The King of Halloween, page 7
“Are all the masks half off?”
The color drained from Adam’s cheeks. He couldn’t be serious.
“No,” Raj said to the teen asking him. Whew. “They’re seventy percent off. Tonight only!”
Red flashed before Adam’s eyes. Maybe the rage tore his retinas, or he popped a blood vessel in both eyes, but all he could see was that monster dancing on his grave in red, sparkly tap shoes.
The mob moved like pigs in a chute toward the back wall. As Adam lifted his head, his heart sank. Dozens of Styrofoam heads held masks he’d never seen. Intricate designs, horrors ripped from the nightmares of demons, hair stitched by hand, and real metal poured on—they were all beyond perfect. And they could only have come from one hand.
“Baph,” Adam snarled.
CHAPTER SEVEN
WINDS STIRRED THE trees. Porcelain faces clanged together, their black eyes churning through the branches to gaze down at all who trespassed. Golden wind chimes rang out a dies irae across the bitter farmland. Unlike the other rural roads dotted with orange pumpkins, ochre corn stalks, and amber dirt, this place was a crypt.
The black farmhouse would send the Amityville home scampering under the bed. Two windows hung at the top of the A-frame, both pitched to the side as if they were inspecting all who trespassed here. Adam gulped and nervously rubbed back his hair. For most of the drive, he was running on rage, but the second he took that turn and all the birdsong died, so too went his nerve.
No. He was a grown man. A few weird sculptures of torn wires stretched over metal scaffolding wouldn’t scare him. Even if staring at them made him contemplate his own meager existence in the tapestry of the universe.
“Baph!” Adam shouted, his voice catching. He coughed to lower it, then called for her again. “Are you inside? Probably baking the heart of a teenager with skin as white as snow into a pie?” He whispered that last part to himself while trudging up the path to the front door. The wraparound porch had a bench swing. Rather folksy decor if the whole thing wasn’t made of rusty nails.
Adam eased up a step when he caught movement. “Baph?” He turned his head, and horns rose from the darkness.
“Shit!” She did it. She raised a demon and…
A brown eye stared at him, its rectangular pupil contracting to a slit. The black tongue sliced through the air, and it screamed, “Baaah!”
The goat racked its horns under the swing, knocking it back as it strode onto the porch like it owned the place. The hide was black as tar with white spots on its nose and around an eye, giving it the look of an old Victorian demon with a monocle and mustache. Its long beard only aided in the illusion. The goat leaped, shook its horns, and slammed both front legs to the porch. “Baaah!” it shrieked at Adam.
“What’s the matter, Chernie?” Her voice lilted around the place instead of booming like the fist of God. Adam took a step back to find her when the goat threatened him again.
He raised his hands and froze, uncertain how much damage those curled horns could do to his intestines. As this was probably Baph’s goat, he’d guess a lot.
“Oh.” She strode across the grounds, managing to keep herself in perfect silhouette. Adam didn’t need to bother shielding his eyes to see through the darkness. No one else was insane enough to live here with her. As she paused just on the edge of light, she cocked her head. “I see we have a visitor.”
Then Baph moved into the sun. People probably expected the kind of woman who hung porcelain baby doll heads in her trees to have ashen skin, jet black hair, cheekbones that’d cut diamonds, and lips red as blood. Instead, Baph was blessed with the rosy cheeks of a child fresh from playing in the cold. Her hair had less of a creeping fog over the graveyard look and more of a honeyed sunset feel—though she did keep it very short. And instead of the go-to rail-thin goth aesthetic, she was that level of plump that everyone from babies to grown men wanted to snuggle on.
At least, they did until they saw her eyes.
Baph sashayed past him, her work galoshes tramping as she went. “Who’s a good boy, Chernie?” she greeted her guard goat. Taking his horns, she gave him a good shake, and the goat joined in like it was a game.
“You have a goat,” Adam said.
“I’ve had Chernabog for three and a half years now. Not that you’d be aware.” She let go of her goat’s horns and stood, arms crossed over her chest. Adam tried to look into her eyes, but they were covered by her welding goggles.
“Do you mind…?” he said, miming taking them off.
She sighed but did as he asked. People would always gasp when they’d pass her in the street. Ask if they were real, or if she’d been in an accident. But no. Her terrifying eyes, so silver the irises nearly blended in with the sclera, were all natural. She looked like a living wraith trapped in the body of a Minnesotan mom.
“You were not given leave to visit, yet here you are before me. What brings you to this place, Adam?” she asked, then stroked her goat’s head like a Bond villain.
“This!” Adam held up his phone with a picture of the wall of masks.
Baph shielded her eyes. “I do not suffer the whims of such addled technology.”
He gritted his teeth, then strode toward her. “You will this time.” Adam kept forcing the phone into her line of sight. It was a childish game, chasing after her eyes as she kept dodging back and forth before finally catching her. “These are yours, aren’t they?”
With a beleaguered sigh, she cupped a hand behind his phone. He clenched tight, worried she might rip it out of his hand and feed it to her goat. “There are no two alike atoms in this world. Every blade of grass is composed of an ever-shifting array of electrons. Isn’t that beautiful?”
“So that’s a yes. What are they doing in a store that’s not mine?”
“Who is to say when the winds of time dance with the waters of mischief?”
“Don’t bullshit me. You sold them. You sold your masks to someone else!”
She sighed, then slipped back on her welding goggles. Without saying a word, she turned and pushed open her front door. The goat followed.
Unbelievable. Adam snorted. He thought they could do this civilly, but if she wasn’t going to own up to her shit, then he might have to go nuclear.
“Well? Are you coming in or not?”
No one saw inside Baph’s house. Almost no one. It was damn near impossible to make out anything. All the windows were coated in a tint, so even at high noon, the place was darker than a crypt. Baph hung her tool belt on a mannequin in a ballerina tutu, then trailed through the living room. “Attend to me in the kitchen,” she said.
Adam started to take off his shoes before he stared closer at the floor. Instead of something normal like wood or even carpet, it looked like she’d dumped cheap tiny toys all over the floor, glued them down, then painted it black. Shoes are staying on.
“Yes, your highness,” Adam mocked, doing his best to ignore the awkward crunching noises as he followed her.
Half a table sat dead center in the room. It was held up by the hands of a massive elephant statue, which the goat rubbed his horns on. Baph randomly caressed the goat’s head as she poured herself a bowl of honey, grabbed a spoon, and sat down to eat.
Does she expect me to watch her eat breakfast?
“This isn’t a social visit,” Adam began.
“It never is with you,” she retorted. “Every visit of yours comes with strings so fine one can almost miss them until the puppeteer pulls and…” She mimed a thread being cut. “Snap.”
Why didn’t he send her a strongly worded email?
Because she wouldn’t have read it for three years before sending him back a picture of a banana.
“Baph, are these your masks?” he asked, once again forcing her to ‘use technology.’ As if she didn’t have all the streaming services on her Xbox.
“Why ask what you already know?” was her way of saying yes.
“And you sold them, without my permission, to my fucking competition!”
Her spoon rattled in the bowl. It stood straight up as she turned to Adam. “I did not realize you two were ensnared in the pulsing throb of lust’s perfume. I approve.”
Adam groaned. “Not…it’s a euphemism. I’m not fucking him.”
“Oh. A shame. He seemed quite knowledgeable in many matters of the macabre.”
“That’s because he’s my competition! He sells Halloween stuff too, and you just gutted my business by selling him your masks!” Adam dug a hand against his face, partially to hide his disgust but also to try and massage away the headache always named Baph. It didn’t matter how long they went without talking; two minutes was all it took for him to go completely mad.
“He approached me with an offer, much as you had many years ago. I don’t understand the issue.”
“For fuck’s sake. You’re not some whimsical fairy. You get how capitalism works.”
She gave him the wraith glare, the full force of her silver eyes stripping him down for parts. But Adam had decades to build up an immunity and stared right back.
It was Baph who sat back. She stirred her honey, then added a splash of milk. “Whether withers the wanton willow? Beyond bearing its barking bite.”
He wanted to collapse into a chair and slam his head on the table, but the only other seat in the kitchen had a huge spike up the middle. “You realize you signed a contract with me? A contract that stipulates I am the exclusive purveyor of your Halloween masks.”
“Yes.”
“That means it’s illegal for you to sell them to anyone else, Beth!” Adam shouted. Her eyes flared, and he winced. “Sorry, Baph.”
His correction came way too late. She shoved back her chair, and the goat stirred at its mistress’ distress. Cloven hooves clipped over the tile causing Adam to realize those damn horns were right in groin-gouging range. Great.
“Give me your damn phone.” She jerked out her hand, and Adam slipped his cell inside. “If you will pay close attention, I did not sell him my finished masks for Samhain. All of those went to you in September’s shipment. Spy that paint job. The brush strokes are atrocious. The gems are practically falling off. And the hair…it is synthetic.”
“What are you saying?” Adam asked.
“He bought my prototypes, my failures. Stacks of old attempts not worthy of my name, but gathering dust. I thought the trade fair, as I would not have to pay for storage or destruction of the souls inside.”
They weren’t the good ones? “They looked perfect when I saw them.”
“That’s because your eyes are weak and untempered by the fire of creation.”
Adam kept trying to find whatever she was talking about, but the resolution was crap. He’d also accidentally snapped the edge of Raj’s nose and hair in the picture. It was blurry, but he kept staring at it when he was supposed to be focusing on the masks. “So a stranger shows up out of nowhere, and you just give him whatever you’ve got lying around?”
“He arrived at my doorstep inquiring about his mask—Dawon in the Night. We spoke at some length about how I create them. I gave him a tour of my workshop and, in time, the conversation swerved to my remnants. Those masks that never quite captured the spark of life and had to be cast aside into the abyss of the trash pile.”
Adam seethed in his mind, but he thought back to that mysterious man who’d beamed with excitement while they’d talked Halloween. It had reinvigorated Adam’s love more than a dozen parades ever could. “Why didn’t you tell me about them?” Cheaper masks would have been a boon to his store. Let people gawp at the perfect ones, then spend a hundred or fifty on the not-quite-perfect masks.
She stared him dead in the eye. “You already know the answer.”
“I would have listened,” Adam insisted.
“As you are listening now and not plunging yourself into darkness while wearing a mantle of spite and a crown of rumors?”
“Don’t psychoanalyze me, Lizzy.” He braced himself for the nut-punch from the goat, but she placed a hand in front of his face.
She twisted her head first to the right, then the left—like a doll with a broken neck. “You seem ill-sorted, Adam.”
“It’s the busiest time of year. I’m being torn in a hundred different directions. I’ve got a thousand things to do as Halloween King, and there’s this asshole trying to take it all away. So yeah, I’m ill-sorted. Imagine that.”
She patted his shoulders like she was about to put him in the game. The only sport Adam ever played was a half season of track when he tripped in a gopher hole and managed to break three kids’ arms by flailing. Adam frowned, not sure why he thought of his most embarrassing fail when he caught a notification on his phone. He needed to get back for the festival setup. Their king couldn’t miss it, after all.
Adam walked, and Baph followed, her hands still on him. They made their way together through the living room until he reached the porch and breathed in the air. Even though everywhere else smelled of leaves and the autumn sun baking trees, here was a cold fog crawling through mud. Trying to shake off the shiver, Adam focused on her. “Look, I…if you have any more extra masks, please sell them to me and not some handsome stranger that shows up at your door. Okay?”
“Handsome?” she asked, getting the same damn look in her eyes as Mom.
There was no way he could walk it back, so Adam walked away. He had a million things to do, and dealing with her would take a lifetime.
“We’ll talk later,” he said, easing into his car.
“Adam!” She called out, her hand high. He paused in closing his car door to stand and stare at her. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
Sure. Helpful as always. “Thanks, sis,” he called out and slumped into his seat. As he stared at his phone and the blurry nose on the edge, he wondered if Mr. Choudhary would be at the festival.
Most of him reviled at having to deal with that man, but an acorn in his heart hoped to see him once again.
Accepting that fate was always a bitch to him, Adam pulled out, leaving behind the macabre cottage of Elizabeth ‘Baphomet’ Stein.
CHAPTER EIGHT
EVERYTHING WAS BACK on track.
“Duck!”
Raj hit the deck just as a metal beam swung neck-height across the room. A few construction workers chased after it, offering apologies to the boss half watching. He had his other eye out the door on the gift shop teeming with kids shoving their sweaty faces into masks.
“Raj, man?” Logan shouted above the whir of tools.
“We’re almost on schedule,” Raj said. Okay, he hadn’t slept in two days, but he was fine. A little jittery from the espresso shots, but fine. This was going to work. “The rooms are staged, the props in place, the fountain’s working. There’s a few parts of the haunted house that need work, but we should get the scare actors in soon for a run-through and training. All good.”
“The store…?” Logan began using his cautious voice. He snapped up one of a hundred clipboards scattered around the construction site.
Raj stuck his hands behind his back and smiled. “It’s working out well. Look how popular it is.”
“Yeah, with teenagers who are just as likely to throw a rock at a prop instead of buying it. And what’s this invoice for masks? I thought we were only doing hotel merch?”
“Just an idea I had. Be a one-stop Halloween shop for people without costumes or tourists looking to get in on the action. The masks are flying off the shelves.”
“Because you’re selling them for twenty-five bucks a pop and they cost us…thirty-three each?” Logan dropped the papers, then looked again, before staring Raj in the eye.
It’d been slow that first night with a handful of people wandering in from the muddy parking lot, staring at the cheap Halloween stuff, then leaving. He’d needed a hook, a way to get them here and in droves, so…
“It’s a loss leader. Stores do that.” And not that he got so wrapped up in being the center of attention that he discounted them over and over until bottoming out at seventy-five percent.
“Big stores that can take the hit, on Black Friday, who then make it up by jacking the prices the rest of the year. We’re gonna have to hit even by next July or—”
“Look, we needed to get people excited, and we did. Our book is full for the entire season, the town’s talking about the haunt. It’s working.” Raj tried to beam, but his eye twitched.
“You okay, man?”
“I’m great,” he shouted. “Just great. Everything’s great.”
So they wouldn’t technically have the only haunt in Anoka, but it’d be the best no matter the cost. People were going to talk about his place for years after. Then, as the town crowned him the new Halloween king, he’d rub it in that bastard’s face. Shove him against the wall, yank back his hair and…
Raj jerked, his stomach roiling at the idea of him touching the man he despised. Or maybe it was the breakfast of black coffee and Red Bull. Logan watched him leap onto one foot, then put the other back down with a careful eye. “Hmm?” Raj asked.
“I didn’t say anything.” He shifted his arms, and a bold flyer caught Raj’s eye. The word Halloween leaped out at him. He slid the paper free. “Maybe you should go get some sleep. We’ve got this under control…”
“What’s this?” Raj asked even as he read the itinerary from the Chamber of Commerce. It was every Halloween activity in the town up to the thirty-first. Most of the options were listed in small black font, but one simply called The Festival was in bold red, and it started in an hour.
“Don’t worry about that.” Logan tried to pull the paper away, but Raj was fixated.
He’ll be there, in his tight-ass suits with that one button undone, hip cocked, and long slender fingers around his tie. Ruling the whole community like he’s an actual king.
“I should go,” Raj said.
