by Michael Chin
Halloween 1996, Mike was thirteen and Shermantown was haunted. Sara Dogwood went missing on the bike ride home from school and the town lost its mind, witch-hunting up suspects, reporting and debunking sightings of the girl. Breaks in the case rumored all the time. Dead ends.
The specter of some child abductor lurking among the good people of Shermantown was enough to scare anybody. But for Mike, who was always prone to getting lost—at the State Fair, when their family went to the big mall in Floboro, in the woods on a camping trip—the most terrifying part was the prospect of getting lost and never found.
Before sunset, Mike’s older brother Corey watched a slasher flick in the living room. The killer, white masked, black hooded, carved a hook into a redhead’s chest.
“Think that’s what happened to Sara Dogwood?” Corey pantomimed the stabbing motion, a gleam in his eyes.
“That’s very disrespectful to that poor girl and her family.” Mom left the big candy bowl she’d use for trick or treaters on the coffee table. “You should know better.”
Speaking of knowing better, Corey had claimed he and his friends were only going to go trick or treating that night, but Mom didn’t trust them. “I’d better not get any calls tonight about you vandalizing the neighborhood.”
Corey was waiting on his ride. He ripped open the blue and white wrapper of an Almond Joy with his teeth.
“The mayor should’ve banned trick or treating this year.” Mom peered out the window overlooking the street. “They don’t even know what happened to the Dogwood girl yet.”
The red and blue lights of a police cruiser reflected off the movie murderer’s face. “This is Shermantown,” Corey said. “The Sara Dogwood thing was a fluke. She’ll turn up in a month—tell everyone she ran off with her chat room boyfriend or some crazy aunt.”
It wasn’t clear Mom heard him. “Mike, you’re sure you want to go out, honey? You don’t have to, you know. I’ll give you all the candy you want. Zach, too.”
Mom didn’t worry about Corey like she was worried about Mike. Corey had been going out with friends for at least five Halloweens by then, while Mike was headed off with friend Zach for the first time unsupervised.
“It’s like Dad says. You’re gonna give him a complex.” Corey reached across the couch and clapped Mike on the shoulder. “Raise a little hell tonight, huh?” It could be hard to tell when Corey was making fun of him those days.
A car horn blared and Corey was on his feet and out the door. Mom complained that the least Corey’s friends could do would be to come inside and introduce themselves, which felt to Mike like a lot, actually, to expect of cool boys with a car and every intention of raising hell. Mike stood alongside her, watching them climb in the old car with a wide, metallic body, a cloth top that looked like it would fold down.
When Zach showed up, he rang the doorbell.
“See, that’s a nice boy. He has manners enough to come to the door.”
In the absence of a car, Mike didn’t know what else Zach would do—stand in the driveway until someone noticed him? But Mom liked Zach, because Zach knew how to talk to parents. After she’d let him inside, the first thing he did was compliment her on the cardboard skeleton and faux cobwebs hanging from the front door, telling her, “It’s all really tasteful.”
“Isn’t that sweet.” Mom headed into the kitchen. “Help yourself to a piece of candy before the trick or treaters take all the good stuff.”
Zach peered through the entryway of the kitchen to double-check she wasn’t looking before he stole a handful—Reese’s, York Peppermint Patties; much more than Mom would’ve intended—and stuffed it all into his pillowcase.
When they got outside, Zach put on his costume—which meant he put the hood up on his sweatshirt and declared himself a rapper. For Mike’s part, he wore a mask he’d fashioned from notebook paper, with imperfectly measured eye and mouth holes, a long string of yarn from Mom’s crafting supplies taped to each end of the paper to loop over his ears, behind his head. The costume was homework, and he hoped the silliness of the concept, maybe paired with a joke—isn’t that the scariest thing of all?—would satisfy whoever asked.
“Your mom is so hot,” Zach said. “Did you see the way she offered me candy? Help yourself to anything you want. She was practically begging me to pork her.”
Mike told him to shut up, but only out of habit.
“I can’t blame moms,” Zach went on. “You dedicate your life—your body—to your family. Then your kid’s friends come of age, and you come out of hibernation.”
They made their way down the block, to the neighbors Mike knew and the neighbors he didn’t. He was especially inclined to put on the mask in front of strangers. There was something unsettling about the idea they might recognize him from riding his bike past their windows while he might not recognize them.
They had made their way down one side of the street and looped around before Zach tipped the hood back and asked if they had enough candy.
Mike thought he was asking if it were time to go home, but before he could respond, Zach had set down his pillowcase and fished out a carton of eggs.
“I don’t want to mess with some random person’s stuff,” Mike said. He knew he sounded overly moralizing, but couldn’t help himself from going on, “How would you feel if somebody egged your house?”
“It’s not spray paint. It’ll wash off with a hose. Besides, I’m not thinking about innocent people. I’m thinking about Johnny Reds.”
They’d known Johnny Reds since kindergarten. The class clown, but also a bastard when it came to tripping kids in the hall and laughing when their Trapper Keepers went flying. Then Johnny started lifting weights. He emerged better looking and stronger. When he punched Mike in the arm for no reason now, it felt as though there were a real danger something might break. He teased girls, too, wolf-whistling at Randi Barnett when she came up to the front of the classroom to read her book report and heaving a water balloon at Tammy Gray, who’d developed early, so she was stuck in a wet t-shirt last spring. The worst part? The girls liked him. He held hands with a series of them, walking the hallways of school. There was a full-on scandal when Johnny and Randi got caught making out in a janitor’s closet during a school dance.
Mike hadn’t gone to that dance. He played Mario Kart at Zach’s instead.
There was no question Johnny was an asshole who deserved to get stuck shivering in the November cold, hosing the side of his house.
So, they made their way to Johnny’s. For years, they’d ridden the school bus when it stopped right in front of the house on the corner of Sullivan Street and Matthews Ave. In elementary school, it wasn’t uncommon for Johnny to burst out the door and sprint to catch the bus at the last second. In middle school, he still came outside late, but sauntered, daring the driver to leave him behind.
The house wasn’t much to look at. A scraggly yard, equal parts grass and dirt, covered in leaves. A garage window that had been busted out the previous summer, patched with cardboard. It was harder to tell by night, but Mike knew the house to be painted in two mismatched shades of yellow. There was a rusty red pickup truck up on blocks and a camper next to it, mostly covered with a ripped blue tarp. TV light flickered inside the house, just visible where the curtains didn’t meet.
Zach opened the carton of eggs, one already cracked and glazed from the yolky innards. “Want to throw the first one?”
All Mike could think about was getting caught. Johnny exploding from the door like he was late for the bus and punching him right in the nose. But Mike did go so far as to hold an egg in his hand. Zach took one too, closed the carton, and stashed it back in his pillowcase.
They waited a few moments, before Zach asked, “You’re not going to do it, are you?”
“You do it first.”
It was impossible to know how long they’d stood there before the door opened. It dawned on Mike they might get caught before they even had the chance to do anything. Punished without even the momentary satisfaction of pulling off the crime first.
Mike slid his egg into his pillowcase. Zach, let his drop behind him to the street.
It wasn’t Johnny at the door, though, but a woman in a black tank top and tight jeans. Somewhere in Mike’s mother’s age bracket. Her hair was jet black, and most of all, Mike noticed her lips, which looked black in the amber mix of the street and front stoop lights.
“What are you waiting for? Do you want some candy?”
Mike was aware, then, of not only how the streetlight lit her, but hung directly over his head. When they’d contemplated vandalizing the house, they hadn’t crouched in shadows. Rather, they stood in the closest thing to broad daylight, their squabbling surely audible.
They walked to her, despite Mike’s every instinct they ought to run away. Get to the door and she could get a better look, maybe grab them.
But Zach was a step ahead, and Mike recognized a familiar body language. He held his head at an angle so his eyes could only be fixed on the woman’s chest. He tilted his face back up, like a pilot steering out of a nosedive, as he got close. Zach stood about an inch taller than her. It was something Mike marveled at, obvious as it was—the way adults stopped growing, but boys like them might keep getting taller and taller, looming over a grown woman.
There was a thirty-inch TV encased in a wooden console in the living room. Mike didn’t recognize the movie playing, but immediately identified it as horror for the absence of expression on the face of the pale bald man lurching forward, the gleam of the knife—as big as his forearm—in his hand. The camera cut to a woman. Blond, with tanned skin. Petite. Mike thought he recognized her from somewhere, but the camera only stayed on her face long enough to see that she was terrified and doomed. Then back to the knife in descent, the man stabbing until blood splattered his face. Bright red. Too red. The killing went on a beat too long, until it wasn’t so much scary as absurd.
The woman had noticed Mike watching. “You boys want to come in and finish the movie with us?” she asked.
Of course Mike didn’t. He didn’t even want their candy, hadn’t even wanted to egg their house, just wanted to get home.
“Yeah, we’ll come in.” Zach said. The dead-eyed starlet watched him through the screen.
There was a big man on the couch, with a bushy brown beard. He wore a plain white t-shirt, jeans, left foot bare, right in a black sock with a hole his big toe stuck right through. He tipped back a glass bottle of beer and didn’t acknowledge them. Mike imagined the woman was on door duty, handing out candy and gabbing with trick or treaters, the man only indulging in Halloween so far as a slasher flick and the fun-sized Snickers wrappers on the floor suggested.
Mike bumped into something hard, waist-high, that at first glance might have been a casket, part of the Halloween décor. He recognized soon after it was a tanning bed.
The woman was tan, Mike could see now, eyes adjusting to the dull light. She stood so close to Zach her breast grazed his arm, and she bent her arm, sending a cherry ring pop into her mouth, pulling it out wet and sticky. Zach stayed exactly where he was.
“Hey, dumbass!” The man on the couch scratched his nuts. “Your friends are here. Tell them not to block the TV.”
Mike got the hint—he was obscuring the right side of the screen. In stepping away, he bumped harder against the edge of the tanning bed, where it would open like a clamshell. His hip smarted as Johnny Reds came into the room with a big metal bowl full of popcorn.
“These aren’t my friends,” Johnny said. “Ma, why’d you let these assholes in?”
“Watch your fucking mouth!” The man’s voice was loud, sharp. He might’ve been Johnny’s dad, but Mike got the impression they weren’t that close, and remembered Johnny saying something about not knowing where the hell his dad was during an oral report everyone had to give once about what their parents did for a living. The man tilted his head toward the bowl in Johnny’s arms. “You’d better not have burned it this time.”
Johnny brought the bowl to him. “It doesn’t smell burned, does it?”
“Relax, Johnny, it’s a holiday.” His mother held the ring pop to her lips.
Johnny took a seat, cross-legged on the floor. Zach followed suit, a little removed, so Mike did, too. Only Johnny’s mom joined the man on the couch, where he put the popcorn on his lap, an arm over her shoulders. Johnny grabbed a Three Musketeers from the candy bowl. Zach was bold enough to fish out a Milky Way.
The killer on TV was methodical. To rush would’ve been a mercy to his victims.
In time, Zach ventured to grab a whole handful of candy and slid it right into his pillowcase. Mike looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but they all seemed focused on the movie.
Another kill. This one a black woman, head under water, body in a bathtub, though she was fully clothed. Mike didn’t quite follow how she got there. Her body floated up, no telling if it were the drowning or the stabbing that killed her first.
Zach asked Johnny’s mom where the bathroom was and disappeared, leaving Mike alone with Johnny and his family.
The movie killer got shot by a barrage of police bullets. The way the string music swelled and the frames slowed, Mike supposed the moment was poetic. Maybe if he’d watched from the beginning, he’d have some sympathy for the killer. It all felt less final than the stabs and slashes and cuts. No blood. No suffering
When Zach came back, he flashed a grin, checked to make sure no one was watching, and showed Mike a lacy black pair of underpants.
“Hey needle-dick.”
Mike jumped. The man wasn’t looking at Zach or Mike, but rather focused his attention on Johnny, nudging him with his bare foot. “Grab all the candy wrappers and take out the kitchen trash. It’s full.”
The panties were out of sight. They must’ve belonged to Johnny’s mom, or at least that’s the assumption Zach would’ve made too. He might’ve found them in a hamper in the bathroom.
Johnny’s Mom got up to switch VHS tapes.
The man tipped back his bottle. “Grab another beer, too.”
Mike wanted to leave. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Mike always got turned around, though, and didn’t like the idea of trying to wander home alone at night. So, he was bound to Zach who had his peripheral vision locked on Johnny’s mom’s rear end as she bent over.
The man turned his attention to Zach and Mike. “You know real friends wouldn’t be afraid to get dirty. Lend a hand.”
It took Mike a beat to figure out that he was talking about Zach and Mike as Johnny’s friends, and that they should help with the trash.
Johnny pushed down candy wrappers, beer and soda cans, and a busted pizza box down past the lip of the kitchen trash can, then gathered up the liner to tie it shut. He led the way out the garage door, past a weight bench and set of adjustable dumb bells, a pull up bar screwed high into the wall, reinforced with layers of duct tape.
They went out through another door to the side of the house where Johnny’s family kept their trash. Johnny hefted the big bag with ease, up from his hip and into the bin, then turned to Zach. “Give me an egg.”
Mike wasn’t sure what it meant that Johnny knew they had eggs.
Zach obliged, taking the carton from his bag, opening it, and depositing a clean, dry one in Johnny’s palm.
Johnny made his way to red pickup. There was no cover over the lid to the gas tank, just a simple matter of unscrewing the cap with one hand, dropping the egg in with the other.
“Give me another,” Johnny said.
Mike didn’t know what an egg in the tank would do. Maybe it would make the truck break down. Maybe explode. Maybe reek as the egg rotted. Maybe it would dissolve into nothing. The uncertainty caught at Mike’s throat.
Zach handed him another egg. “Your dad’s an asshole, huh?”
“He is.” Johnny said. “But that’s not my dad. He’s just Mom’s fuckhead boyfriend.” He slipped the second egg down into the gas tank. “Another.”
Then, “Another.”
Mike noticed the panties hanging from the edge of Zach’s pillowcase first.
“Another.”
Maybe Mike could get in between to block Johnny’s view and buy Zach enough time to realize the underwear was visible too.
“Another.”
Maybe Mike could push the panties out of sight himself, except that might draw Johnny’s attention to them.
“Another.”
Mike waited too long, weighing options and contingencies.
“What the fuck is that?” Johnny asked. Then he had the underwear in his hand. Then he had the collar of Zach’s t-shirt balled up in his big fist. “Are these my mom’s, you little perv?”
Mike was sure Johnny would deck Zach, and maybe him, too. Except the front door flew open and Johnny’s not-father was there. “You think you’re funny putting eggs in my god damn gas tank?”
They all ran. Johnny might kick their asses. This man might murder them all, uninterested in differentiating the roles they’d played.
Mike outpaced Zach, running ahead. Johnny wasn’t quite as fast as either of them, and Mike thought that was to their advantage, like a pack of zebras fleeing a lion in the wild. It didn’t matter which was fastest, only which was slowest. That’s the one who’d get devoured.
“I’ll fucking kill you,” Johnny called, breath ragged.
“Stop running, you little shits,” the man yelled. He sounded winded. Mike wondered if he’d bothered to put shoes on.
Zach caught up to Mike. Maybe because Mike had looked back too long. Maybe adrenaline. Maybe because Zach ran at a more measured pace, not going as fast as he could, knowing he’d need to keep some energy in reserve while Mike felt his pulse pounding his neck, unsure how long he could keep up his pace.
“Let’s split up,” Zach said.
It was a terrible idea, but Zach broke left, over a front yard to the space between houses. Mike thought to follow him, but saw there was a chest-high chain-link fence waiting and didn’t like the idea of trying to climb it before Johnny caught up to him, so he broke right, following the curve of the road onto a poorly lit street.
Johnny chased after Mike. Mike didn’t know if the man were behind him, had gone after Zach, or went home to wait on Johnny’s inevitable return.
“Johnny.” Mike turned his head back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what Zach was doing.”
“Stop running.”
Mike ditched his pillowcase, only weighing him down, distracting him. He found a second wind. A survival instinct. He couldn’t have gotten that far from Johnny’s, that far from home, but he was unmistakably lost. He thought of Sara Dogwood and whoever had gotten their hands on her. Maybe this was how it started, lost on an unfamiliar street. Maybe Mike was running to a fate like that, even if Johnny gave up trying to catch him.
He started passing cars, parked along the side of a stretch of road without any houses. Heavy bass throbbed. Music meant people, and that might be enough to stop Johnny that night, even if he came after him with a vengeance at school the next day.
“You’re only making me mad.”
Johnny wasn’t a lion, Mike decided. He was one of those big dogs who barked meanly and slobbered.
Mike could see the house now, rundown but huge. He’d never seen this house before and wondered if he’d run farther than he realized. He could make out the song from this close. Warren G. “Regulators.” The house wasn’t well-lit, but pulsing with energy and Mike realized it was the Ravenscroft place—a big house, where a big, eccentric family used to live, before they split town overnight years back. Big enough to hold a hundred bodies. Secluded enough not to disturb neighbors. He’d heard the rumors it was a party house now—a space where teenagers raged after prom, on New Year’s—Halloween night fit the bill.
Johnny was gaining.
Johnny was the kind of dog who toyed and tortured, sinking his teeth into a victim’s flesh not to eat at first, but for the purpose of scarring.
The yard was littered with oddities—flamingo yard stakes, an old pinball machine, a thread-worn couch, an engine big enough to belong in an eighteen-wheeler.
Then Mike recognized the car Corey had gotten into earlier. It stood out for the convertible top, the wide body that jutted into the road.
Johnny swiped at him. The kind of clumsy contact that would just count in a game of tag, but the lunge set him back a step, running in the dark like they were, and allowed Mike to put a little more distance between them. His lungs burned.
Dogs weren’t mean by nature, Mike understood. The meanest ones got that way because people starved, beat, or neglected them. Mike could feel poorly for a dog like that, up to a point. But it didn’t change the danger of one giving chase, out for blood in that moment.
Mike spotted a garden gnome at the last second and leaped over it. He rounded the corner into the driveway, where he smelled the smoke, saw the lit tip of the cigarette from beneath a cowboy hat—the Marlboro Man sprung to life from a magazine ad—before he recognized Corey, seated alone on the hood of a Civic.
Johnny caught up. He pulled up to stop, breathing heavier than Mike had realized, eventually huffing out, “Get over here, dipshit.”
Mike looked to Corey, too out of breath to plead for help.
Corey stood a good six inches taller than either of them. Maybe not that much stronger than Johnny, but grownup in a way Johnny obviously wasn’t. “This kid messing with you?”
“Mind your business, cowboy.” The words were about what Mike might have expected from Johnny, but muffled in a mumble, like the way he spoke to his mom’s boyfriend.
“He’s my brother.” He shoved Johnny hard enough to send him on his ass.
Johnny backed up, scooting in reverse before he stumbled to his feet.
“And don’t mess with him at school, either.” Corey stood his ground, solid. “I’m not above kicking some middle school punk’s ass.”
Johnny said fucker under his breath but walked away.
Mike felt a rush of gratitude and familial love, barely stifling the urge to say something like, yeah, you’d better run to Johnny in retreat.
“So, you smoke now?” Mike asked.
“Not really.” The cigarette burned down, edging close to the filter between Corey’s fingers. “I bummed one off this girl so I could talk to her. She left me to hang out with her boyfriend.” Stubble dotted his cheeks, and he looked old. “Nothing’s going the way it’s supposed to tonight.” Before Mike could ask what he meant, Corey went on, “Don’t tell Mom.” He was probably talking about the cigarette, maybe the bad night. He let on that, one by one, his friends had disappeared, leaving him alone at the party
Corey let the cigarette butt drop. “It’s cold. Let’s go inside.”
The inside of the house was rundown, dimly lit. There was a thread-worn velour couch with a print that depicted an autumn scene of orange and brown flowers, a wagon wheel leaned against a rustic barn. The pattern repeated, except on the last cushion, where it was obscured by a boy and girl making out.
There were other people making out on other furniture—a vampire and one of four girls nearby approximating the different versions of Alanis Morissette in the “Ironic” music video. A pair of guys in black suits out of Pulp Fiction played beer pong across a dining room table from two girls in sparkly dresses. On a big tube television, Freddy Krueger flexed his bladed fingers.
Corey pumped the handle on a keg and poured from the tap down the side of one Solo cup and handed it to Mike, then another for himself. “Don’t tell Mom,” he said again.
They stood with their backs to the wall, less in the party than watching it. The beer tasted terrible, but he choked down a little anyway.
“Those guys are assholes.” Corey might have meant Johnny for picking on Mike, or his friends.
It felt good for Mike to be with his brother. With Corey, he wasn’t alone. With Corey, unlike Sara Dogwood, Mike would find his way home.
Corey let out a loud belch, took Mike’s three-quarters-full beer and chugged it. He put one empty cup in the other, then, crushed them in his hand so residual foam and beer droplets squirted out, and chucked them on the floor. “Come on,” he said and led them back to the door, back to the driveway, out into the October chill, a night too dark to see farther than arm’s reach.
About the Author
Michael Chin was born and raised in Utica, New York and currently lives in Las Vegas with his wife and son. He’s the author of six full-length books, including his novel, My Grandfather’s an Immigrant, and So is Yours (Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2021) and his forthcoming short story collection This Year’s Ghost (JackLeg Press, 2025). Find him online at miketchin.com and follow him on Twitter @miketchin.