Michael Collings - The Slab

Kyle really wanted to Trick or Treat some more. His white pillowcase was nowhere near full-in fact, he could still see part of the bottom seam when he angled the impromptu cloth bag just so. And, unlike Brady, he had never quite been able to figure out where his mother hid the small packets of Sugar Babies she was handing out this year. He knew from past experience that the piddling collection of sweets he had garnered wouldn’t last until tomorrow night. Kyle wanted to keep on. He wanted to find a group of little kids and tag behind them, gleaning the rich benefits when all the adults would gush “Oh, how cute” or “Isn’t she an angel” at one of the kids and then hand out double helpings to all the other Trick-or-Treaters at the door as well. He had tumbled onto that trick the year before and was eager to try it out again.

But no, Brady had decided otherwise. Brady had bigger ideas, Brady was the one who made the rules, and who was Kyle to argue?

“Let’s check out the haunted house,” Brady said abruptly as the boys finished the fifth house on Oleander Place.

It was just past sunset, with enough light to see the grey-white gleam of sidewalks sandwiched between swathes of green-black lawn and the darker asphalt.

“There isn’t one.”

“Sure there is.” He pointed up the road at the new houses. “We can Trick-or-Treat until we get to the top.” He lowered his voice to what he hoped was a menacing tone. “To the haunted house.”

“It’s not haunted, just empty,” Kyle said, knowing as he did so that the truth wouldn’t faze Brady’s imagination.

Brady shot Kyle a withering glance and Kyle felt his head nodding, distantly, as if it were someone else’s head nodding yes to someone else’s best friend’s question.

“Okay,” the fearless cowboy sighed. “Let’s go.”

That was it. The decision was final.

For a couple more houses, Brady went through the motions of little-kid Trick-or-Treating. He even grinned outrageously when one old guy pretended to be horrified by Brady’s mummy costume and acted like he was going to barf in Brady’s candy bag, hunching his shoulders over the opened bag and whoop- ing like he was about to spew his guts up. But Kyle could tell that Brady’s heart was somewhere else, and he waited apprehensively for the moment when Brady would look at him and say, “Come on, let’s ditch this stuff.”

And all too soon, Brady did.

So, without really knowing why, certainly without wanting to, a lone black-and-silver suited cowboy trudged up the hill behind a tattered, shambling mummy. His head bowed, his feet dragging, Kyle was the only kid on the street no longer excited by Halloween.

The empty house stood dark and ragged-looking in the end lot. The yard angled away on either side to form a truncated wedge, like a piece of pie with the house in the center and the point nibbled away by the sidewalk. The houses on either side were lit with yellow porch lights and haphazardly carved Jack o’ Lanterns grimacing wickedly along the walkways. But the house at the end seemed to swallow, not reflect, the light. In spite of the brightness and the activity along the rest of Oleander, it remained aloof, distant, coldly unaffected.

Kyle stood in front of the house and looked at it. The two windows visible from that angle stared blankly and blackly at him.

Eyes, Kyle thought, unaware of how stereotyped the image was. Eyes glaring at me, waiting to open, wanting to open and get me. He shivered.

“Hey, Brady,” he began, but just then a troupe of clowns and fairy princesses cut from the house on the left across to the house on the right. Kyle noticed that the kids avoided the dark stretch of sidewalk in front of 1066 and dashed straight across the road instead. As they passed a dozen feet away, silhouetted by the house lights from below, Brady grabbed Kyle’s arm and pulled him into the shadow of a huge tree on the corner of the lot.

From there, the house looked even worse, more sinister. It swelled up at the crest of the hill, seeming to grow larger and larger as Kyle stared at it. A long, white car stood in the driveway, a ghostly hearse waiting patiently for whatever haunted inside the house.

“Come on,” Brady whispered. “The coast is clear.”

Kyle risked a quick glance down the street. Amazingly enough, Brady was right. There wasn’t a kid in sight for three or four houses on either side. The group that had just crossed Oleander was hidden behind the swelling bulk of a garage, and even though Kyle could clearly hear their happy laughter and the ringing echoes of “Trick-or-Treat,” he couldn’t see them.

“Now’s our chance,” Brady said. He slipped from the shadow of the tree, crossed the weed-infested yard, and crouched by the darkened left headlight of the long, white car.

“Hurry.”

Kyle hurried. Bent over as if he were running against a strong headwind, he followed Brady’s trail until he too crouched on one knee in front of the car. The silvery-gleaming grill loomed over his shoulder like a tooth-filled mouth, and Kyle suddenly wanted to join the clowns and the fairy princesses and hold his pillowcase out for packets of Milk Duds and maybe even some of those little Mars bars that he considered the ultimate pay-off of the evening. But Brady was moving again, running low, dodging invisible shadows and phantom enemies as he skirted the corner of the garage and disappeared. Kyle swallowed hard and followed. He was running so hard as he rounded the garage that he almost rammed into Brady.

“Look,” Brady whispered, his finger pointing toward the side of the house. In the faint light, his skin seemed dead-white, his finger more bone than flesh. The mummy wrappings seemed distressingly real, and even the rank smell of old ketchup seemed to have disappeared, replaced by something heavier and hotter and darker.

Kyle looked.

The side garage door hung open.

“Cool,” Brady said. “Come on.”

“Hey…uh, I mean…”

Brady turned and looked coldly at Kyle. “Chickenshit?”

“Uh, no, I…” But there was nothing to say. Brady shook his head. The message was clear. Come with me and be my friend, or stay out here in the dark and you’re on your own.

Kyle wasn’t too familiar with the term blackmail, but at that moment he understood the panic and terror of its victims. Brady was blackmailing him. At stake was a lifetime’s friendship. He didn’t want to go into that house. He would have been willing to do almost anything rather than go into that house. Go to bed at six o’clock for a month straight. Eat lima beans and spinach. Study his spelling words for hours on end. Do dishes. Wash windows. Clean toilet bowls.

Anything.

But given the way Brady was acting, given the stakes Brady had established, Kyle had no choice. He followed Brady into the darkness.

The garage was pitch-black, but Kyle had expected that. Everything about the old house was dark and grim and gruesome

“Wait a minute,” he said softly. He dug in his back pocket and pulled out a small red and silver metal flashlight. When he depressed the switch, the bulb flickered. It was only a penlight bulb, and the batteries were obviously weakening, but it gave out enough light for the boys’ shadows to dance grotesquely behind them as they moved. And enough for Brady to whisper, “Watch out. There’s a big crack here.”

Kyle stepped cautiously, letting the light play for a moment on the ragged edge of concrete. It looked like a miniature cliff when the dim yellow light spilled across it. Brady knelt by the crack and touched a dark spot with his fingertips.

“Blood,” he intoned in his best Bella-Lugosi-as-Dracula voice. “ Blooood!”