The Year's Best Horror Stories 11

over the loneliness of this child. “That was a very scary story. Where did you get it from?”

There was silence in the classroom.

Raylee’s eyes were back on the floor. “I made it up,” she said in a whisper.

To make up something like that, Ms. Grinby thought. I know, I know!

She patted the little girl on her back. “Here’s your candy; you can sit down now.” The girl returned to her seat quickly, eyes averted.

All eyes were on her.

And then something that made Ms. Grinby’s heart leap:

“Neat story!” said Randy Feffer.

“Neat!”

“Wow!”

Roger Mapleton, Jane Campbell.

As she sat down Raylee was trembling but smiling shyly.

“Neat story!”

A bell rang somewhere.

“Can it be that time already?” Ms. Grinby looked at the full moon-faced wall clock. “Why it is! Time to go home. I hope everyone had a nice party—and remember! Don’t eat too much candy!”

A small hand waved anxiously at her from the center of the room.

“Yes, Cleo!”

Cleo, red-freckled face and blue eyes, stood up. “Can I please tell the class, Ms. Grinby, that I’m having a party tonight, and that I can invite everyone in the class?”

Ms. Grinby smiled. “You may, Cleo, but there doesn’t seem to be much left to tell, does there?”

“Well,” said Cleo, smiling at Raylee, “only that everyone’s invited.”

Raylee smiled back and looked quickly away.

Books and candy bags were crumpled together, and all ran out under crepe paper, cats, and ghouls, under the watchful eyes of the jack-o’-lantern, into darkening afternoon.

A black and orange night.

Here came a black cat walking on two legs; there two percale sheet ghosts trailing paper bags with handles; here again a miniature man from outer space. The wind was up: leaves whipped along the serpentine sidewalk like racing cars. There was an apple-crisp smell in the air, an icicle down your spine, here-comes-winter chill. Pumpkins everywhere, and a half-harvest moon playing coyly with wisps of high shadowy clouds. A thousand dull yellow night-lights winked through breezy trees on a thousand festooned porches. A constant ringing of doorbells, the wash of goblin traffic: they traveled in twos, threes, or fours, these monsters, held together by Halloween gravity. Groups passed other groups, just coming up, or coming down, stairs, made faces, and said “Boo!” There were a million “Boo!” greetings this night.

On one particular porch in all that thousand, goblins went up the steps but did not come down again. The door opened a crack, then wider, and groups of ghosts, wizards, and spooks, instead of waiting patiently for a toss in a bag and then turning away, slipped through into the house and disappeared from the night. Disappeared into another night.

Through the hallway and kitchen and down another set of stairs to the cellar. A cellar transformed. A cellar of hell, this cellar—charcoal-pit black with eerie dim red lanterns glowing out of odd corners and cracks. An Edgar Allan Poe cellar—and there hung his portrait over the apple-bobbing tub, raven-bedecked and with a cracked grin under those dark-pool eyes and that ponderous brow. This was his cellar, to be sure, a Masque of the Red Death cellar.

And here were the Poe-people; miniature versions of his evil creatures; enough hideous beasts to fill page after page and all shrunk down to child size. Devils galore, with papier-mache masks, and hooves and tails of red rope, each with a crimson fork on the end; a gaggle of poke-hole ghosts; a mechanical cardboard man; two wolfmen; four vampires with wax teeth; one mummy; one ten-tentacled sea beast; three Frankenstein monsters; one Bride of same; and one monster of indefinite shape and design, something like a jellyfish made of plastic bags.

And Raylee.

Raylee came last; was last to slip silently and trembling through the portal of the yellow front door, was last to slip even more silently down the creaking cellar steps to the Poe-cellar below. She came cat silent and cautious, holding her breath—was indeed dressed cat-like, in whiskered mask, black tights, and black rope tail, all black to mix silently with the black basement.

No one saw her come in; only the black-beetle eyes of Poe over the apple tub noted her arrival.

The apple tub was well in use by now, a host of devils, ghosts, and Frankensteins clamoring around it and eagerly awaiting a turn at its game under Poe’s watchful eyes.

“I got one!” shouted one red devil, triumphantly pulling a glossy apple from his mouth; no devil mask here, but a red-painted face, red and dripping from the tub’s water. It was Peter, one of the taunting boys in Raylee’s class.

Raylee hung back in the shadows.

“I got one!” shouted a Frankenstein monster.

“And me!” from his Bride. Two crisp red apples were held aloft for Poe’s inspection.

“And me!” “And me!” shouted Draculas, hunchbacks, little green men.

Spooks and wolfmen shouted too.

One apple left.

“Who hasn’t tried yet?” cried Cleo, resplendent in witch’s garb. She was a miniature Ms. Grinby. She leaned her broom against the tub, called for attention.

“Who hasn’t tried?”

Raylee tried to sink into the shadows’ protection but could not. A deeper darkness was what she needed; she was spotted.

“Raylee! Raylee!” shouted Cleo. “Come get your apple!” It was a singsong, as Raylee held her hands out, apple-less, and stepped into the circle of ghouls.

She was terrified. She trembled so hard she could not hold her hands still on the side of the metal tub as she leaned over it. She wanted to bolt from the room, up the stairs and out through the yellow doorway into the dark night.

“Dunk! Dunk!” the ghoul circle began to chant, impatient.

Raylee stared down into the water, saw her dark-reflection and Poe’s mingled by the ripples of the bobbing apple.

“Dunk! Dunk!” the circle chanted.

Raylee pushed herself from the reflection, stared at the faces surrounding her. “I don’t want to!”

“Dunk!…” the chant faded.

Two dozen cool eyes surveyed her behind eye-holes, weighed her dispassionately in the sharp light of peer pressure. There were ghouls behind those ghoulish masks and eyes.

Someone hissed a laugh as the circle tightened around Raylee. Like a battered leaf with its stem caught under a rock in a high wind, she trembled.

Cleo, alone outside the circle, stepped quickly into it to protect her. She held out her hands. “Raylee—” she began soothingly.

The circle tightened still more, undaunted. Above them all, Poe’s eyes in the low crimson light seemed to brighten with anticipation.

Desperate, Cleo suddenly said, “Raylee, tell us a story.”

A moment of tension, and then a relaxed “Ah” from the circle.

Raylee shivered.

“Yes, tell us a story!”

This from someone in the suffocating circle, a wolfman, or perhaps a vampire.

“No, please,” Raylee begged. Her cat whiskers and cat tail shivered. “I don’t want to!”