I thought I smelled smoke when the green sedan pulled up in front of me. Just for a second, and it wasn’t a bad smell really. Not the sharp, twisting scent of burnt electrical wire or the smudgy, thick smell of cigarette smoke. This was mainly the warm crispness of autumn leaves on fire, blanketing some more metallic odor that lay underneath.
And then it was gone, and I just had time to think the car had brought some errant breeze by of where someone had a fire in a nearby yard—though I saw no fires or yards on the dark street where I was getting off of work—before the window rolled down and I saw the pale lower half of a woman’s face smiling out at me.
“Are you Zach?”
I nodded. “Yeah…hey. I guess you’re my ride?”
“It looks like it. Get on in the back if you don’t mind.”
I tried to return her fixed smile and got in, glancing around at the interior and the small woman up front as I did. The car was clean and while older, seemed safe enough. And while it might be sexist, I was a bit relieved that my first rideshare driver was a woman. Not that she couldn’t be crazy or dangerous, but at least I thought I could take the forty-something woman in the orange sweater vest that was beaming at me from the rearview mirror. Shit, she’d said something else.
“Sorry, what was that?”
I asked if it was all right if I make one other stop on the way. My two little ones need to be picked up from their father’s. Taking them trick-or-treating later tonight. Is that okay? They’ll sit up here with me, of course.
Um, yeah sure. That’s cool. So, I guess tonight is Halloween, isn’t it?
Sure is. A lot of rides tonight are going to parties, but not you, huh?
What? Oh, no. I was just up here working this weekend…I work back there where you picked me up. When I came out, my car was dead. Tried calling my car emergency service, but they said it’d be like three hours. So I’ll just deal with that on Monday.
I hear you. Too much to do to be waiting around like that. Especially on a fun night like tonight.
Oh? Oh, you mean Halloween? I never got into it that much I guess. My parents moved me around a lot, and I think the last time I went trick or treating I was like eight or nine.
Well that’s a shame. I think I enjoy it more now than I did as a child, though having the kids is part of that I’m sure. Speaking of which, there’s the little monsters now!
I glanced out the window and saw two small figures waiting on the sidewalk outside of a dark building. Where were we even at? Did their dad live in that place? Squinting, I looked at the figures themselves more closely. A red devil and a bright green velociraptor stared back at me. After a moment, the dinosaur gave me a little wave as the driver came to a stop and rolled down the front passenger window.
“Come on, guys. Hurry up, let’s go!”
The devil stepped forward and opened the door, holding it for the velociraptor to get in before climbing in themselves. Poor kids. I couldn’t say for sure because of their masks, but based on their sizes I’d say they were probably about eight and ten, with the dinosaur being thinner and taller. Too young to be left out on a dark street by themselves like yesterday’s trash. I had a flash of memory—me at a bus stop, waiting for a bus because my parents had forgotten me again after dropping me off hours earlier. Me not realizing until it was too late that the buses had already stopped running for the night.
I blinked as my eyes began to water and shifted my gaze up to the front. The devil and raptor were both turned around in their shared seat, staring at me. “Hey, guys. Looking forward to trick or treating tonight?”
The dino just turned its head and gave a black and orange bead bracelet on its wrist a little shake, while the little hellspawn leaned over to whisper to the mother as she drove. The woman let out a short laugh and shook her head. “No, you leave him alone.” She glanced back at me in the mirror. “He was asking if you had any candy.”
I grinned at the devil. “Sorry, I don’t. I forgot it was Halloween.” Feeling bad, I lamely added as I looked between the two. “Cool masks though. You’re pretty scary.” When they continued to just stare at me, I finally pulled out my phone and began acting like I was checking emails, hoping they’d take the hint and turn around in their seat.
“You know, masks aren’t really the scary part, are they?”
I glanced up at the woman. “Huh?” And then trying to give a better response, “They’re not?”
No, not really. The masks and costumes, the tradition of guising and asking for food, you know where that comes from, right?
No, not really. Never that big into Halloween.
Right, that’s right. Well, it’s commonly said that part of it is so you can pass among all the ghosts and ghouls undetected, like you’re one of them. Of course that’s silly.
Well, sure. I mean there’s no such things as ghosts and monsters. Not really.
No, I don’t mean that. It’s just that they’d never be fooled by a bit of cloth or plastic painted up to look like a cartoon version of something old and powerful and unknowable.
Oh, well, yeah I guess. I just don’t…
And that’s not the real reason for the masks anyway, is it?
It’s not, huh?
No, it’s not. It’s a way of asking for passage. Begging for it. By honoring the things we fear. Wearing the faces we give them and calling them by our names.
That’s cool…look, I’m no expert, but I’ve never gone this way to get to Brookhaven. Do you need to check your map or something?
But even that’s only part of the truth. Because we’re not just honoring them are we? We’re trying to contain them. Control them by our ideas of what they are, what they can do, how they can be avoided or defeated.
Okay, this looks way too rural. And I don’t ever cross a river going home. Can you please stop and check where you’re going?
And these things that live in the dark? They know this. They just don’t care what some scared monkeys tell themselves when they go out at night. Because it’s what we don’t know, what we don’t understand, that is really scary. Not the mask, but what’s underneath it that terrifies.
Lady, just stop the car, okay? I don’t know what this is, but...
The devil and raptor both burst into wet-sounding giggles, looking at each other and then back to me. What the fuck was wrong with these people? And where was she taking me? We were going past woods now. How had we gotten this far out this fast?
“Please, just let me out. I can get another ride.”
The woman chuckled. “Oh no. You’re with us until the end now.” With that, she stomped the accelerator as she yanked the wheel hard and shot down a dirt road, barely avoiding the ditch as she fishtailed back to the washed-out hardpack in the middle. The children were cackling now, but the sound of it was changing, getting sharper and nastier as they started pawing at each other’s faces, ripping away each other’s masks.
It was then that I started to scream.
Underneath the masks…I don’t have the words to describe what I saw there. There were eyes and bits of flesh and bone, mouths and things that moved and tested the air like a snake might if it had been imagined by dreams of Hell. But none of that is right either. As they shed their disguises, I realized what I was seeing was really just another form of mask—an explanation of my mind as it tried to stay sane in the face of something outside of anything that could or should be. So was all of it an illusion?
No.
The mouths were real enough.
They fell on the woman, tearing chunks from her even as she drove us across a field and into a thicket of trees and bushes. I thought at first she was screaming, but I was wrong. She was singing, her voice high and shrill as she bellowed out notes until her throat was torn out. They were crawling on her, biting through meat and bone, spraying blood everywhere as they tossed out chunks they didn’t swallow down as they went. The car was jumping and swerving on its on now. The woman wasn’t driving any longer, and what was left of her had turned to biting them back in kind.
I was crying and pulling on the door handles by this point—I didn’t care how fast we were going, anything was better than being trapped in this. But the doors didn’t work, and I knew at the rate they were going, whoever was left after they finished eating each other would soon be turning to me. And oh God, how was any of this actually…
That’s when we hit the tree.
When I woke up, I smelled that burning smell again, but older and fainter, like the faded memory of fire. Looking around, I saw I was still in the car, but everything was different. In the meager moonlight that pushed through the trees overhead, I could see that the car was old and covered in leaves and vines, and that underneath that, seats and dashboard, steering wheel and console were all melted and black.
Just like the burned figures huddled together in the front.
Everything had a silver tint in the moon’s glow, but I could still make out small patches of orange on the woman’s vest. The twisted remnant of what might have been a devil’s horn fused into a child’s skull. The oddly-perfect curve of a plastic shoe cover made to resemble a velociraptor’s claw. I let out a moan as I reached for the door again, and this time it opened with a rusty squeal. Crawling away, I vomited and wept into the grass for a few moments before making my way back to the road.
The next day was spent talking to police. I’d led them back to the car and to the remains there. Valerie Parker and her two children, Aaron and Elise. They had gone missing ten years earlier, a couple of days before her ex-husband had died in a car accident three hundred miles away. No one had seen or heard from them since, until…well, me.
One of the cops dropped me off at my house just after noon. I felt exhausted…no, more than that, I felt hollowed out. Scooped clean like one of the jack-o-lanterns on my neighbors’ lawn. None of it made sense, and even now, even after talking to the cops and knowing who they were, I had trouble believing…
My fingers had been digging in my pocket for the keys when they hit something else instead. Stomach twisting, I pulled it out and stared at it, fighting the urge to throw it down or scream as I forced myself to take it all in.
It was a small black and orange bracelet. In the dark, it had looked like it was made out of beads, but seeing it in the noonday sun, I realized I’d only been half right. The black portions were small, perfect teeth, charred black by flame. Strung between them were little orange pumpkins, each embossed with a thin, crooked letter white as bone. Voice hoarse and cracking, I read the words as the smell of smoke filled my nostrils again.
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