Halloween and Other Seasons

“Hel…lo?” he said. His voice sounded like a frog’s croak.

There was no answer.

Feeling stronger than he had before, Jody tried to twist himself around.

Whatever he was trussed to, it gave little, but it did give. He turned a bit to the right, then swung back, as if he were suspended on a rope. He had seen the wall beyond the Pumpkin Boy and the poster: flat brown, unadorned.

He twisted again, harder. His legs were asleep, which at least meant that his twisted ankle didn’t hurt anymore. His hands were also asleep, but he could feel enough of them now to discover that they were bound behind his back, tightly.

He tried for a time, but couldn’t loosen them.

This time as he turned he saw the wall and something on the true floor: a table, a bright silver machine with a big black dial and the edge of a huge white clock-face with too many numbers around the edge.

He came stubbornly back to rest.

He was growing weaker.

The Pumpkin Boy hadn’t moved, was staring straight through him.

Jody gave a mighty turn, with an ooofff!

This time he felt as if a lance had pierced his forehead. He cried out in pain—but he saw the whole silver machine, which was on casters, and other machines, one of which looked like the emergency generator Mom kept in the garage, and a door. No windows. The clown suit was draped over a single chair, next to a lamp—

The door was just opening.

Jody swung back to rest, the pain still driving through his head. He knew he was crying.

The shuffle sounded frantic.

“Ted—!”

He passed out with the man’s hands on his head, or what felt like through it.

~ * ~

A hum in his ears.

It sounded like bees, or millions of ants. He’d seen millions of ants once, two armies fighting in the forest, brown and black. He went back three days later and they were still fighting. His cousin Jim, who was fourteen years old, told him to make a cone out of the comic book in his back pocket and when he did, and put the wide end of the cone near the massed ants and the other, the tighter end next to his ear. He heard a roaring, a scrabble and hum that sounded like the mighty armies he saw fighting in books.

He thought Jim had played a trick on him, and took the homemade horn away from the battle, but there was Jim ten feet away from him, grinning.

“Somethin’, ain’t it?”

“Wow…”

It had sounded like this, only less so…

Jody opened his eyes. It felt, now, like his head had been split in two, like a melon. There was a dry burning behind his eyelids, and a circle of hot pain all around his head, as if a heated clamp had been tightened around it.

He heard a mewling sound, and realized it came from his mouth.

“There, Ted, there…”

A cool hand rested on his brow, above his eyes, and then withdrew.

The hot pain circling his head increased.

His eyes were watering, but he blinked and then could see, almost clearly. The Pumpkin Boy sat where he had been, staring mutely at nothing. To his right the silver machine with the big black dial and white clock face had been positioned at a slight angle; next to it, on another dolly, was a similar, smaller machine.

The thick bundle of hair-thin silver wires was now plugged into the side of the silver machine; another bundle was plugged into the opposite side of the machine and ran to the floor…

…toward Jody…

He cried out, in pain and terror—

“There, there, Ted…”

Again the soothing hand, the clown glove; as it withdrew from his face Jody saw the clown face close to his own, peering into him as if his head were a fish bowl. The lips didn’t smile, nor the eyes.

“…out!”

“Yes, Ted,” the soft voice sing-songed. “Yes…”

The clown hand came back to pat his forehead.

He writhed, tried to loosen his hands, his feet, to snake down from his captivity.

The soothing voice became almost scolding.

“Ted, you mustn’t—”

The clown hand reached out to the huge black dial on the silver machine—Jody saw the hand grip it hard and twist it—

Pain came, and he went back to sleep.

4

Pictures of Jody.

She didn’t know whether to take them down, put them away, turn them to the wall or put them in new frames. Nothing, Emily Wendt knew, would work. If she put them away it would be a defeat, an admission that he was gone, as well as giving up hope.

But having him staring out at her from every room in the house was almost unbearable. She had never realized how many pictures she had of her son: they were everywhere, framed on the hallway wall, in a gilt frame next to her bed, stuck under magnets on the refrigerator door, herded with other family portraits on top of the television, on the hunter’s table behind the sofa, the last Sears portrait, from Christmas, on the phone table—

In the end, she put them all away except the one next to her bed.

That had been the first portrait she’d ever had taken of him, when he was one. Jack had still been alive, then. She remembered how much trouble they had keeping Jody still; the photographer had posed him in a chair covered with a blanket and Jody, who had recently taken his first steps, kept trying to dismount the chair. It was obvious he was fascinated by the camera and wanted to study it. Finally the photographer had to let him look it over, click the shutter twice and then promise him another look if he sat still for the picture.

You’d never know he had been any trouble by looking at the finished product. The portrait showed him staring quietly, with big eyes, at the camera; his face held a measure of interest that proved he was only thinking about getting his hands on that machine again. A lick of his thin auburn hair had fallen over his brow (later his hair would thicken, becoming almost coarse; unless cut very short it tended never to stay combed or brushed for long) and his pudgy hands were folded on his lap.

This would be the picture she wouldn’t put away.

Later that day, after the session, she and Jody and Jack had gone to the taco place in the mall, the one and only time they had ever eaten out together. She still remembered what Jody had done to the burrito they had gotten him, how he had dissected it like a frog—

She found herself weeping—the first time, in the week since Jody had been taken, that she had cried. She had thought her life was over after Jack was killed, but now she knew just how much she had still possessed, even after the loss of her husband. There was a hollow place in her now that felt as if it had been scooped out with a trowel, and she knew it would never fill in.

This was nothing like it had been when Jack died.

She collapsed to the floor, hugging Jody’s picture, and sat with her legs folded beneath her, rocking and crying.

“Oh, Jody, Jody…”