The three of them were suddenly absorbed into the mass, and Jonathan felt lost in a strange world, weak and exposed. The people twirled in their costumes, stumbled drunkenly, bumped and jostled, laughed and screeched. It seemed there were more adults dressed in costume than children, bent on some form of mild debauchery, dressed as witches, goblins, ghouls and other creatures born out of myths and ancient tales, their costumes an attempt to expose humanity to the deathly fate that awaits them all. Jonathan saw children dressed as zombies, the desiccated dead risen from the grave, skin sallow or peeling, eyes blackened, bloody and evil, and he couldn’t help but wonder what awaited him the following week in Coombs’ Gulch. The boy had lain in that sealed case underground for ten years. Jonathan had never seen a corpse that had fully experienced all the ravages of death, except through the special effects of movies, but now it seemed as if all the stages of death crowded on the streets, mingling in a ritualistic gathering of citizenry. From the angelic face of a young child to the bare bones of a skeleton, a pantomime of the life-and-death process paraded down Main Street in the night.
Jonathan’s stomach curled: would they open the box? Would they need to? He didn’t know. Part of him wanted to treat it like any other piece of luggage to be thrown away, but there was something else burning in his soul, something that said he could never put it to rest until he fully confronted it, gazed into that box and communed with the reality of death.
He felt that somewhere in the crowd, somewhere in this night, the boy was dancing around him, parading and marching, waving and laughing, gray with putrescence, walking on wobbly, dead legs, hand in hand with something much larger and more terrifying in its power.
It stirred both his guilt and wonder. After weeks of researching and his phone call with the Texan, what disturbed Jonathan more were the children dressed as caricatures of familiar things – clowns, farmers, characters from cartoons or movies, and his own little mad scientist. They were real things distorted and accentuated into something other. It made him think of those strange images, the children caught on hunting cameras in the middle of the forest in the night, places not meant for people. It occurred to him that the children in those pictures appeared too perfect, like something pulled out of an advertisement, meant to show what children are supposed to look like, but rarely do. In that way, they seemed alien and even more frightening than the caricatures of death. Jacob walked beside him, his eyes wide in fright and wonder at the massive, roiling crowd of strange faces. Jonathan felt Jacob’s little hand slipping from his own.
After finally reaching Main Street, they shuffled along with the throng of parents and kids. People lined the sidewalks, waving and laughing; cameras flashed, smartphones recorded video. Perhaps when they played the video back later they would see something different, something more powerful hovering in the sky, bearing down on them all. Perhaps they would see what the ancients feared and sacrificed to during these days of descending darkness.
Jonathan heard Mary laugh – a welcome sound – and turned to look. She had her hand on Madison’s shoulder. Conner was standing, tall and lithe, beside his wife, and it took Jonathan a moment to recognize him in the strange setting. Conner nodded and they shook hands briefly. Mary was asking why they didn’t see more of each other and why they didn’t get the kids together more often. Madison nodded her perfect, pretty head in agreement.
Jonathan looked down and saw Conner’s children, Brent and Aria. Brent was dressed as a hunter, in camouflage jacket and pants, which were baggy and creased in odd angles on his small body, a bright orange cap that seemed to glow in the darkness, black makeup beneath his eyes and a toy rifle cradled in his arms. His face was smiling, pale, innocent and unbroken, and, for a moment, Jonathan thought that it was all just some tremendous joke, the boy in the woods nothing more than an elaborate prank, his life for the past ten years a reality television farce played out for some cackling audience.
“He saw the old pictures of you guys from your hunting days and wanted to dress up like his daddy and Uncle Mike,” Madison said.
Jonathan saw Michael standing a few feet back, looking aloof and lost in the mass of families, his wife, Annie, nowhere to be seen. He came to do his duty in supporting his brother, niece and nephew, but he looked out of place and uncomfortable.
Jonathan looked at Conner. “A hunter, huh?”
Conner put on his proud-dad face. “Yeah, maybe someday.”
“Well, I bet you guys are excited to go out together again next week,” Madison said, and Mary launched into a speech about how she was always trying to get Jonathan to go out with his friends and do the things that bring him joy – a veiled admission that his life was largely joyless. “You just can’t work your whole life,” she said.
She didn’t realize that for men like them there were no friends, there was no joy.
Jonathan turned back and gazed out at the mass of costumed people streaming around them. The pitch-black sky bore down over the yellowed