Part 3: Chapter 5: Partay! (with the Crays)

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Chapter 5: Halloween

On Halloween night, the line of flickering Jack o’ Lanterns stretched all the way from the railroad tracks up the hill to the Cray house, but no one thought of smashing one.

The sun had shone all day, sending its rays through red and gold haze in the maple groves; it was hard to imagine a worse Halloween. But at around four, a vast, gray-veined bank of clouds swept in, and Sam Gann the Weather Man said it brought a cold front. Maybe tomorrow they would see a few flakes of snow.

Evie Carlsson stood in line beside her new best friend Karin Lind, both of them dressed as relatively modest Playboy Bunnies. Wind gusted from the north, rattling the branches of the tall blue spruce and Douglas firs that flanked the Cray house. Evie pulled the filmy wrap she wore over her swimsuit tighter around her shoulders. “I should’ve brought a jacket. This is going to take forever.”

“Maybe we should just skip out,” said Karin, smiling nervously. She was tall and skinny, with thick blond bangs and an overbite, and Evie thought her fur-trimmed swimsuit didn’t do much for her. Unlike Kristen Hawke, Karin was always jittery about something.

“Are you crazy? After paying five dollars each and waiting twenty minutes?”

“Five dollars is noth - isn’t much,” said Karin, whose dad was a doctor. “Anyway, I only bought the ticket because Ty Gregson was selling them in my homeroom, and he’s like, this über-do-gooder, and he said it was benefiting the Humane Society. You know how I feel about animals.”

“Puppies and kittens, whatever,” said Evie. The line inched closer to the house’s bleak gray façade, and she said, “I like animals too, OK? But what I really want is to see inside that house.”

“The Crays used to have big Halloween parties every year,” said Britta Golp, who was standing just behind them. The broad-brimmed witch’s hat made her long, freckled face look even more painfully earnest. “My mom and aunt used to go when they were kids. Granny Cray’s brother and his wife owned the house back then. They always invited everybody, and it was always for charity, but Mom says it was their way to show off. They had all kinds of stuff - a scare-house you had to go through to get to the party part. A movie special effects guy helped design it. One time a girl got so scared she fainted. But when you got to the party, the flowers and cake and even the candy apples were from the city. Nobody went trick-or-treating when they could go to the Crays’.”

“They didn’t have cable in Cray’s back then,” said Evie. “Or pizza delivery. The best entertainment on Halloween night was tipping some farmer’s cow.”

Karin laughed obsequiously.

Evie was bored of her already. Her eye darted several people ahead in line to where Kristen Hawke stood between Billy Corcoran and Jeremy Bliss, one dressed as an unshaven, randy-looking pirate and the other as a weirdly polite zombie. For her part, Kristen apparently thought her yoga leotard and pink tights were a costume.

The baddest boy in school and the smartest boy in school, and she has both of them! Evie thought. Envy swelled in her chest like a balloon; she imagined herself popping from the pressure and leaving little shreds all over the Crays’ yard.

She raised her hand to her mouth and yawned. Nobody had cared about Kristen until she started pretending not to care about anything. And who had she learned it from? Evie, of course. Evie was the original and best not-carer. Kristen had simply taken it a step further, to a place where you wore black and said weird things and basically dared people to think you were insane. And somehow, as if she were a rock star, it had worked.

It never lasted, that was the thing. Rock stars always overdosed and ended up in rehab. Or they became ministers, or fat. Or they died.

A few yards ahead, Kristen, Billy, and Jeremy found themselves pushed to the end of the flagstone walkway and up the five steep steps to the Crays’ threshold. The front door stood open, but their way was blocked by a black cheese-cloth curtain on which someone had silk-screened in spiky silver letters, Turn back or abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

From watching the people ahead of them, they knew they had to wait for a black-gloved hand to draw back the curtain and usher one of them inside. If you tried to muscle your way in or come as a group, a very large, surprisingly brawny old Swedish woman would block your way, brandishing a heavy black waffle iron and growling, “Wait your turn, little chickies! You’ll come in sooner than you want!”

So they waited. Jeremy cast sidelong, admiring glances at Kristen in her black leotard. Kristen stared straight ahead at the house wall. Billy craned to look the way they had come. “The line’s all the way over the tracks now,” he observed.

“Good for them,” said Kristen.

“Are there, like, adults coming?” asked Jeremy. “I saw Frieda Weiner selling tickets at the diner.”

“Scared somebody’ll see you spiking the punch, Jer?” said Billy, nudging him. He could feel the place in Jeremy’s trenchcoat where he himself had insisted on hiding a bottle of Absolut Kurant (for the girls) and another of Cuervo.

“You’ll be doing the honors,” said Jeremy irritably.

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch. The tix are staggered. The adult ones say to come later, like eight. We’ll be getting wasted elsewhere by then.”

“Is that all you ever think about?” asked Kristen.

Jeremy looked straight at her before he could stop himself. Ever since Kristen Hawke had dared to walk deeper into the mountain cave by herself, he had considered her far superior to other girls - less sappy, for one thing. She never needed to be complimented, and she never feared the consequences of doing anything. But there were times when Kristen said something in her odd, expressionless way that another girl would have said with sarcasm or excitement or annoyance, and it didn’t make him like her better than other girls. It just creeped him out.

Kristen stared back at him, her eyes wide and bored. Her lips pursed just slightly at one corner, as if she were wondering what his problem was.

The curtain swept back with a flourish, just enough to reveal darkness inside. The long, skinny gloved hand beckoned. “Ladies first!” called a screechy voice.

Kristen rolled her eyes, mouthed, “Later,” and stepped through the gap in the curtain. It fell back, but Billy surreptitiously peeled a crack open and peered through. “They blindfold you,” he informed Jeremy.

But there was no point in peering, really, because about a minute later the flap opened again. A finger crooked in Billy’s direction. The screechy voice said, “Your turn, spy! Stay back, wretched mortals!”

“Catch up with us,” Billy muttered, and disappeared.

Jeremy crossed his arms on his chest and waited. He was wearing his “Flip It for Kristen” T-shirt, the one that was banned at school. When the principal called his folks, they had all of a sudden got very upset about his approaching PSATs and his new habit of hanging out with Billy Corcoran. Which was funny, really, because last fall his mom and dad had told him he should get a few friends and stop spending all his time alone studying and playing World of WarCraft.

So now he had friends, and they wanted him to study more. “People always want the things they don’t have,” said Kristen, when he told her. “It’s like they’re trying to keep themselves warm by dancing, but there’s no music, so they just look stupid.”

Jeremy thought this was deep, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it meant.

Again the curtain rippled. The black hand appeared, pointing roughly in his direction. Jeremy sighed and stepped through the gap. He didn’t feel like being pushed around just now.

It was dark in there, really dark, and he didn’t know where to go as the curtain furled back in place, closing the sliver of daylight. Then a bright, tightly focused spotlight clicked on, illuminating a low table in front of him. Something made a grinding noise, and a man’s sepulchral voice said, “If you wish to continue, trespasser, choose your blindfold and put it on. No one sighted proceeds beyond this point.”

On the table sat a fishbowl full of what looked like black stockings. Jeremy pulled one out and saw it was indeed a blindfold, a solid velour band with elastic in back. He stretched it and tugged it over his head, then over his eyes, too lazy to figure out a way to arrange it so he could still see.

A strange thing happened in the fuzzy darkness. It seemed to him like he had lost his hearing, too. He could no longer sense the shuffling and mumbling of people in line outdoors. When a gloved hand grasped his, and he felt a person’s warm breath on his neck, he recoiled in surprise.

But the person squeezed his hand and said, perfectly clearly, “Stay close and hold on to me.”

So he let the hand lead him through another curtain, over a threshold (“Don’t trip here”), and into a bigger, higher space where he could hear a clock ticking and faintly echoing. His guide led him straight into the edge of a metal table, where he banged his thigh. “Ow.”

Somewhere in the distance, farm dogs began to howl. Or was it a recording? A wolf pack? An owl hooted in one long, sinister note. The sepulchral voice he had heard before said, “Now is the hour of the unholy supper. Put out your hands and take.”

“I’m not so hungry,” said Jeremy. When no one answered, he held out his hands. Even though he could feel his guide breathing close by, and even though he knew he could remove the blindfold, he kept thinking about being all alone in some unknown room of the Cray house, unable to find his way out.

Metal catering dishes clanked. “For your delectation, eyeballs popped from the heads of unlucky trespassers,” said the voice.

Jeremy knew this one. It was a handful of peeled grapes. He ate them, feeling a bit reassured, and tried to enjoy the rest of the banquet of horrors.

Something Asian-rice-noodle-like was “maggots.” The “small children’s hearts” were peeled, pitted, very pulpy peaches floating in juice. He gagged on his, though it tasted nothing like anything’s heart. The “gossiping tongues cut from their owners’ mouths” were raw salmon sliced sushi-style, which made Jeremy gag, too, though he liked sushi normally. It was not seeing what you were eating that did it, he decided.

Still, the worst dish was the last one, described simply as “bread dipped in blood,” which tasted like Wonder bread soaked in a vat of ketchup, possibly with a dollop of Worcestershire sauce. It was so disgusting on every level that he nearly retched.

After the banquet, he was ordered to remove and carry his shoes and socks, a task that nearly made him lose his balance. He pushed through another curtain and nearly tripped over another threshold. On the other side, a new guide - still with a voice he didn’t recognize - took his shoes and grabbed his arm and made him walk across a floor strewn with the remains of a massacre.

The groans of dying men and women resounded to his right, then his left. “These are the fools who removed their blindfolds,” said the sepulchral voice, and chuckled. “Careful - don’t slip on the entrails.”

Jello, Jeremy thought, feeling something cold, slimy and squishy between his toes. I’m walking on Jello that’s spread on a big sheet of plastic, and this is a lawsuit waiting to happen. He managed to stay upright, but he didn’t enjoy it, especially when he kicked aside something that felt like an arm.

In the next room, he was told he was disturbing the sleep of giant vampire bats. He took a step and immediately came up against what felt like a row of feathery, rubbery dry-cleaning bags hanging from the ceiling. The whole room made unpleasant squeaks and gutteral whispering sounds. He couldn’t see any light through his blindfold, even at the edges, which made him wonder if the guides were somehow working in the dark, and if so, how they did it.

Someone screamed very close to him, and he turned to run and nearly abandoned his guide before realizing it was just another cleverly positioned speaker.

The scream dwindled to nails-on-a-chalkboard laughter. Jeremy’s face hit something cold and wet, festooned like a clothesline across the room. He had to bend nearly double to pass underneath.

“Human jerky, made from the tendons of trespassers,” said his guide.

Jeremy was seriously considering ripping off his blindfold and announcing that this was in very poor taste, when he felt another curtain rustle around his shoulders. “You may now remove your blindfold,” said the sepulchral voice, as if reading his mind.

Jeremy reached up with both hands, more frantically than he wanted to, and freed his eyes. He found himself staring at a dark, polished oak door. A spotlight shone directly above it, but the rest of the passage lay in shadows. Jeremy turned to his guide and saw she was swathed head to toe in black gauze, with two slits cut for her eyes. “Put on your shoes,” she said. “You’ll need to wait a moment.”

Somehow, after all that time in the dark, even tying his sneakers felt like a challenge. When he was done, he launched himself at the shiny door and turned the handle.

“I said not yet!” cried the guide. She was tall and had a deep, formidable voice like an actress. But Jeremy was taller and stronger, and this time he chose to ignore her.

The door opened easily, and he found himself in a narrow room, pitch-dark except for two candles burning on the opposite wall, on either side of an oval mirror.

Two people stood by the mirror, talking in high voices. They sounded like Billy and Kristen. But as he stepped toward them, two new guides shrouded in black intercepted him. One of these guides was male and very solid. Between him and the actressy one tugging from behind, Jeremy found himself hustled back out the door.

Someone slammed it from inside. The shrill voices - arguing? scared? - disappeared. “This is really annoying,” said Jeremy. “They weren’t supposed to go in together.” To the right of the door, he could see a brownish oil portrait of an ugly Cray ancestor, an old man with long white hair and owlish eyes. “Why do I gotta wait?”

“You’ll get your turn,” hissed the guide.

Sure enough, it took only a minute or so for the door to open. When Jeremy stepped inside this time, the room was quiet, though he was not alone. One of the dark guides circled him, wearing a costume that made her look like a hunchback, and closed the door. He wondered where the strong one was.

From high on the wall behind him, the sepulchral voice announced, “You have passed your tests, mortal, and are now ready to enter the domain of creatures of the night. Only one trial remains before you may join the revels of the Demented Sisterhood of Witches.”

“And that’s what?” asked Jeremy, feeling tired. He didn’t know why he was talking to a recording.

The hunchback nudged him. She said in the unmistakable voice of Imogen Cray, “Go to the mirror. Stand so you can see yourself between the candles. And ask the spirit of the house if you can enter. She has to say yes.”

“Is her name Bloody Mary?” Jeremy asked, stifling a yawn. As he crossed the room, skirting the long table, he made out a dark shape sitting there, with a high collar where its head should be and a pumpkin-sized object resting on the table in front of it. “You the Headless Horseman?”

No one answered either of his questions. The candles flickered on little brackets on a sort of old bureau, making the mirror’s surface swirl like water. He stepped in front of it and saw himself - a tall shape with a pale, featureless face. One candle guttered in a draft he couldn’t feel. “Bloody Mary,” he said, remembering the game his older sister and her friends used to play at their slumber parties. “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary… wait, or is it Candyman?” He gave up. No one cared. “Hey, house spirit,” he said, “let me in.”

There were eyes behind him.

He thought at first he was seeing lights in the mirror - old-fashioned, low-wattage globes on the opposite wall, maybe. He turned to look, but he already knew. Except for the candles, the room was dark.

Anyway, what he saw wasn’t reflected lights. He knew that perfectly well, because sometimes he saw them when he rubbed his eyes hard in class, or when he put his head on the pillow and started drifting to sleep. They were eyes.

They were Kristen Hawke’s eyes. And now he knew what he saw in her eyes when she spoke in that blank way. He saw this whiteness, this bleached, lifeless light, this whirling snow. This world of snow. This cold that never ended. He had seen it in her eyes when they sat alone under the goal posts, and he told her about his folks’ bitching and moaning, and she kissed him and then slid her cold hand under his shirt. It was a few days ago, or maybe a week, or maybe a month. “Are you feeling me up?” he asked. And she put her hand over his heart and didn’t answer, but in her eyes he saw she wasn’t doing that at all. She didn’t care about him that way. Didn’t care.

Seeing those eyes before him in the mirror was like coming home. And suddenly Jeremy knew he had been doing a lot of things for no particular reason. He had been following Kristen around like a puppy. He had been jealous of Billy. He had been writing up his labs and doing calculus problems and practicing the PSATs.

When in the end it came down to this. This snow. Whether you stepped into the blizzard now or later didn’t really matter. He thought of his cousin Evan, who had been T-boned at an intersection and died just before his college graduation. Had he known what was going to happen? Did he feel the way Jeremy did these days - old and tired, only half-there, like a ghost?

He had been a ghost trying to pretend he wasn’t a ghost, trying to live and make plans for the future. He would stop. Now he understood why Kristen said you didn’t have to do anything, didn’t have to want anything, and why she always seemed so tired. Wanting things was like dancing to keep yourself warm. The cold was always waiting, though.

“I think I can come in,” he said.

And into the silence, Imogen Cray’s voice answered, “Yes, Jeremy. You can come in.”