The Halloween Children Read online

  The Halloween Children is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2017 Hydra Ebook Edition

  Copyright © 2014 by Brian James Freeman and Norman Prentiss

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hydra, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  HYDRA is a registered trademark and the HYDRA colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Earthling Publications in 2014.

  Ebook ISBN 9780399180972

  Cover design: Elderlemon Design

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  From Digital Transcription #7

  Lynn

  From Digital Transcription #7

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  Lynn

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  Harris

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  Lynn

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  Lynn

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  Lynn

  Email from Jessica Shepard

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  Lynn

  Harris

  The Final Interview

  Dedication

  About the Authors

  The Halloween Children are everywhere and they know our fears.

  —written in black marker on a bench outside the Stillbrook Apartments

  Source: Digital Transcription

  Names have been changed to “Interviewer” and “Victim” for the public release of this file.

  Interviewer: Who are the Halloween Children?

  Victim: You’re missing the point.

  Interviewer: Okay, if that’s not the point, why did they do what they did?

  Victim: You’re still missing the point.

  Interviewer: Was it all an elaborate hoax?

  Victim: You think that’s important? Then you’re missing the point.

  [Fifteen seconds of silence on the recording.]

  Interviewer: How did you get out of there alive?

  [Another silence, this time twenty seconds.]

  Victim: Now we’re getting somewhere, but you already know the answer to that.

  Interviewer: Okay, when did you realize something wasn’t right that Halloween night?

  [Another silence, this time thirty seconds.]

  Victim: When I discovered that so many of my neighbors were dead.

  Harris

  A few weeks before my entire world collapsed around me, my wife and I rented a found-footage movie about a couple of spoiled rich kids deciding their house is haunted. They’re terrified because a dish gets broken or they hear a strange noise in their silent, spotless home.

  I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for them. Stuff got broken around our place all the time, and the apartment had never exactly been quiet to begin with.

  It’s called having a family.

  I turned to Lynn at her end of the couch and I said, “If this happened to us, how would we know? Seriously, how? With your Amber chatting and singing constantly, I wouldn’t be able to hear a ghost unless it screamed right into my ear.”

  “You’re the one talking now. Amber’s asleep.”

  Lynn pretended annoyance that I spoke over the television, but I knew she was miffed at the “your Amber” remark—which, let’s be clear, I never say in front of our daughter. But when my wife and I are alone, I kind of can’t resist pointing out Lynn’s tendency to give Amber extra attention and encouragement, sometimes at Mattie’s expense.

  Amber’s the squeaky wheel.

  As a for-instance: Say, after dinner, we’re in the TV room and Mattie’s drawing in one of his notebooks while Amber plinks away at the xylophone I could kill my brother for giving her last Christmas. She hits a ton of notes until it’s like Morse code, dot-dot-dash-dot-whatever, and I swear it’s like she sends her mother a coded message. You want a cookie? Lynn says, and Amber bright-smiles with a Yes, please, so you know it’s just what she’s been thinking, and all the while she never pauses with those sticks against the colorful metal bars, maybe practicing a sequence for her next request—you know, Bring me a glass of milk while you’re at it, okay Mom?

  And all the time Mattie’s right there in the same room. “What about Mattie?” I say, and Lynn says she didn’t think he wanted to be bothered while he was drawing. If he’s hungry, he should speak up, she says. Then she asks him anyway, just to humor me, and Mattie looks at her like he ponders the offer, then moves his head kind of in a circle so you can’t tell if he’s nodding yes or no. To me, it’s a sweet and sad gesture: It’s like the boy thinks he doesn’t deserve a cookie. So I’m like, “Bring him one, too. He doesn’t eat it, I will.”

  Later, in the movie, the young wife started screaming because she heard footsteps above the bedroom ceiling.

  How terrifying.

  As Lynn and I watched, our new upstairs neighbor took heavy steps across the floor of his living room.

  “Mr. Stompy’s at it again,” Lynn said. The apartment regulations said you were supposed to carpet eighty-five percent of the floors, with padding beneath, to muffle footsteps. Before I’d met the new upstairs guy in person, I thought he must weigh four hundred pounds. Actually, he was this frail little thing and I didn’t know how he managed to make so much noise.

  “He sounds angry,” I said as he crossed the room again. My eyes tracked his movement across our ceiling. “Let’s hope he doesn’t start his vacuum at two a.m. again, like last week.”

  Next, the movie husband heard a low whisper through the baby monitor. I couldn’t hear what it said because somebody used the trash chute in the hallway outside our apartment. The bag clanged against the hollow metal chute on the way down, and some glass shattered when it hit bottom.

  “Some ghost has probably been trying to scare us for months now,” I said. “Too bad we can’t hear it.”

  “Shhhh,” Lynn said. “Movie.”

  I was just joking around, of course. If my jokes had anything to do with what happened to our family that Halloween, I’m really sorry. I wish I could take it all back.

  Lynn

  I have no idea how to begin this thing, this journal or whatever I’m supposed to call it.

  Just having it around seems like asking for trouble.

  Harris doesn’t really use the computer, but what if Amber or Matt found what I’m writing for you? Their games are on here, and they’re allowed to chat online with friends if we’re in the room.

  I thought about buying a real diary or journal, but that would be even more obvious and out of place in the apartment.

  I’ll probably just delete all of this anyway.

  To start, you said I should write a little bit about myself, as if you and I hadn’t already had a couple of sessions.

  So here goes nothing:

  My husband, Harris, is the handyman for the apartment complex
we live in, although sometimes I think he isn’t very handy at all.

  My daughter, Amber, is exceptionally talented at everything she tries.

  My son, Matt, is a lot like his father.

  I work as a computer tech support operator for ComQues, a job that I can do remotely from home with a VoIP phone program the company provided me and remote-access software that allows me to view the customer’s computer.

  My job is simple, but I’m also very good at what I do.

  Most computer stuff can be fixed in one of four ways, and most people are so grateful when you solve their problem.

  Once in a while you get some grumpy Gus, but I know how to handle them. If you talk nice to them, they eventually calm down.

  Honestly, they’re just frustrated because their machine doesn’t do what they expect it to.

  Almost as bad as people sometimes—ha!

  But none of this really explains why I’m seeing you, does it?

  You also asked me to write down my thoughts and feelings between our sessions so we could better discuss them, right?

  Well, right now I’m thinking maybe a woman in a strong marriage shouldn’t be seeing a marriage counselor alone, in secret, without her husband knowing.

  I’ve been thinking about that a lot since our first session.

  But what you really want me to do is answer the question you asked me at the end of our last session, right? The one I didn’t want to answer?

  You asked what about Harris annoys me the most.

  The reason I didn’t want to answer is simple: Just like how someone in a good, stable, happy marriage shouldn’t be visiting a marriage counselor on her own, she also shouldn’t have to prioritize as many answers to that question as I had running through my head.

  Then again, you already knew that, didn’t you?

  Hence this diary. Or journal. Or whatever.

  I guess I’m really doing this, and I guess it’s okay to type this since I’ll probably just delete it.

  Here’s the answer to your question:

  One of the biggest annoyances is how much Harris shelters Matt.

  How exactly will Matt grow up to be a real man if his father is always holding his hand and serving the world to him on a silver platter?

  In fact, Harris does the exact opposite with Amber. It’s almost like he doesn’t even know our daughter exists some days. It’s Matt this and Matt that.

  But you know what’s really bugging me right now?

  It’s actually nothing to do with Harris. Not exactly. It’s what his son is up to when I’m not looking.

  You see, I think Matt is sneaking around this apartment and moving things, just a little bit, for reasons I can’t quite figure out.

  For example, I like to read in bed to help me wind down after a long day, and right now I’m reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier for about the hundredth time.

  But last night, when I went to bed, the bookmark was in the wrong chapter.

  I asked Harris about it and he insisted he had no idea.

  He’s never lied to me, at least not that I know of, so that makes me think of Matt.

  Why’s my son sneaking into our bedroom?

  It’s like he’s testing me to see if I notice.

  I don’t like that. Not one little bit.

  Another example of Matt being up to no good:

  Every evening we have what we call “family time” in the living room.

  I might be surfing the news on my phone.

  Harris is probably playing Candy Crush or some other time killer of a game on his.

  Amber is either chatting with her friends on the computer or playing her xylophone.

  Matt is always drawing in his notebooks.

  Always.

  But the thing is, sometimes I feel like maybe he’s not really drawing at all.

  I think he’s watching me out of the corner of his eye, just to see what I’m doing.

  I don’t know why he would be spying on me, and I never actually catch him in the act, but why else would I feel like he’s watching me if he wasn’t actually doing it, you know?

  I also don’t like that one little bit.

  Harris

  “My side,” Mattie whispered to me one day. His mom and Amber were in the community lounge fixing up a craft project for fifth-grade history—a shoe box, construction paper, Popsicle sticks, and a toilet-paper tube with eyes drawn on it, and voilà, you’ve got a scene from The Call of the Wild or something. The girls were busy, in that conspiratorial way they have, and my big-dad fingers were apparently too clumsy to be trusted with rounded scissors or delicate wisps of cotton pulled into clouds, so I was banished to the TV room. Mattie caught me during one of the commercial breaks.

  (And do I need to point out how courteous that is? Even if the show isn’t any good—a Star Trek spin-off with the wrong cast, or those stupid contestant interviews on Jeopardy!—Mattie will always wait for the commercial instead of interrupting. If we’re watching a DVD, he’s patient until I push the pause button. I’d like to say I taught him to do that, but he figured it out on his own. Amber’s still learning, I guess. Lynn, too, for that matter.)

  Anyway, I followed him to the bedroom he shared with Amber.

  When Mattie said “My side,” since we were alone, I was tempted to respond: “Of course I’m on your side, Buddy, you know that. No matter what.” There’s nothing wrong with a parent saying that. It’s being supportive. To be careful, I could have added, “I’m on your side, and I’m on Amber’s, too”—even though Mattie tended to be the more reasonable, nine times out of ten. Ten out of ten.

  Then I realized he wasn’t asking me. He was telling.

  His side.

  It would take only one picture of the kids’ bedroom to explain. Mattie’s bed was made. His books were arranged on each shelf, the Harry Potter and other series books together in order, paperbacks aligned neatly according to size, and a small section on the top right for schoolbooks and his dictionary. A gooseneck lamp sat on his wooden desk, with one sharpened pencil in the groove along the desk’s back edge—more pencils and supplies were stored in the drawer, to be brought out only when needed. The same was true of his toys, closed in the bottom dresser drawer, awaiting rare occasions when Mattie chose to play rather than read or draw.

  Amber’s side, well…we wouldn’t want to stifle her creativity by insisting on order, would we? The covers were kicked aside, with last night’s clothes in a heap on the bedside floor. Two of her four dresser drawers were perpetually open, and a clump of cotton swelled over the sock drawer, looking like it had been slammed to catch someone’s toes. Amber’s schoolbooks were along the windowsill, on or under the bed, or buried beneath stuffed animals or other toys that populated her side of the room.

  Her side. On TV comedies, fighting siblings sometimes chalked a dividing line down the middle of their carpet, or hung a string across the bedroom, clothes draped over it to create an improvised curtain. I’m mad at you. Keep your stuff on your side of the room, Cindy Brady or Todd Huxtable or whoever. Mattie and Amber never needed to draw the line. Her stuff overflowed and created its boundary—mess as a territorial marking. Mattie’s neatness was the border guard. Nothing crossed over.

  Except something did. That’s what Mattie wanted to show me.

  He didn’t need to point it out. One of Amber’s dollhouse figures had clearly intruded onto Mattie’s side of the room and lay facedown on the carpet. The dollhouse was an extravagant gift from Grandfather Chitwood, on Lynn’s side. It opened up like a suitcase to offer cutaway views of a single-family home with four bedrooms, two baths, a fully stocked kitchen, a dining room, and an entertainment center. An attic playroom and a full basement. The dollhouse was too heavy for Amber or even Lynn to carry; whenever Amber wanted to play with it outside or in the community lounge of our apartment complex, we had to stuff all the little people inside, along with all the removable furniture and the two cars for the garage, and I’d lug it around for her. I
f our family could afford to take vacations to Europe or on cruise ships, I guess that’s how heavy our suitcase would be.

  I’d drag it around wherever she wanted me to. Sometimes, after all my effort, she’d hardly play with the dollhouse.

  It ended up back in the kids’ room, as usual, hinged open with the whole mini-household suffering from the aftereffects of an earthquake. Hurricane Amber, to be more accurate. Plastic chairs and lamps now lay on their sides in the cutaway rooms, and a sofa and dining room table had spilled onto the carpet. From an upstairs bedroom, the bed had shifted from the back wall and hung precariously over the open edge, perhaps ready to bedknob-and-broomstick into space like in that Angela Lansbury movie. The residents themselves occupied separate rooms of their spacious and disorderly home, stiff-postured in some strange tableau or other. My favorite was one of the plastic teenagers, which Amber had kneeled next to an upstairs toilet as if it heaved up penance after a night of binge drinking. Meanwhile, a diapered infant the size of my thumb lay unattended in the garage, its head near the back wheel of the family SUV.

  Amber might have intended some story line to her placements, or she might have arranged the figures absentmindedly. Who could say? At least all the family members stayed on their own property—even the pets, with an unleashed poodle in the attic and the cat figurine curled snug atop an overturned refrigerator.

  Except for the head of household. That’s what Mattie had called me up here to see. The father figurine—the one Amber called Mr. Man—was bent into a crawling position. Perhaps the hurricane had blown him out the top-floor bedroom, but he didn’t seem in any hurry to return to his family. He was aimed away from the dollhouse and had crawled into Mattie’s side of the room.