Still sipping from the mug, Sean shifted his gaze to the other side of the bed. The big man dwarfed Sean’s little desk chair, and he seemed about as comfortable as an elephant in a Volkswagen Beetle. Karl grinned at him, and Sean moved the drink for a moment—just long enough for a quick grin—then took another sip.

  His mother’s cool hand came to rest on his forehead. “He’s still got the fever, Karl.”

  Karl’s gaze cut to Vickie, and his eyes narrowed a little. “We can take him to Rochester. Or Cuba—it’s closer.”

  “How do you feel, Sean?” asked his mom.

  “Throat hurts,” he said. “Tired. Hot.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Karl.”

  “Maybe moving him will make him worse. We should just let him sleep.”

  Sean turned toward his mother, awaiting her decision. He drained the remaining Dr. Pepper from the Scooby cup. “More?”

  “That’s a good sign, isn’t it, Vickie?” asked Karl. “The other times he woke up, he wasn’t with it enough to even drink soda. Now, he wants more.”

  “Yes, I suppose,” said Vickie Walker, but her voice didn’t ring with confidence. “What about it, Sean? Do you feel better than before?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t remember.”

  “I’ll fetch him another cup of Dr. Pepper. Karl, take his temperature again?”

  Karl grunted and turned to get the thermometer from Sean’s desk. He handled the mercury-filled glass cylinder as if it might explode at any moment, and Sean smiled at him as Karl slid the cold-tasting tube under his tongue.

  When Vickie came back with another Scooby-sized dose of Dr. Pepper, Karl withdrew the thermometer and squinted down at it.

  “Well?” asked Vickie.

  “I…” Karl blushed. “I can barely read this damn thing, but seems it’s come down a degree.”

  Vickie handed the cup to Sean with one hand and held the other out for the thermometer. She stared at it for a moment, then grinned. “One hundred and two. That’s down two degrees since last time.”

  “Let’s all get some rest. We can check him again in the morning.”

  Vickie’s gaze slipped away from Sean’s eyes. “You go ahead, Karl. I’ll stay in here.”

  Sean had another sip of his Dr. Pepper, then held out the cup. “Sleepy, again.”

  Vickie took it and patted him on the shoulder. “Go to sleep, silly.”

  Sean’s eyelids had already drooped closed. In moments, he’d fallen asleep.

  Sean walked down Union Street, casting frequent glances behind him, keeping his eyes peeled for Dennis Cratchkin. The bully was after him. Again.

  He crossed to the left side of the road and stepped up on the sidewalk. Cratchkin won’t let this go, he thought. I will have to kill him. He shuddered. Where did that come from?

  He walked under the boughs of a large maple tree, a strange déjà vu overtaking him. He looked up, expecting to find a teenaged boy sitting with a pretty girl, but instead, a yellow-scaled gorilla swung from one of the upper branches, something flapping behind him in the wind of his passage. Sean peered upward, trying to identify the flapping garment as it seemed of critical importance. He lifted a hand to shield his face from the suddenly too-bright sunlight.

  “No fair peeking, Sean,” growled Karl Munnur’s voice.

  Sean stumbled back a step or two, still peering up. But the sun had moved in the sky to silhouette the gorilla’s shape. He dropped his gaze to the dancing shadow of the thing and the strange bit fluttering behind it.

  “It’s her skin, kid,” said the gorilla in Karl’s voice. “Kristy’s. I took it for a cape. Do you love it?”

  Sean skittered back, unbalancing himself and falling on his ass. He didn’t want to look, but his head raised on its own, and his eyes swiveled up in their sockets until his gaze rested on the gorilla’s chest.

  The beast had knotted the cape around its thick throat. Two strap-like sections hung over his shoulders, and after a moment, Sean recognized them and gagged.

  The straps were the skin from a girl’s arms.

  “Don’t carry on so, kid. She’s a trollop. Do you know what I got her to do? Plus, even you’ve seen her pretty bits naked.”

  Sean rocked his head from side to side with such violence that his neck muscles screamed in protest. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Dude… What the hell’s wrong with the kid?” said a stranger’s voice.

  Sean turned and peeked. A bright red shape rested in the road, about as tall as Karl. It looked as if made of wax, but an intense heat had warped and melted it around the edges. Three tentacles sprang from its top, a single, bone-like talon at the tip of each. Its eyes reminded Sean of the enlarged photographs of insects they had in the school library, of honeycombs, of imagined alien invaders. But the worst things had to be its mouths—three triangular-shaped openings, rowed with sharp, hook-shaped fangs.

  Sean opened his mouth to scream, but before he could, Dennis Cratchkin stepped from behind the red thing, tapping his short-handled sledgehammer against his palm. “Bill’s come due, Sean. Time to pay up,” he said.

  Sean scrabbled back like a crab, only the heels of his hands and the soles of his feet touching the concrete sidewalk. He hadn’t forgotten about the yellow-scaled gorilla—not exactly—but he had lost sight of the thing.

  When the scaled yellow hand fell on his shoulder with the weight of mountains behind it, Sean screamed and…

  …sat bolt-upright in bed, his heart thundering in his chest. His mother slept twisted in an odd position in the dining room chair she’d pulled next to his bed. Gasping for breath, Sean turned his head.

  Karl perched in the little chair that went with Sean’s desk. His gaze rested on Sean, his eyes narrowed to slits. A peculiar expression twitched on the man’s face—suspicion, irritation, or perhaps something darker. “Nightmare?” he asked.

  Sean dropped his gaze, unable to continue to meet Karl’s hostile stare. “Yeah.”

  “We should talk about your imagination, kid,” said the deputy. “It might just get you in trouble someday.”

  11

  September 1976

  Kristy did feel better than before, but she didn’t feel good. She wasn’t happy, and being unhappy at her birthday party made her a little sick. Her gaze kept straying toward the side windows that looked out on Leif’s house.

  If she were honest with herself, she had hoped Leif would’ve relented by her birthday, but she hadn’t seen him. She still harbored a twisted hope that he would crash the party, that he would come and apologize, that he would take her back.

  She didn’t share that wish with anyone. Not her mother, not even Michelle.

  The guest list had swelled and swelled and swelled, and it seemed as though people stood elbow to elbow in the living room. True to her word, Kristy’s mother had made a space for a dance floor of sorts, moving the dining room set out onto the back porch, and the dining room was full of bouncing, twisting, cavorting bodies and thumping to the rhythms of David Bowie, Elton John, and the Eagles. To Kristy, the dancing kids looked as though they were having sex with their clothes on.

  But then again, sex had been on her mind almost every waking moment since the fight with Leif. She stood alone, a subtle gap of space between her and her guests. She wore an outfit Leif had called “hot,” and she wore it as if born to it. The boys she’d invited stared at her with lust in their eyes, and while that stroked her ego…they weren’t Leif and never would be.

  With a suppressed smile, she walked to the window and peered up at Leif’s bedroom. Unchanged since the day he dumped her, the shade blocked the window with no telltale border of light surrounding it. She hadn’t noticed his lamp on since that horrible night. She’d neither seen nor heard from him in the previous weeks, and that ripped at her heart.

  Why does he have to be this way? Why is he being so fucking mean? The two questions had become a refrain of sorts—chasing each other through the hallways of her mind like Tom and Jerry. Her mother said he’d acted like a child and shown his “true colors,” but Kristy didn’t believe that. She’d played her part in the drama. She’d acted the fool that night, too—screaming at him to leave her alone, to go find a slut to fuck.

  Kristy hated to think of it, despised the memory of how she’d felt: vicious, mean, wanting to sting him. She regretted it. She’d acted like a child, and though he’d hurt her with what he said, she knew he hadn’t meant the jibes. The situation had frustrated him, that’s all.

  “Come dance, Kristy!” called Michelle, who’d been dancing with the same sophomore all night. He’s cute, she thought. But he’s no L— She cut that line of thinking dead. She’d been thinking it too much, too often. Watching television—Erik Estrada was adorable, but he was no Leif. She sneered at how simple she’d become. She measured everyone and everything against the perfection of Leif.

  Michelle pointed at her date’s friend and tossed a wink at her. Kristy tilted her head to the side and looked the boy over. He wore a KISS concert shirt over Levi’s. The tight jersey showed off his body—he was in great shape—and his face was pretty enough. She winked back at Michelle, nodding and holding up her index finger. She took one last look up at Leif’s window.

  The shade was up, the light was on, and Leif stood in the window, looking down at her, a small grin playing on his lips. She smiled a little, bittersweet smile.

  “Happy birthday,” he mouthed, and she heard his voice in her mind. His silky, sexy voice.

  She nodded up at him and paused for a moment, frozen with indecision, before glancing at the boy Michelle had pointed out. She turned her gaze to Leif’s window, and his expression had fallen. He looked so sad, so heartbroken, and she knew what she wanted. What she’d wanted all along.

  She lifted her arm and beckoned him, and his face broke into a radiant expression of joy. He disappeared from the window, and Kristy’s stomach danced with butterflies as they had the first night she’d caught him watching her.

  She smiled at Michelle and the boys she stood with, but instead of joining them, she went out the front door to meet Leif on the lawn. They would talk for a few minutes, then go in and dance.

  She wanted to ask him for a special present, one only he could give her. They would dance until the party ended, and then he could give it to her. She hoped his dad wasn’t home and they could use Leif’s bed.

  Kristy didn’t want her first time to be in a flower bed.

  12

  Halloween 1976

  Excitement bubbled in Dennis’s brain like the bubbles in soda. Each little bubble contained a vision of torment with either Jasper or Ari as the target. He’d been working on his plan, ironing out details and testing ideas since his epiphany in the week before school started.

  And the day of his revenge had arrived.

  But what if I get caught? asked a whiny voice in his mind. Dad will kill me if I do.

  Dennis grimaced and pushed the voice away—it was the least of his worries. He bent his mind to his task, focusing on the last few details. They’ll never catch me. The plan is perfect.

  After tonight, one of his so-called friends would be dead, and the other would be charged with his murder.

  Perfect.

  He left the house, his backpack slung on his shoulder, dressed in black pants, a black T-shirt, and a black nylon windbreaker. Inside the pack, he had a few necessary items, one of which was a black balaclava.

  “Hey, Denny,” said Ari as he and Jasper came up the sidewalk. “Ready to have fun?”

  Dennis plastered a grin on his face and nodded. “I hope you two are ready for some freaky-deaky hijinks.”

  “Hijinks?” asked Jasper with faint signs of amusement twisting his lips.

  “I thought for sure you’d flip over ‘freaky-deaky’ yet here you are asking about ‘hijinks?’ Sheesh, Jasper, get with it.” Dennis broke into a wide grin to hide his feral rage.

  “So, what’s this big plan?”

  “It’s a killer, man, but you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear the details.” Dennis made a show of tapping his ears and looking around. “No telling who’s listening.”

  “Come on, dude. Spill.”

  Dennis grinned. He had both of them hooked and neither suspected a thing.

  “Yeah, man. Tell us. Will it take long? I want to have time for candy tonight.”

  Candy, Dennis thought with derision. Fucking clowns don’t know what’s coming. Idiots. He pasted a smile on his face and winked at Ari. “Oh, we’ll be getting candy, all right. Trust me. There will be tons of it. But first, we have to set things up.”

  “Wait. What?”

  Dennis smiled and winked, though it made him want to puke. He’d much rather be swatting these two bugs with his hammer. “Yeah. We’re going to have a fake haunted house. We’ll lure the little kids there and scare the shit out of them. They’ll drop their bags and boogie, and if they don’t, I’ll be hiding in the dark, and I’ll steal the bags from them as they run away.”

  Jasper looked him up and down. “Hence the black.”

  “Hence? Hence?” Dennis sniggered.

  “Hey, if you can use hijinks, I can say hence.”

  “You’re using it wrong, bozo,” said Ari. “Not supposed to use it at the beginning of a sentence. You should say ‘thus,’ instead.”

  Dennis and Jasper shared a glance then brayed laughter.

  “Well, you should,” said Ari, but that only elicited more laughter. “Fine. Be uneducated brutes all your lives.”

  Dennis let his laughter peter out and slapped Jasper on the shoulder. “Let’s go get this thing set up, you uneducated brute.”

  “Let’s do,” said Jasper in his snooty butler voice. “Thus, we will be ready to steal candy when the time comes.”

  “Thus, Ari will quit crying about grammar.”

  “Assholes,” Ari said, but he laughed as he said it.

  “Where do we set up this master plan?”

  “At our old hideout.”

  Jasper twitched his head back. “How do we get kids to come into the woods?”

  “You look like a chicken when you do that,” said Dennis with a long-suffering air. “And your question is stupid. We’ll tell them we’re giving out whole candy bars.”

  Jasper pursed his lips and looked up and to the right. “That should do it…if my math is right.”

  “It is,” said Dennis.

  “I concur,” said Ari.

  Dennis twitched his eyebrow at Jasper and the chortling started anew. The three boys walked into the woods, laughing and joshing one another as boys will do.

  When they reached the tumbledown shack they called their hideout, Dennis stopped and said, “Okay, it’ll work like this. One of you, and it doesn’t matter which, waits inside for the kiddies to show. The other hides in the woods, and when the kiddies go in for their candy, you run out making monster sounds and beat your fists on the outside of the shed. The guy there makes as if he’s scared, that there’s a werewolf or something out here.”

  “And what will you be doing?” asked Ari.

  “I’ll be hiding in the woods, too, ready to snatch any plastic pumpkins or candy bags they manage to keep ahold of.” He reached into his backpack and withdrew the balaclava. He slid it on and grinned. “What do you think?”

  “Do you have more of those for us?” asked Ari.

  “No, but you don’t need it.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The kiddies will only see the guy inside, and if you act scared enough, they won’t realize you’re in on it.”

  Jasper made a face. “I don’t know. That part seems risky.”

  Dennis smiled his most winning smile. “You’re the outside man, then.”

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said Ari.

  “You snooze, you lose,” said Jasper with a grin for Dennis. “Get inside, Ariel. And act scared when I do my thing.”

  “Won’t they see I don’t have any candy?”

  “I’ve got that covered,” said Dennis, reaching into his pack again. This time, he pulled out a Snickers display box. “It’s empty, though, so keep the lid closed.”

  Ari grinned. “This could work.”

  “Of course it will work,” said Dennis. He turned and jogged into the trees. “Get ready, guys.”

  “But who will bring the kids here?” called Jasper.

  “I’m going to put up signs at the end of the path. Don’t worry! I considered everything.” He slithered into the woods and butterflies of nervousness and excitement tickled his belly. He slipped his hand into his pack for the third time, but this time, he withdrew the sledgehammer.

  Finally get to see if you’ll make a dent in someone’s forehead, he thought at the hammer. I bet you will.

  13

  Halloween 1976

  Sean dressed in beige pants and one of Karl’s long-sleeved white shirts. He left the shirt unbuttoned and had his mother’s bathrobe belt to tie around his waist and hold the shirt closed. He had an arm’s length of aluminum pipe that he’d spray-painted Day-Glo green.

  Karl looked him over and tipped him a wink. “You make a good Luke Skywalker, Sean Walker.”

  “Cute,” said Sean with mock severity. “It’ll cost you five bucks, though.”

  Karl grunted, then grinned at him. “You sure you don’t want to trick-or-treat around your house?”

  “Rabbit Run will have better candy.”

  The big man looked at him in that way he had, and Sean pretended not to notice. “You know, Sean, if that bully is‍—‍”

  “No, it’s fine. I mean no one is bothering me.”

  “I can teach you to‍—‍”

  “Karl, it’s Halloween.”

  “Right. Message received.” Karl chuckled.

  “Thanks for taking me.”

  “No bother. Gets me out of doorbell-duty. I hate getting the door on Halloween.” He turned down Neibolt Street and passed the park, peering into the gloom to make sure no skells hung around in the darkness.

  “Halloween, Karl,” said Sean.

  Karl chuckled. “Busted. You can take the man out of the cops, but you can’t take the cop out of the man.”

 

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