Halloweenland (30 page)

The van crept up the street, following Douglas and his fellow pirate.

As Grant was stepping back downstairs the doorbell rang again, and soon he was sitting in the living room with the lights out, smoking his second cigarette, waiting for the bell to ring.

It did, again and again: hobos, men from Mars, ballerinas followed by more hobos.

There was a lull, and Grant went into the kitchen, made another grilled cheese sandwich for dinner.

The doorbell rang again.

Abandoning the grilled cheese sandwich, Grant grabbed a handful of candy bars, yanked open the door—

Petee Wilkins was standing there, snuffling, looking at the ground. There was something in his right hand, which he jerked up—

Instinctively, Grant twisted aside as Petee’s eyes briefly
met his and the gun went off. It sounded very far away and not very loud. But it must have been a better handgun than Grant assumed, because the slug hit him in the side like a hard punch. As Grant kept twisting, falling into the candy basket and to the ground, he heard Petee hitch a sob and cry, “I’m sorry!”

Then Petee was gone.

Grant lay stunned, and waited for pain to follow the burning sensation of the bullet.

It came, but it wasn’t as bad as he feared.

As he sat up, a lone trick-or-treater, dressed in some indeterminate costume that may have represented Mr. Moneybags from the board game Monopoly, stood in the doorway looking down at him. He said the required words and Grant fumbled on the ground around him and threw a handful of candy bars his way.

“Gee, thanks, mister!” Mr. Moneybags said, and ran off.

Grant scooped as much of the candy around him as possible out through the doorway, then stood up with an “Oooof” and, holding his side, kicked closed the door.

He limped into the kitchen and had a look.

There was blood on his hand, which was not a good sign, but there wasn’t a lot soaked into his shirt, which was. He pulled his shirt out of his pants, took a deep breath, and studied the wound.

Just under the skin, left side, in and out, looking clean. He knew he would find the slug somewhere in the front hallway.

“Thank you, Petee, you incompetent asshole,” he whispered, and cleaned the wound at the kitchen sink as best he could. He tied three clean dish towels together and girded his middle.

The blood flow had nearly stopped already.

The front doorbell rang, but he ignored it.

He called the police dispatcher, whose name was Maggie Pheifer, identified himself, told her to have a patrol car visit Petee Wilkins’ father’s house, where they would probably find Petee Wilkins hiding under his own bed. “Consider him armed and dangerous, just in case. I’ll call back in later.”

From upstairs came a moan, louder than the others.

“Shit,” Grant said and, taking a deep, painful breath, hobbled to the stairs and limped his way up.

Marianne Carlin’s eyes were wide open. She lay pushed back on the bed, knees apart. She was breathing in short little gasps.

“Hello, Detective,” Samhain said calmly from the foot of the bed, where he floated like a wraith. “I see Petee didn’t do his job, which is just as well. I really didn’t want you dead, only . . . incapacitated.”

Grant felt suddenly short of breath, leaned against the doorjamb. He slid down to the floor, staring at Samhain.

“My, my,” Samhain said, “Petee seems to have done a fine job at that.”

“What do you want, Samhain?” Grant said, gasping. There was a growing pain in his left side, which wasn’t going to go away.

Samhain said nothing, staring at Marianne Carlin, who gave a moan and arched her back.

“You want the baby,” Grant said.

“Yes,” Samhain said simply.

“Why?”

Again the wraith was silent as Marianne threw her head
back in pain. Grant wanted to help her but felt as if his body was filled with lead. He could barely lift his left arm.

“Do you know what ghosts are, Detective?” Samhain said, quietly. “It happens now and then that someone on the way to my realm from yours gets . . . caught in the middle. These are usually very strong personalities. Often, there is something very important that they are leaving behind. Unfinished business, if you will.

“Jack Carlin got . . . away from me, you might say. At the moment he was to be mine, he broke away and reached his wife. This has never happened quite like this before. He was neither of this Earth when this happened, nor completely in my own place. He was dead, Detective. And yet . . .”

Samhain stood silent vigil at the foot of the bed, staring at Marianne Carlin in a kind of wonder.

Grant said, “The baby is from your world.”

“Yes. The child is of . . . death. It is mine, in a way. Do you understand now? It is . . . life from death. This . . . has never happened.”

Grant gasped, gathered his strength. “You sound almost proud.”

Samhain turned a mild, almost fond, look on Grant. “You give me too much credit for cruelty, Detective. I serve, nothing more. And after eons of death, to see something born from it like this . . .”

His attention was brought back to Marianne, whose cries were coming more closely together. Her stomach was taut with effort, her legs spread impossibly wide.

“It will not be long now . . .” Samhain said, in wonder. He moved up over the foot of the bed to hover above the birthing woman.

Grant took a deep breath and pushed himself back against the doorjamb. With a supreme effort he stood.
For a moment the world went black, but he held his position and when his sight cleared he urged himself forward.

“Don’t try to interfere, Detective,” Samhain snapped.

“That thing could bring death into this world. I can’t let that happen.”

“I said don’t interfere . . .”

Grant took two halting steps forward and then the pain in his left side flared to broiling heat. He stumbled, reaching out to clutch at the side of the bed as he fell to his knees. He pulled himself up, fighting for breath, to see the crown of a baby’s head appear between Marianne Carlin’s legs.

“Good, Marianne—good!” Samhain urged, as the young woman screamed and arched and pushed.

Grant took a long shuddering breath, put his right hand into his coat pocket, resting it on the butt of his 9mm handgun.

Samhain moved up and closer over the woman, almost alive with excitement.

“Push, Marianne! Push!”

Marianne Carlin screamed. The baby’s head appeared, a gray wrinkled thing with closed eyes and a puckered mouth.

It was followed in a rush of blood by the rest of the body, tiny hands and skinny legs and tiny feet.

Samhain moved over the baby, straightened, his head thrown back, his red mouth opened wide.

“Mine!”
he cried.

The thing on the bed kicked, and then its tiny mouth opened and then its eyes.

It looked up at the thing hovering overhead.

Grant tightened his grip on the 9mm.

The baby wailed, a hollow, long, hoarse shriek.

It held its tiny hands out to Samhain, and opened its mouth again.

As Samhain tentatively reached out to touch it, the baby turned to dust, head to foot, the blood surrounding it and the umbilical cord also.

Its dying empty moan echoed to silence.

“Nooooooooo!”
Samhain wailed, throwing his clawed hands down to the empty spot on the bed where the baby had been.
“Nooooooooo!”

Grant’s grip loosened on the handgun, and he saw black, and fell to the floor . . .

Sunlight made Bill Grant wince. He opened his eyes, feeling a hot sharp pain in his right side, which abruptly tapered and subsided. He was in a hospital bed, a white sheet pulled up to his chin, a lightly curtained closed window to his right. It was broad daylight, the sun high in a sapphire blue cloudless sky over the rooftops outside.

“Welcome to November,” a sarcastic voice said.

He pushed himself up as Marianne Carlin’s sister Janet appeared at the foot of his bed, hands on hips.

“You . . .” Grant said.

Her cheeks colored slightly. “Let’s just say I felt guilty as hell over being such a chickenshit,” she said. “I started for home right after I talked to you on the phone. Said my last good-byes to Chuck and Baby Charlie and got to Marianne’s house just in time to find it crawling with police. I followed one of them to your house. It seems some trick-or-treater found a handgun on your front lawn and put it in his bag. When the police got there they found you and my sister both half-dead in your guest bedroom.”

“How—” Grant began.

“Marianne’s fine. She doesn’t remember anything that happened the last few weeks. But what everyone wants to know is, what happened to the baby?”

“The—” Grant said, but was again cut off, this time by Doc Williams, who appeared next to Janet. He looked no better than the last time Grant had seen him.

“There was no baby,” Williams said. “It was an hysterical pregnancy after all.” He glanced at Grant briefly, his eyes hooded, and cut off Janet Larson when she tried to speak.

“The investigation is complete, Mrs. Larson. There was no fetus, no placenta, no cord, no blood.”

For a moment their eyes met, and then Janet said, “Oh. So you had a little visit from our friend in the black cape, too.”

“He won’t bother you anymore,” Grant said.

They both looked at him, with a mixture of hope and dread on their faces.

“It’s over. Forget about it,” Grant added.

“Is it?” Janet asked.

“For you two, it is. He’s got plenty else to keep him busy. And Halloween is over.”

Later, much later, after they all had gone, and the sun was sinking into the purple west toward another dark night, Grant thought, just before he slept a blessedly dreamless sleep, “Until next year.”