selling lair.

Vanessa found an empty table. She dragged out a metal chair, its feet screeching against the floor, and plopped down to people-watch. Mostly she was aggressively hunting for people at whom she could glare. There were occasional racists, but mostly it was just dudes of all ages who were checking her out. She wasn’t dressed for Halloween any more than Winnie the Pooh, but there weren’t many girls in Coventry, Massachusetts, into the things she loved. As far as the typical mall rats were concerned, a Dominican girl whose makeup and hair made her look like Siouxsie Sioux was something to stare at. Okay, she did steal some of her eyeliner and shadow designs from pictures of Siouxsie and the Banshees, but she usually wore a T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and boots—all black. Nothing sexy, nothing that hugged her body extra tight. It was just men, and boys. Dudes in general. They saw this girl whom they might normally find mildly attractive, but who dressed and behaved like she couldn’t give a shit what they thought of her, and her indifference to their dicks made them want to either fuck her or hurt her, or both, in whichever order they could swing it.

Her dad was a man. Steve would be a man someday. She loved them both, would take a bullet for either one of them, so she knew there must be a lot of wonderful guys out there. She just wished the rest of them weren’t always doing their best to make her feel nasty.

Vanessa glared reproachfully at a fiftyish guy walking with his daughter, carrying her shopping bags from Tape World and Jordan Marsh. He was with his daughter, but examining Vanessa pretty thoroughly.

“What?” she snapped. Loudly.

The guy pivoted, guiding his daughter away from the food court. Vanessa smiled, but she didn’t feel like smiling at all. She hated the mall so much, couldn’t wait to be done with high school so she could get out of the Merrimack Valley. New York City called to her, maybe even Los Angeles, but of course she’d never go to LA. Too far from her parents. And that was the great irony of her life. Punks always seemed to hate their parents, but she couldn’t bear to think of leaving hers behind.

“Here comes your poison!” Steve said as he wove through the maze of food court tables. She wondered what people thought, seeing the two of them together—her, this death-punk rocker girl, and him with a stylishly stonewashed denim jacket over a Huey Lewis and the News T-shirt, looking like a John Hughes movie had fucked MTV and borne a child.

Vanessa smiled again, this time for real, as he slid into the chair opposite her. Steve handed over her pretzel, but she also grabbed his Orange Julius and took a big drink from his straw.

“Oh, you bitch.”

“Poison is delicious.” She smiled, knowing he could never really be mad at her. It just wasn’t in the DNA of their friendship.

The conversation ceased while he chowed on his cheese dog. Vanessa ripped off one loop of her hot pretzel and bit off a hunk. Steve had dragged her out of the house to drive him to Methuen, mostly because he wanted to drift through Chess King and the other shops that sold clothes he didn’t think he was cool enough to wear just yet. Coventry wasn’t a bad place to grow up, but Steve longed for college just as much as she did. An opportunity for a fresh start. When you’re young and in school with the same kids year after year, you start defining yourself before you can even tie your shoes, and by the time you realize that’s what you’ve been doing, it’s too late. They’ve all made up their minds about you already. College would be a new beginning, a time when they could both choose to be anything or anyone they wished.

“Do you want to hit the arcade?” he asked in between bites.

But she knew the answer he was hoping for. Despite his feathered hair and stonewashed jacket, he hadn’t come to the mall hoping to run into girls. He just wanted to do some window-shopping and let Vanessa cajole him into cruising the aisles of the bookstore. They were here because it was away from Coventry, and because she had her license, and it made them both feel a little grown-up, as crazy as that seemed with a mall full of kids.

“Nah. No arcade today,” she said, though she did have a small video game addiction that cost her many quarters. Many, many quarters. “Your parents would be pissed if I kept you too long today. I’m sure there’s stuff they want you to help with for the party.”

Steve took a sip of Orange Julius. “You’re coming, right?”

Vanessa squirmed in her seat.

“Vee. You are coming, right? I mean, we both know you’re not hanging around with Owen and those assholes. They’ll probably be smoking crack or something.”

“They don’t smoke crack,” Vanessa said. “None of those pussies would dare.”

“Oh, like you would.”

“I wouldn’t,” she agreed. “But that’s because I’m too smart for that shit, not because I’m scared. Now, if Owen’s got shrooms, I will go and smoke with him, and you will not say a word about it.”

Steve rolled his eyes and took another bite of his hot dog. They both knew that he would have plenty to say if she went off and did drugs with Owen O’Leary and his gang of imbeciles later, and she would agree with most of what he said. But she would be high at the time.

“Yes,” she promised. “I will be at the big Koenig Halloween Bash of ’84. Then, later tonight, I will watch scary movies with you until the crack of dawn and then make scrambled eggs for your parents and crow like a rooster and bring them breakfast in bed, just like last year.”

Steve sat back in his chair. “But between the party and the movies, you might get super fucking high on shrooms so the movies will freak you out even more.”

Vanessa pointed a finger at him. “Bingo. And if you want to get high instead of me, and this year, I’ll take care of you while you freak out, I will do that for you because you are my best friend on this earth or any other. You’re too young, of course.”

“Says the girl who’s eleven months older than I am.”

“I’m an adult now. I have my driver’s license.”

“True. And I love you for it.”

“You only love me for my chauffeuring skills.”

Steve nodded to confirm the accusation. They both laughed as they cleaned up the trash from their table, dumped it in a can, and left the mall to go home, celebrate Halloween, and get high. They were eagerly looking forward to being terrified that night.

Just like every Halloween.

BARB SWEENEY

Barb didn’t mind driving around town doing errands—usually she appreciated the time to herself, away from the constant push and pull of being a wife and mother—but this afternoon, she’d planned to carve pumpkins and decorate the front door with fake spiderwebs and little rubber spiders that would hang from the light fixtures on either side of the door. Somewhere in there, she had also planned to make dinner. Barb had never been much of a cook, but it didn’t take a lot of skill to prepare the pepperoni mac and cheese that her kids loved so much.

Of course, to do all that, she’d have needed to stay home and not be running around doing things that her husband, Donnie, had promised to get done this afternoon. Instead, Donnie had decided to clean out the garage, something he’d been vowing to do since July. It would have been a relief to know that he’d finally gotten around to it, except, as usual, he had chosen precisely the wrong moment. An hour into the job, he had gotten a phone call about one of his court cases, and that had dragged him back inside to sift through the files and argue over the phone, and by the time he’d emerged, two o’clock had come and gone with half the contents of the garage scattered about the driveway.

Barb didn’t want an argument. Not today. Donnie meant well. He was a good attorney, a halfway decent father, and a passable husband when he felt like it. For the rest, he skated by on charm and dimples and too much to drink.

A burst of static came over the radio. Then another. The song had been “The One That You Love” by Air Supply, and she’d been musing on strangling the one that she loved, but now the static seemed to claw at the music, tear it up. Another voice broke in, like the ghost of one radio station overlapping with Kiss 108. But this wasn’t the voice of Sunny Joe White. The voice sounded like someone amused, caught in the middle of telling a joke, but then it changed, as if the man had something caught in his throat. The sound was awful, almost hateful, like an animal … and then it was just static again. Barb twisted the dial, trying to tune back in to Kiss, but all that came out was static and squealing, so she jabbed the power knob and the inside of the car went silent.

Barb Sweeney didn’t like silence. Too much time to think.

And now the goddamn radio was broken. One more thing Donnie would promise to handle and then leave to her to fix. Sort of like their marriage. And that was the problem, wasn’t it? Donnie was always handling things he ought not to touch and breaking the promises he ought to keep.

“Stop it,” she told herself, interrupting the quiet inside her Cutlass, which looked new but which her mother had forced her brother to sell her secondhand on the cheap, just to keep up appearances. The neighborhood knew Donnie was an attorney, knew he’d served two terms in the statehouse, but those days were over. He was still a lawyer, but she didn’t know where his money went and was afraid to find out.

Heart racing, Barb pulled over at the entrance to Parmenter Road, just beside the Dead End sign. She cranked the window down all the way and took a few deep breaths. She loved the son of a bitch. Loved him for the same charm that got him into trouble all the time, and she’d known exactly who he was when she married him—pregnant at the time, and him engaged to someone else.

A smile touched her lips. “Jesus, Donnie,” she whispered. “What am I going to do with you?”

With a few more deep breaths, shivering at the chill of the late October air sweeping through the open windows, she hit the gas and drove up Parmenter Road. The trees in front of number 15 Parmenter were festooned with sheets and pillowcases made into ghosts that flapped in the breeze. Tonight, they would be spooky as heck, and she hoped the breeze would still blow. Some of the houses gave no hint of their owners being aware it was Halloween, but most of the neighbors had made at least some effort, a few cardboard decorations taped to the storm door or some pumpkins. But of course, nothing would compare to the Barbosas’ Haunted Woods later tonight. Alice Barbosa and her husband—Barb could never remember his first name—kept mostly to themselves, but on Halloween, they pulled out all the stops.

They’d have competition tonight, though, with the block party the Koenigs were throwing. Barb drove past the Barbosas and saw their daughter, Chloe, carrying a box around from the backyard. They’d gone the extra mile this year, with a fake stone entryway and fake wrought iron gate to lead into the backyard. Barb admired the heck out of their charitable efforts. She’d done a lot of charity work herself, mostly with the Coventry Hospital Aid and the planning committee for the town’s upcoming tricentennial celebration. But what the Barbosas did was just pure fun. She envied them the fun they had together and the way they seemed so content just to be in each other’s company.

Chloe glanced up as she drove by, and Barb gave her a quick wave to avoid seeming rude. The girl managed to clutch the box with one arm long enough to flap her hand in something like a wave, smiling as she nearly dropped her burden. Barb glanced in her rearview mirror, hoping she hadn’t caused Chloe to damage anything in that box, but it looked as if the girl had it under control.

Distant strains of music greeted her as she rounded the bend and 48 Parmenter Road came into view. Barb and Donnie had moved into the split-level in the summer of 1972. In that time, they’d painted it twice, but the clapboard siding soaked up paint like Donnie soaked up scotch, and it desperately needed a new coat. They’d made a deal with their kids—if they were willing to commit to a schedule and get the job done, Barb and Donnie would pay them instead of hiring a contractor. What they hadn’t told the kids was that they’d pay less than half as much, but what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

Barb smiled when she saw Julia up on the ladder. At eighteen, she’d been in more than her share of trouble—Barb didn’t like to think about it—but she had straightened herself out and would be off to community college next fall. Barb’s fiery red hair came from a bottle at her hairdresser’s, but Julia came by her ginger status naturally, a gift from her dad’s side of the family, though Donnie himself had the dark hair his mother had told him came down from the “Black Irish,” the descendants of Spanish sailors who’d survived the sinking of the armada and washed up on Ireland’s shores.

At the foot of the ladder, thirteen-year-old Brian was stirring a freshly opened can of paint, the spitting image of his dad. Her youngest, Charlie, had the pale blond hair and blue eyes he’d inherited from his mother, and Barb had a special place in her heart for Charlie because of it. Of course, she would never admit that to anyone.

Eleven-year-old Charlie was half-hidden behind the bushes in the mulch beds in front of their split-level, slathering on the eggshell-blue paint while bobbing his head to the music blaring from the battered radio the kids had put on the grass. Some kind of twangy Southern rock blasted from the speaker. At his age, Charlie didn’t have much of his own musical taste to go on, but he loved anything his older siblings listened to.

He also loved Chinese food, which was why Barb had two paper bags of takeout on the seat beside her instead of pizza, which would’ve been quicker and cheaper.

Brian looked up from stirring the paint and spotted her. “Hey, Mom!”

“Foooooood!” Charlie called, emerging from the bushes with a grin on his face and paint spatters all over his clothes. There was a reason she asked him to paint where the mulch would soak it up instead of having him do the garage doors and drip all over the driveway.

Barb exhaled, the sight of her happy kids relieving much of her stress as she pulled the car into the driveway.

Then she hit the brake, staring through the windshield. “What. The. Fuck?”

The stress came roaring back. She slammed the shift into Park and killed the engine, popped the door, and stepped out, forgetting all about the Chinese food and the trick-or-treat candy she’d bought and her husband’s dry cleaning that hung on the hook in the back seat. If she’d thought of it, she might have tossed that dry cleaning onto the driveway and backed up over it, maybe spun the tires right on top of the tailored suit Donnie was so damned proud of.

Barb didn’t use a lot of profanity. The kids noticed. They halted any further work and just watched her. She saw them out of the corner of her eye, but she didn’t care, couldn’t shake herself from the paralysis of fury.

The kids’ bicycles had been put back, and so had the trash cans, but at least half of the boxes and other crap Donnie had pulled out when he’d started “cleaning” the garage had been left out, stacked and arranged just outside the still-open garage doors. From the looks of it, he’d kept at the job for maybe fifteen minutes after she’d left, and now there was no sign of him.

She swiveled her head around to stare at Julia. It wasn’t fair, but she was the oldest and often served as Barb’s sounding board. Sometimes those sounds were just a flurry of angry words, things she shouldn’t dump on a teenage girl, especially her own child. But with Donnie gone, and the neighborhood gossips to think of, who else was she supposed to unload on?

“Where is your father?”

Julia shrugged. “No clue.”

A lump of ice formed in Barb’s chest.

“He said he had to call a client or something,” Brian said. “Then he came outside and said he had to go to the office but not to worry, ’cause he’d be back before dinner.”

Barb clenched and unclenched her hands and bit her lower lip, not wanting to say something to her children that she’d regret. When did Donnie think dinner was going to be? The kids were all going out to enjoy Halloween with their friends, and they—Barb and Donnie—were due at the Koenigs’ party when most of the trick-or-treaters had come and gone. The kids were going to eat their Chinese food right now, and Barb had figured she and Donnie would eat their own dinner shortly thereafter. Instead, he’d taken off and left her with the kids, the candy, and a bunch of crap to stow back into the garage.

No. Just, no.

“Kids, come and get all this stuff out of the car. Eat your dinner and then put all that stuff back into the garage for me before you get cleaned up for tonight.”

They stared at her. Young Charlie took a step toward the car. “Mom, where are you going?”

Barb bent to reach into the car and grabbed the Chinese food, the smell wafting from the two bags making her stomach growl. Or maybe that was just her temper finally eradicating the last of her patience.

“I’m going out to find your father.” She handed the takeout bags to Julia. “If he comes home before I do, tell him he’s in the doghouse.”

Charlie smiled at that—he loved references to any of them being in the doghouse, the imagery of it. Julia and Brian knew better. There was nothing here to smile about. Barb climbed back into the car and slammed the door. She took one more glance at her kids but said nothing as she started it up and reversed out of the driveway.

When she found Donnie, he really would be in the doghouse, because no way would she allow him to sleep in her bed tonight. Not when she was pretty sure he’d spent the afternoon in someone else’s.

The tires skidded in road sand as she gave the car some gas. Then it leaped forward, and she didn’t spare a thought to the possibility of early trick-or-treaters. Reason and caution had been left behind.

Donnie had hurt her too much, at last.

The time had come to see if she could hurt him back.

VANESSA MONTEZ

Vanessa liked to take her time making up her face. People seemed to think that her aesthetic was just slathering on makeup, but it took time and meticulous effort to achieve just the effect she was going for. The fact that she would be attending a Halloween party only added to what she deemed her obligation to perfect her look. Her lipstick tonight would be a dark, frosted blue, her cheeks albino white, and her eye makeup blacker than black. Boys and men fetishized her looks—some thought her beautiful and others ugly, but most of them wanted to slot her into some category they called “exotic” without realizing how racist their whole thought process was. She was something other than white, so automatically, she was mysterious.

Idiots.

Her mother was Vietnamese and her dad Dominican, and these boys didn’t know what to make of her, which was just fine. Vanessa had never been interested in boys.

“Aren’t you a little old for trick-or-treat?”

Vanessa flinched, heart racing as she turned to see her mother standing on the threshold of her bedroom. The door had been halfway open, so she wasn’t exactly intruding, but a knock would have been nice.

“Mom! You scared the crap out of me!”

Lucy Montez’s expression softened with hurt. She had a mischievous side, but she always hated to think she’d upset anyone she loved. “Sorry, honey. I didn’t think.” Then her eyebrows lifted. “Although, isn’t this the day for scaring?”

Vanessa had to give her that. “It’s fine. But try not to give me a heart attack, okay?”

“Not to worry. That’s your job as a teenager. Giving your parents heart attacks.”

“Fair,” Vanessa replied. “Anyway, I’m not trick-or-treating, but I’m gonna go over to Steve’s early and give out candy with him tonight, if that’s okay. His parents are still going to be getting ready for the party, and he asked me.”

Her mom pondered that for a moment. “I guess it’s okay. I’m sure your dad won’t mind.”

“Thanks!” Vanessa saw the way her mother scrutinized her outfit and glanced at herself in the mirror on her bureau. “You don’t like my costume?”

“It’s a costume?”

That got a laugh. “Yes, Mom. I know it’s hard to tell sometimes with me. I’m going as Siouxsie Sioux.”

“Siouxsie Sioux. Always with you, it’s Siouxsie Sioux.”

Vanessa smiled. “You like the music. You know you do.”

“It’s okay. The hair and the makeup, though—you look like a ghost!”

“I look like a girl who doesn’t give a damn what the world thinks.”

Her mother’s eyes narrowed, examining her more closely. Then she nodded. “Yes. I think you do.” She kissed Vanessa on the temple. “But it’s not a costume, my girl. It’s only you.”

Vanessa felt her chest swell. That was just about the nicest thing her mom had ever said to her. And then she had to go and ruin it.

“It must be nice on Halloween to walk around and not have people think you’re strange.”

She wanted to groan, but she kept quiet. Her mother meant well. In Lucy Montez’s mind, that was probably a kind thing to say. But Vanessa could read between the lines—her mom had just sort of approved of her not giving a shit what people thought and then two seconds later snatched back that approval.

Vanessa forced a smile and wondered if her mother could tell it was a mask. Her parents were sweet and indulgent with her, and she loved to hang around with them, to watch TV or play board games or walk around Boston and just see the sights, but she knew they had never understood her and that they were uncomfortable when people shot puzzled or disapproving looks at their only child. They loved her unconditionally, but they didn’t realize that Vanessa wanted to be seen as strange. She disapproved of the world and its people, and she wanted to set herself apart from it. If people saw her and thought she was a freak or an alien—something that didn’t belong—that was precisely the response she desired. But how could she explain that to John and Lucy Montez, who struggled so hard to belong?

“I do love Halloween,” she said. A safe reply. The truth.

She turned back to her mirror, adding more sharpness to the edges of the black diamonds she’d painted around her eyes. The wildly teased hair looked perfect right now, and she wondered how long it would stay like that—without it, the odds of anyone guessing she was masquerading as Siouxsie plummeted.

“So, you and Steve are spending a lot of time together,” her mother observed with added gravity.

Vanessa snickered. “We’ve been spending a lot of time together since the first grade.”

“I know. But it seems … more.”

Fixing her spiky hair, Vanessa turned to face her mom. She’d never come out and told her parents she was gay, but she was sure both of her parents knew. It felt obvious to her in the little things they said and didn’t say, the glances they gave each other when other parents talked about who their sons or daughters were dating, and asked if Vanessa had a boyfriend yet. There had never been a conversation, but she could see that they knew, and they didn’t seem to love her any less. But she never brought it up, left it unsaid, because what if she was wrong?

No, she had never come out and told anyone aside from Steve. Even then, it was only because on her thirteenth birthday, Steve had told her that he loved her. He’d still been twelve and had been worried that when she started high school a year ahead of him, she would start hanging out with older boys and get swept off her feet by some guy with chin scruff and a guitar. She’d told him that she loved him, too, but that it would have to stay just the kind of love it had always been. Somehow that worked. Steve was the only one she trusted, the only one who knew. Owen and the other guys might tease her and call her lezzie and dyke, but they were mostly kidding. They didn’t know any lesbians, and imagining she might actually be gay was, for them, like imagining she was a Martian. She didn’t like it, but she tried not to hate them for being ignorant little pricks.

Steve, at least, was smart enough to love her for who she was.

Now Vanessa smiled at her mom and wondered if she would love her daughter any less if Vanessa opened up to her and confirmed what she had probably already guessed.

She will. She’ll love you no matter what.

Her mom had always promised that, and Vanessa believed it—most days. But she only had half a year left until college, and unless she met a girl and fell madly in love before then—which, let’s face it, was pretty unlikely at Coventry High School—she planned to wait until after graduation to officially come out. That way if they were disappointed or disgusted with her, she’d only have to live with that reaction for a couple of months.

Until then, leaving it all unspoken felt safer.

“I’ve gotta go,” she said, and she kissed her mom on the cheek.

“Have fun,” her mom replied. “We’ll see you at the party. Don’t eat too much candy before dinner.”

“It’ll be fine,” Vanessa promised. “One piece of candy for the kids and one for me, right? Even split?”

Her mother wagged a finger. “I haven’t forgotten the year you threw up all over my bedroom.”

Vanessa rolled her eyes as she hustled down the stairs. “I was nine years old! Move on, woman!”

With a wave, she went out the door and pulled it shut behind her, resisting the temptation to sample the candy that already waited in the Halloween-themed bowl on the little table her mom had put there this afternoon. Outside, she felt a twinge of yearning for the years when her dad brought her around the neighborhood on Halloween night, holding her hand as she engaged in the most important ritual of childhood commerce—the plea for free sweets.

The afternoon shadows had grown long, the street quiet in that strange almost postapocalyptic hush that enveloped them in the hour or so before trick-or-treat began. Parents would be struggling to dress their kids in costumes. Some of those kids would be throwing tantrums. Moms would be trying to cajole children to eat something now, early as it was, because if they had no dinner before they went out, they would be full to bursting with candy before they made it home, and dinner would be ruined.

Autumn leaves skittered along the pavement as Vanessa walked toward the Koenigs’ house. Parmenter Road was a dead end, with three houses on the cul-de-sac, all of them surrounded by towering pines and oaks. The Koenig house was on the left, the Montez home on the right, and the Sullivans in between. Most afternoons, the Sullivans would have left their dog out on his own in the yard, leashed to a wire run that let him roam back and forth barking at passersby. Today, the dog was as scarce as the rest of the neighbors. It was like October had decided to hold its breath until November arrived.

Vanessa enjoyed the quiet. In her dark makeup and black combat boots, with her spiky hair, she felt like the ringmaster at some kind of nightmare circus, and the thought made her sublimely happy. If a life meeting that description were offered to her, she’d have jumped at the chance. Instead, she had this one night a year to pretend the world understood her. For now, that would have to do.

BARB SWEENEY

Barb went to Giovanni’s first. The place styled itself a “trattoria,” but that was just a fancy word for an Italian restaurant. Like most of the eateries in Coventry, it had a dining room space but also an attractive bar on one end, all brass and wood and gleaming bottles, with a big fat TV bolted to a shelf in the corner behind the bartender. The volume never went up—this wasn’t that kind of bar—but there was always some type of sports match on, and they didn’t require much narration.

When Barb pushed her way into Giovanni’s on her own, she felt her face flush. Maybe nobody would notice her pink cheeks, but she thought they would. It infuriated her to know that she blushed, that she felt embarrassed to be searching the town for a husband who couldn’t stay away from the bars for forty-eight hours in a row. Donnie’s drinking she could handle, most days, but he didn’t just come to bars for the drinks. He came for the scenery.

How many times had she done this—searching