Halloween and Other Seasons

marks led into the tangle of trees on the other side of water.

The odd thing was that there were only the boy’s tracks. He broadened his search, and discovered that, a second, oddly-shaped set of tracks led from the pumpkin field behind the Wendt house down the embankment into the woods, but they were nowhere near the boy’s.

Which led him to believe that, perhaps, the boy had been following someone?

Out of breath and sweating a little, his slight paunch only one indication of how out of shape he was (thirty years old and already starting to look like an old cop), he found himself at a spot in the patch of woods marked by a broken pumpkin where both sets of tracks converged.

It was here, obviously, that the boy was abducted.

There were signs of a struggle. And then only the second set of prints—which were very odd indeed, not shoe or boot prints but large flat ovoids, which made him think that someone had worn some sort of covering over his shoes, to disguise the prints—led away.

And then, abruptly, in the middle of nowhere, among a gloomy stand of gnarled trees, so thick and twisted they blocked all light from above, they stopped.

At that point the hair on the back of Schneider’s head (where there still was hair, a good part of the top of his head being bald) stood on end. He looked at the clearing he stood in, covered with leaves and dead branches.

Where…

He brought in dogs, of course, and along with two uniformed policemen he brushed the area of leaves and twigs, looking for an underground opening. But there was none. Even the dogs, who had been given a piece of Jody Wendt’s clothing, had stopped at the same spot Schneider had.

One of them threw back its head and bayed, which, again, made the hair on the back of Schneider’s head stand on end.

Jody Wendt had disappeared into thin air.

3

The poster, which read: UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU! was upside down. He was glad his mom had taught him to read. There was more writing at the bottom of the poster, but he couldn’t make out what it said because it was too small and it was also upside down. So was everything else. The sign was in bright colors, red and blue and yellow and green, as if the colors had been splashed on or finger-painted—they ran over their borders and looked still wet. The room smelled like paint, like the time his mother had painted his bedroom in March and left all the windows open. He’d slept on the couch in the living room that night (sneaking the television on at three in the morning, but there had only been commercials on for exercise equipment—some of which Mom had—and for calcium and vitamin supplements—he had soon tired and turned the TV off; even out here he could faintly smell the paint on the walls of his room) and when he went back to his room the next night he got sick to his stomach, even though the paint was dry and the windows had been left open a crack. A week later all his own posters and his bookshelf with Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (his favorite book) and The Wizard of Oz and Sam Hain and the Halloween that Almost Wasn’t were back, and the smell was gone. He’d forgotten his room had ever been painted.

But the smell wasn’t gone here—it was stronger. It had a curious burning odor underneath the paint smell, as if someone was heating paint in a pan.

That was funny, heating paint in a pan…

He felt light-headed, and suddenly wanted to throw up.

Ahhhhh…

The discomforting noise he made caused another noise out of his vision, a shuffling like a dog had been disturbed. He could not see. Except for the upside-down poster and an upside-down coat hook next to it with a rain coat which was hung near the floor and ran up the wall (again: funny! And despite his queasy stomach he gurgled a short laugh) he could see little else. The wall was colored chocolate brown, and it was stuffy in the room.

Again he heard the dog-shuffle.

Something new came into his view, in front of the wall poster—something just as brightly colored. It was accompanied by the shuffling noise, which was caused, Jody saw, when he strained his eyes to look up (which hurt) by the slow movement of a pair of huge clown feet, which were red with bright yellow laces. His vision in that direction was impeded by a sort of cap that appeared to be on his head, though he felt nothing there. There was a sharp rim, and he could see no farther. What he saw of the ceiling under the clown’s feet, was the same color as the wall.

Jody looked down, and his sight trailed over the figure of a circus clown dressed in blue pants, a red and green-striped blouse with baggy sleeves and white gloves, and a white face with impossibly wide, bright red smile, eyelashes painted all around his eyes, all topped by a snow-white cap with a red pom-pom.

The shuffling stopped; the clown was facing him now and Jody noted that the figure’s real lips inside the painted-on smile weren’t smiling. The eyes looked serious inside their cartoon lashes, too.

“Ted?” The clown whispered, in an impossibly gentle voice. “You’re awake, Ted?”

Jody tried to tell the clown that his name wasn’t Ted, but the feared throw-up rose hotly in his throat, out his mouth and ran up his face.

It was now, through the paint smell and dizziness and headache, that he realized he was upside-down, not the room.

The clown tsk-tsked, and a wet cloth was pressed to Jody’s nose and cheeks, rubbed gently.

The bile was gone.

It was getting very stuffy in the room.

“Soon, Ted, soon…” the clown said, and then he shuffled out of Jody’s sight.

“I—” Jody managed to get out.

The shuffling stopped. “Yes?” the clown asked, and there was a closed-in hush in the room.

“I…no…Ted…” Jody spit out, along with more bile, before his vision began to blur.

“I know, Ted. Yes,” the Clown answered, in what was almost a sing-song whisper.

Then, Jody closed his eyes.

~ * ~

When he opened them again, he was hungry.

The paint smell was still there, and the queasiness, and the headache, which was worse now, and he was still upside-down and couldn’t move. But, somehow, he felt more alert.

He saw immediately that the poster—UNCLE LOLLIPOP LOVES YOU!—was partially blocked by a familiar sight: the Pumpkin Boy, or at least part of him. The Pumpkin Boy’s chest, which was a thicker tube of metal than the articulated stalks that composed his arms, was open, revealing a cavity within with something red, suspended in a web of golden wire, that throbbed darkly. The web shivered noticeably with each beat. The cavity’s door lay hinged back against the Pumpkin Boy’s side. He seemed to be missing from the legs down (or up, to Jody’s eyes) and his head was hinged open on the top. Now, in the light, Jody saw that the head itself looked to be made of some sort of ceramic or plastic or other hard surface; it was too hard-edged and brightly colored (a hue as bright as the poster colors, and the Clown suit colors) to be real. There were no seeds stuck to the inside of the lid, which looked smooth and clean.

A trail of golden wires led out of the Pumpkin Boy’s head, the back part behind the eyes, nose, and grinning mouth (could there be a hidden compartment back there?) and were bundled together with white plastic ties. There looked to be hundreds of individual hair-thin wires. The bundle ended in a curl, like a rolled hose, on the floor.

Jody saw that the Pumpkin Boy wore a pair of ordinary leather carpenter’s gloves, like the ones his mother used in the garden.

Jody now realized how quiet it was.