“When you killed that Jack,” he begins. “The one on the porch of the old Miller place. Did the lights go on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, did its eyes start to glow before you killed it? If that happened, someone might have seen you… and the house, too.”

  “You mean something might have seen me. Back at Halloween Central Control, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “Yes.” The boy stares down at his hands lying in his lap, suddenly nervous about the light in the room, and the drapes that aren’t drawn, and the windows that reveal nothing but opaque blackness out in the street. “I guess that’s what I mean.”

  “Uh-huh.” The violet scar on Bloody Mary’s cheek bends like a drawn bowstring as she smiles. “You think that something would care about you? Specifically? Something smart… something that’s actually in control? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Well… ”

  “Like maybe: the gods of this new world, or the dead god from the old one, or maybe the universe itself? You figure one of those things would single you out for special attention?”

  “I don’t know anything about gods or the universe. I only know that it doesn’t pay to take chances. And I know the Jacks see things, and then the other things come. They’re like guard dogs. A few weeks ago I was scavenging in one of those big warehouse stores and a Jack saw me. The next thing I knew, six goblins riding giant bats were flying around the parking lot. A couple of them got inside the store, and I barely had a chance to hide. They almost found me and—”

  “Nice little story. I’m sure it has a happy ending, and you scuttled away and hid like a roach. But why do you think the Jacks would care about you? Specifically? You’re no threat. You’re not even much of a meal. You’re not even two bites.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Not for a werewolf, you’re not. Right now you’re barely even two bites for me. And I’ll bet that cat over there would chew you down to gristle and bone if it was hungry enough.”

  The boy looks down at his hands. They just lay there in his lap. He has to admit that his fingers are very narrow, and his palms seem like they can barely hold the skin that covers them. Truthfully, that is the case, so he doesn’t say another word.

  “You’re thinking,” Bloody Mary says. “That’s a start.”

  The boy nods, but he doesn’t speak.

  “Look at me,” Bloody Mary says, and the boy raises his head. Their eyes lock. And he’s surprised at the eyes inside the half-a-princess mask. Because even in this moment — here, in a room like this, with a cat curled in the corner — Bloody Mary’s eyes are piercing… burning… angry… just as they were in the moments after she killed the cyclops.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn before something cares enough to notice you,” she says. “Someone, too. That’s Lesson One — remember it.”

  Bloody Mary’s head inclines. The scar on her cheek points at the work on the table below. She reassembles the shotgun. Clicks, snaps, metallic slaps. The sounds remind the boy of a machine running. Then Bloody Mary loads the weapon, each sound percussive, measured. After that, it is quiet in the room.

  “You can sleep where you want,” Bloody Mary says finally. “I’m sleeping upstairs.”

  * * *

  When Bloody Mary climbs the staircase to the second floor and the door to the master bedroom closes, the boy wanders through the other rooms with a flashlight. He can’t settle in any of them, so he goes to his usual spot — the crawlspace above the second floor.

  He doesn’t realize until later that the bedroom below his nest is the one where Bloody Mary is sleeping. He lays there in the dark, listening, but she doesn’t make a sound. Soon the silence is almost hypnotizing, and it seems to ring in his ears. Then he begins to hear other things, echoes from the day — the shotgun blasts, and Bloody Mary’s words, and the sound of the Remington being cleaned and assembled. Each sound seems to have its own particular cadence, and together they seem to lull him more than the silence as he considers the woman in the room beneath the crawlspace, and who she might have been before, and who she is now. And those thoughts travel in circles, and the circles form suppositions that lead to Bloody Mary’s eyes, and her mask, and her scar, and the things she carries, and the boy’s thoughts follow that path… ’round and ’round and ’round.

  Before he knows it, he’s asleep. It’s a long sleep, and deeper than any he’s had in the last year. When he awakens, he is disoriented. Then he remembers the events of the previous afternoon, and the previous night.

  The first thing he feels is safe.

  That is a surprise.

  He rolls over, grabs the flashlight, and thumbs the button. Bloody Mary’s face is only a few feet away, behind the half-a-princess mask. The flashlight beam catches her eyes, and—

  Teeth flashing, the woman slams the pistol against the boy’s head. The flashlight flies from his grasp, and the batteries pop out, and then it is dark. Now she’s on top of him, straddling him. His arms are pinned against ceiling joists, and she jabs a stiff index finger behind his jaw and below his ear and his mouth comes open like a picked safe. Then her revolver is between his teeth, and she jams it deeper, deep enough so that he tastes gun oil and gags on it, and he thrashes, arms trapped beneath the hard bones of her shins, and then—

  Bloody Mary is still. Absolutely. Like something dead. On top of him, bent over him, unseen but undeniable. She doesn’t move an inch, and neither does he.

  “Lesson Two,” she says. “Never let your guard down.”

  The gun barrel slides from the boy’s mouth.

  By the time he catches his breath, Bloody Mary is gone.

  The boy swallows, and he tastes blood.

  * * *

  It begins that morning. First, the chainsaw. Then, the sawed-off shotgun. Neither comes easy to the boy. But he keeps at it — that day, and the next, and the one after that… and into the next week. Soon he doesn’t look so much like a scarecrow dancing with a hurricane when he works with either tool.

  That’s what Bloody Mary calls them: tools. She has others, and the boy learns about them. They are smaller, and the boy likes them better. A hatchet. A combat knife. A revolver.

  At night, they sit in the house. Sometimes they talk, but not about the things the boy wants to know. There are many things he wants to ask Bloody Mary. He wants to ask about the mask she wears. He wants to know who she was before, and how she came to be the person she is. These are the things that used to matter before 10/31, the things people called secrets. But as he watches and learns, he begins to think that maybe secrets aren’t really that important anymore. Because whoever Bloody Mary is now, she is not the person she once was. Anyone can see that much is true. Anyone who heard her name would understand.

  And there are other things that matter to the boy, anyway. The things Bloody Mary teaches him. And a million little things that wouldn’t seem to matter to anyone at all. The hiss of the propane lantern at night. The rustle of her black skirt against her legs, and the cadence of her boots on the hardwood floors. The open window beyond the dining room, and the things that might be lurking on the other side of it… or might not. The smell of the mint tea Bloody Mary brews, a foraging prize with mingled scents of peppermint, lemon grass, and spearmint. The shotgun, positioned just so for an easy grab. The cat — comfortable now with both of them — curled next to the Frisbee plate on the floor. The boy calls the cat Blackie; Bloody Mary calls it Spike. The cat doesn’t pay much attention, unless either word is followed by the vacuum pop of a cat-food can.

  And so the nights become a kind of routine, almost comfortable in the wake of the day’s lessons. As always, there are never many words between them. So as the night stretches on, the boy reads his familiar books and magazines, only now he does not read them by the glow of a flashlight. Bloody Mary works the cyclops tusk with a long thin knife, paring… notching and excavating… carving. One night she tells the boy about the art of scrimshaw, and whalers from the days of old, and the bones and teeth and tusks of creatures once thought to be monsters. That same night she finishes embellishing the tusk and sets it on the table.

  Immediately, the boy recognizes the chainsaw etched on the side. “Life imitates art,” Bloody Mary says. “Sometimes. And sometimes life runs in circles. And there are monsters everywhere — for everyone, for everything, for every time and place. Those aren’t lessons, but I do believe they’re things that are true. Sometimes.”

  Bloody Mary spins the tusk on the table, and when it stops the killing point is aimed at the boy. He sips his tea, considering her words. The hiss of the propane lantern seems louder in the silence. He stares at the tusk, at the etched chainsaw waiting there. He can almost hear it growl. He takes another sip of tea. All of a sudden, he’s sleepy. Too sleepy. He rises and tries to take a step, but it’s as if he left his legs behind him on the chair.

  The boy topples and goes down hard.

  Bloody Mary stands over him. He hears the dull rattle of a pill bottle in her hand.

  “Lesson Three,” she says. “Never trust anyone.”

  Then she gets out the handcuffs.

  * * *

  The boy doesn’t know if it’s the thunder that wakes him or the rain, but there’s plenty enough of both to go around. Lightning flashes fill the sky, bathing the pasture before him in harsh white light. Has to be he’s a good piece out of town. Grass and mud stretch to an indistinct treeline, and between him and that there are only sheets of rain.

  Walls actually, for it’s coming down even harder now. The boy shakes his head, clearing the cobwebs, waiting for another lightning strike. A peal of thunder… boom… and then a hard slash of crackling white splits the sky like a hammer-strike on black glass. And in that moment he spots Bloody Mary’s wheelbarrow, twenty feet away, near a clutch of old oaks. But there’s no sign of Bloody Mary, and the wheelbarrow is empty.

  The boy starts to stand and feels a pull against his wrist. Another flash of lighting and he sees he’s handcuffed to a post, the empty handcuff locked around an old eyebolt screwed into rotting wood. Probably used to chain a bull here, he thinks. And then, just a little dizzily: Bulls must have seemed like monsters, once… Once upon a time…

  He doesn’t know why he thinks that. He doesn’t know why Bloody Mary drugged him, or locked him to a post, or why the wheelbarrow is sitting twenty feet away as empty as a broken promise. He only knows that the crawlspace scavenger who lives down in his gut doesn’t like to be exposed this way. Before he learned to use the tools, being trapped in the open was his greatest terror, and now that push has come to shove it doesn’t seem like that has changed.

  So his first impulse is to run. He jerks against the eyebolt, but it holds firm. Must be the rotted post is not so rotten. But he has not been trained to give up easily. He jerks against it again and—

  A pool of light starts to spread behind him, somewhere over his shoulder. Not white light, like the lightning; this light is orange. Ten feet away, in the mud by a leaning barbed-wire fence, the glow grows brighter, spilling across the muddy pasture. The boy turns to face it, and he finds something waiting — something with triangular eyes and razor-cut teeth.

  A Jack. Its eyes flare as it spots the boy, and orange beams cut through the black night and the rain and shine directly on him. Panic knots the boy’s chest — just for a moment — and Bloody Mary’s words mock him in memory: “You think that something would care about you? Specifically? Something smart… something that’s actually in control?”

  The Jack starts to scream. And now the boy’s anger rises, because the sound tells him that something does care… something dangerous. He yanks against the cuffs again, and the short chain makes a sick little clicking sound that isn’t even a rattle. Metal slices his wrist as he yanks one more time, and harder, but the eyebolt doesn’t budge and neither does the old post. Then another lightning flash explodes above him, and he spots something in the mud at his feet.

  Bloody Mary’s revolver.

  Just as he bends to snatch it up, two sounds rise beneath the storm.

  The screech of a bat… and a goblin’s cackle.

  The boy’s head jerks up. The screaming Jack is in full hellfire blaze now, and he doesn’t need lightning to see the things riding toward him in the night sky. They’re coming for him. Goblins mounted on bats, black reins in their clawed hands and bits jammed into the bat’s fanged maws.

  A grin creases the reptilian face of the goblin riding point, and his fanged teeth part like a rat-trap. He roars a command, one-handing the reins, jerking them taut. His mount’s wings dip, and the great bat dives, and as another bolt of lightning rips the night the goblin sets a meat-hook whirring on a long chain held tightly in his other hand.

  The boy does not hesitate. He fires the revolver. No panic now; no anger. Just a conditioned response. Six shots in the cylinder, and he burns them down quickly. A head-shot blasts the goblin with the meat-hook out of the saddle, and the twisted green monster hits the ground a full second before a rain of his own skull fragments slice through the mud. The second rider makes it closer, and this time it takes two shots, but the boy kills the goblin just the same. The dead rider pulls rein with a reflexive jerk so that the giant bat piles into the barbed-wire fence, launching the goblin’s corpse into a headfirst slide that ends in the blazing glow of the Jack’s screaming smile.

  Three more goblins fall dead in a handful of seconds.

  And that’s it. The boy has done his worst, and the revolver’s tapped. The only thing left is his twitching finger, and the hammer falling on an empty shell casings, and more goblins coming his way.

  Too many more.

  The boy sucks a deep breath and waits for the inevitable. That’s when Bloody Mary’s sawed-off shotgun starts to boom. Again and again. By the Halloween blaze of the Jack, the boy spots her charging through the rain, orange light gleaming against a blacker slash of motion in the black of night, the tail of Bloody Mary’s thick leather duster flapping in her wake like an escaped shroud, blasts of Remington fire exploding from her grasp and carving a trail before her.

  Mounted goblins dive from the sky, investing dark faith in their numbers, mistaking the young woman with the riot gun for easy prey. But there is nothing easy about Bloody Mary, and she does not stop until the work is finished. Soon the goblins — and the Jack — are all dead. And then it is over, and all that remains is the lightning and the rain, and a pair of retreating bats cutting a path through the storm.

  Heading for parts unknown.

  * * *

  The boy wakes in a barn. In truth, he hasn’t slept very well. During the night, rats ran circuits in the hayloft and above his head, their claws scrabbling over the crossbeams. Big ones… ones that made a fine meal for the cat, who wears the expression of a satisfied glutton as the boy wakes and pulls on his boots.

  Bloody Mary eyes him from a dark corner. Her clothes are drying on a rail. She’s wearing cargo pants and a black t-shirt, and she’s busy cleaning the mud off her boots. “You did well last night,” she says, always spare with a compliment. “Now it’s time to move on.”

  The boy sits up, rubbing his wrist. It’s still raw from the handcuffs, and his fingers are swollen. “Maybe another week. Another week and I’ll be ready—”

  “You’re ready now. You proved that last night. I’ve taught you all I can… well, almost. The only thing left to learn is the easy part, and you’ll learn that today.”

  “The easy part?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that?”

  Bloody Mary smiles. The scar on her cheek arches.

  “Pushing the wheelbarrow,” she says. “Even a zombie could handle that.”

  * * *

  The wheelbarrow is heavy. The boy discovers that right away. There’s the shotgun, the chainsaw… all the other tools. The boy wonders why Bloody Mary travels this way. Even now, it’s not hard to find a car and fix it up so it will run. But Bloody Mary says that it’s better to take things slow… and, anyway, most places are exactly the same now. There’s really nothing different to see anywhere, so there’s no real need to cover lots of ground. The only thing out there is more emptiness, and the occasional monster to fill up the corners.

  So the boy hefts wooden handles and pushes. Maybe five or six miles a day. Sometimes less. Sometimes more. Soon blisters fill his shallow palms and line his narrow fingers. Then the blisters heal, and he sprouts a second set. When those crust over, his hands are bigger than they were when he spent his days in crawlspaces.

  And so he pushes. The next day, and the day after that, and one more, and then another. The next time dead skin peels from the boy’s hands, the flesh beneath is thicker, and callused.

  That’s when Bloody Mary gives him a pair of black gloves.

  By that time the boy doesn’t need them, but he wears them just the same.

  * * *

  It goes like that for a long while. A year… nearly two. Enough time that the seasons make the circuit, and run it ’round again, and Bloody Mary and the boy mark summer nights and winter nights with shared memories of other nights that came the year before. And then another morning comes, and the memories are put away, and (sometimes) new ones take their place in the course of the coming day.

  Most memories are marked in time with the percussive sound of gunfire, or the whirring roar of a chainsaw, or the sharp wet sound of an axe cleaving meat from bone. Others are marked with softer sounds — the wet sizzle of a Jack’s flaring eyes, the dragging whisper of a mummy’s footfall as it passes through a dead cornfield, the crackle of storm-blown leaves as they crumble against a hungry zombie’s unblinking face. These are sounds to remember, and they linger long after they are gone. But the boy holds other memories closer, for things are different now. He is different. Older. Not a boy anymore at all.

 

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