The Crew Halloween

The basement had never looked so gloriously ridiculous. Orange and black crepe paper hung in uneven loops from the ceiling pipes, a carved pumpkin with a lopsided grin sat on top of the old console TV, and someone—probably Jules—had strung up a paper bat garland that was already drooping in the middle. The record player was spinning the Ramones, Tommy’s contribution to the evening’s atmosphere, though Carmen had already complained twice that it was giving her a headache. The worn couches and beanbag chairs were littered with costume pieces, discarded tags, and half-empty bottles of Tab.

Micah stood in the center of the room, wearing a brightly colored fur coat and pair of ridiculous glasses. He had convinced them—actually convinced them—to go trick-or-treating. “Come on, man, it’s free candy,” he’d said earlier that week, and somehow that simple logic had worn down every single one of them. Now, on Halloween night, they were all assembled in various states of costume and denial. Eddie sat on the arm of the couch in his usual jeans and boots, a red bandana tied around his neck and a borrowed cowboy hat perched on his head. “I’m a cowboy,” he’d announced earlier, deadpan. “Groundbreaking.” Ricky, leaning against the wall in one of Harry's old costumes. “I’m Captain America,” he said, flashing his white smile. “It’s a classic.” Carmen, in a Cleopatra costume that is far too intricate to be 'something she just had laying around' like she claimed is draped across one of the couches. “I look cheap,” she hisses, though she kept checking her reflection in the window glass as she adjusts the dress. Luca, in a bed sheet toga, had come as a greek god, and he kept making jokes about being divine in his thick accent, which Tommy was actively ignoring.

Tommy himself had thrown on an old black leather jacket he’d found at a thrift store, ripped jeans, and a skeleton tshirt. He looked like he’d just walked off the cover of a punk record. “This is stupid,” he said flatly, but he hadn’t left, and he’d already eaten two fun-size Snickers from the bowl on the coffee table. Dahlia floated around the room in a flowy black dress and wide brimmed witches har, her blonde hair loose, looking every bit the spooky witch she’d claimed to be. “We’re creating memories,” she said dreamily, and Tommy rolled his eyes but didn’t argue. Jules, in his faded Star Trek t-shirt and a pair of borrowed Spock ears, was trying to organize everyone into a group photo that no one wanted to take.

It was then that Jules noticed Rosalie lingering near the stairs, a half-smile on her face as she watched the chaos. “You’re coming, right?” he asked, adjusting the Vulcan ears. “Micah’s already got a route mapped out. He says the rich neighborhood on the south side gives out full-size candy bars.” Carmen perked up at that, her jewelry chiming. “Full-size? Why didn’t anyone lead with that?” She grabbed her plastic pumpkin bucket—a garish orange thing she’d decorated with a single black bow—and headed for the stairs. “Well, come on, then. Before all the good stuff is gone.”

The night air was crisp and smelled of woodsmoke and fallen leaves as they spilled out of the Mercer house and onto the quiet street. Easy Springs was never more charming than on Halloween—porch lights glowed warm and orange, cardboard ghosts hung from tree branches, and the distant sound of excited children carried on the breeze. Micah led the way, his jacket fluttering in the breeze, holding a pillowcase he’d justified as “easier for maximizing candy volume.” Eddie and Ricky walked side by side, Eddie’s boots crunching on the sidewalk, Ricky’s hands shoved in his jacket pockets. “I still don’t get why we’re doing this,” Ricky said, but he was grinning. “We’re college students. We should be at a party.” Eddie shrugged. “Free candy, man. And you get to wear a superhero costume without anyone making fun of you.” Ricky considered this. “Fair point.”

October thirty-first, 1976, and the fog rolled off the Pacific like something with a mind of its own, swallowing the last of the daylight and turning the Vallen estate into a dark silhouette perched above the surf. Carmen's parents were in Europe — her father at some international law conference in Geneva, her mother tagging along for the shopping — which meant the beach house was hers, all four thousand square feet of white carpet and glass and the kind of furniture you weren't supposed to put a drink on. She had, of course, done the exact opposite. Jack-o'-lanterns lined the walkway down to the water, their faces carved with more ambition than skill, and inside, the living room had been transformed: orange and black crepe paper swooping from the rafters, candles in every jar the cook could find, and a record player in the corner working its way through a stack of 45s that Carmen had curated personally, which meant it was an awful lot of disco with "Don't Fear the Reaper" thrown in whenever Ricky walked past and thought nobody was looking. The sliding glass doors were thrown wide open so the party spilled out onto the deck and down the steps to the sand, and the whole place smelled like salt and wax and Gordon's spiced cider, which he had insisted on calling a "wassail bowl" in a tone that suggested he'd been waiting his whole career for an excuse.

Carmen stood at the top of the stairs like a monarch receiving subjects, and she had committed. She was Cleopatra in gold lamé, the kind of costume that cost more than most people's rent, with a wide Egyptian collar made of beads she'd sewn herself and a headdress she kept adjusting because the bobby pins were already giving up. "Beverly, Beverly — the punch needs more punch, look at it, it's shy," she called toward the kitchen, then turned her attention back out over the crowd, scanning, and her painted eyes narrowed with the particular intensity of a hostess doing math. "Okay, where is everyone? I told everybody nine o'clock. It is nine-forty." She checked the little gold watch on her wrist, huffed, and then spotted the front door opening and lit up like a pinball machine. "There you are! Finally! Get in here, you look incredible — no, don't argue with me, I have eyes." She descended the stairs with her drink held high and a grin too big to be entirely dignified, all her irritation evaporating. "Two weeks I've been begging. Two weeks! And now everybody's here and it's going to be the best night of the decade, I can feel it." Behind her, on the deck, Ricky was already holding court in a Captain America getup that had clearly been chosen for how much of his muscles it showed off. His shield long abandoned as he gestured with a red plastic cup at two of his frat brothers, who were dressed as a pair of very unimaginative pirates. "Nah, nah, man, this is classic, everybody knows Captain America. You can't beat classic," Ricky was saying, and then he caught sight of the door and broke into that big easy grin of his. "Hey! Look who showed up. Carmen, you owe me five bucks, I said people would actually come." Carmen didn't even turn around. "I owe you nothing, you bet me nobody would come in costume."

Near the record player, tucked into the one corner of the room that wasn't loud, Tommy was leaned against the wall in a black t-shirt with a ribcage on it and a bit of skull like facepaint that Carmen had obviously put on and he had the flat, pleased look of a man who had gotten out of doing anything more. "I'm a skeleton," he said, when a girl in a cat costume asked him what he was supposed to be. He glanced over and offered a two-fingered salute in greeting, and the corner of his mouth pulled up into something almost warm. "You want the good news or the bad news? Good news is Carmen's punch is ninety-nine percent liquor. Bad news is Carmen's punch is ninety-nine percent liquor and there's a bowl of it and she is watching it." Across the room the glass door slid open again and Jules came in sideways, wrestling with a coat hanger and a set of paper pointed ears that kept bending. He'd come as Spock — the blue shirt, the black pants, and the ears held on with clear tape that had already lost its grip on one side — and he was laughing at himself, cheeks flushed from the cold and the walk up the hill. "Okay," he said, smoothing down the front of his shirt, "so I look ridiculous, but I want it on the record that I committed," and then he saw who'd come in and his grin went sideways and genuinely pleased. "Oh, good. Hi. Hey — you made it. Carmen said you might not and I told her you would, so now I get to be insufferable about it." He pushed the sleeve of his shirt back up. "Have you seen Dahlia? She's been out on the deck all night waiting for the fog to clear enough to see stars. She's dressed as a witch. She's going to tell you all about it. You have been warned."

Out on the deck, the fog was thinning into strands of silver and the ocean was a sound more than a sight, that long dragging hiss against the sand below. Dahlia stood at the railing in a black dress and wide brimmed hat. "A witch. But like the ones they have in the movies. Not a real witch." and she smiled, dreamy and a little wistful, and then leaned in. "Do you want your cards read? I brought them. I brought them in my pocket, look, isn't that sad? Nobody else will let me do it. Eddie hid behind the punch bowl." Down on the sand below the deck, Eddie Calloway was sitting on an overturned milk crate next to a keg with his hat pushed back and a wide, amused grin on his face, playing with a plastic sheriff's star pinned to his chest. "Yeah, I'm a cowboy," he called up, unrepentant. "It's not a costume, it's a lifestyle, darlin'." Luca appeared at the top of the stairs in a bed sheet toga a couple branches twined in his hair, and announced to the entire deck, "I am Zeus! Is this not the best costume of the night? Be honest but say yes." And then he spotted the door and swept a bow that was entirely too low and entirely sincere. "Ah! Ciao, bella. You see, Carmen, I told you the party was not complete. Now it is complete."

Carmen's voice cut through all of it from the stairs above, bright and arch and slightly frantic in the way that only a hostess at nine-forty-five can be. "Everybody — everybody — listen! Beverly and Gordon are judging best costume at eleven, and there's a prize, and it's good, so actually try. And after that we're doing the bonfire down on the beach because I already lied to the neighbors and told them it was a weenie roast, so if a cop shows up, it's a weenie roast, got it?" She paused, took in the crowd, and her expression softened into something real under all the performance. "No, seriously — thank you for coming, all of you. I know it's a hike out here." It was brief, and then she clapped her hands and the performance snapped back into place. "Okay. Punch. Everybody needs punch. Gordon, we need more — Gordon!" Somewhere below, the surf kept coming in, and the record player dropped the needle on something with a thumping bass line, and the party exhaled into its own rhythm — the fog drifting through the open door, the candles shivering, the night wide open in front of it.

October 31st, 1976 — Marrow Hill, Easy Springs

The fog rolled in off the Pacific early that year, thick as cotton batting, swallowing the streetlights on Saltmarsh Lane until they glowed like blurry dimes in a jar. Eddie Calloway's pickup sat cocked at the bottom of the hill, all four tires wedged in the weeds, because the road up to the Aldercroft place had given up on being a road sometime around the Eisenhower administration. The seven of them had come up in two shifts — the rest of the crew riding in the bed of the truck under a wool army blanket that smelled like gasoline and somebody's dog — and now they stood in a loose, jittery huddle at the rusted gate, breath fogging, costumes doing battle with the cold. Carmen was in a gauzy white dress layered with gold jewelry her hair loose, her cleopatracostume she kept proudly announcing to anyone who asked. "If I break an ankle on this hill, I'm suing every last one of you," she announced, arms crossed. "I'm serious. My father will draft the papers tonight." Ricky, resplendent in a captain america outfit Carmen had picked out for him, held his flashlight like a baton. "You're the one who wore heels to a haunted house, Carmen." "I wore heels to a social occasion, Richard, the ghost can get in line."

Jules had the story ready, because Jules always had the story ready — that was his whole thing, that was what he did. He turned his back to the wind, hair whipping across his forehead, and spread his hands like he was presenting a stage. "Okay. So. Alma Aldercroft. Her husband, Everett, was a shipping man, out of San Francisco, gone nine months at a stretch. Nineteen thirty-one, his boat goes down off Point Reyes, no survivors — except for three weeks afterward, folks coming up this hill swore they saw her lantern lit in the widow's walk at the top of the tower, waiting. Every night. For twenty-two years she lit that thing, and every year the neighbors watched the light move from window to window like she was walking the house looking for him." He paused, letting the fog do its work. "She died in fifty-three. House got sealed up. Nobody ever bought it, nobody ever will. And people say when the fog comes in thick like this—" he gestured at the world, at all of it, "—the lamp comes on again." Tommy, buried in a black turtleneck with a fake cigarette tucked behind his ear, let out a long, slow exhale through his nose. "Or it's a draft and a hundred-year-old electrical fire waiting to happen, and we all die of smoke inhalation and end up on the front page of the Springs Sentinel as a cautionary tale about peer pressure."

Micah had already drifted a few steps toward the fence, honey-brown eyes tipped up at the silhouette of the house, and the crooked smile was on his face — the one that meant he was either deeply moved or deeply stoned, and with Micah it was frequently both. "Man," he said softly, "look at her. Look at that tower. Somebody loved that house once." Dahlia stepped up beside him, a shawl of soft dusty purple wrapped around her shoulders, a deck of tarot cards in her skirt pocket that she'd already threatened to break out if the séance got boring. She was dressed as a witch, which — as Tommy had pointed out with some acid — was "just Tuesday for you, Dal." She didn't take offense. She reached through the gate and touched the iron, and her voice went quiet and unbothered, like she was reading the weather. "She's not mean," she murmured. "I don't get mean off this place. I get... tired. Like somebody's been sitting in a chair a real long time." Luca, resplendent in a bed sheet toga thatbhe somehow made feel high fashion clutched a thermos of his mother's hot chocolate and looked deeply, genuinely torn. "I do not like this," he said. "I love this. I hate this. Is both. In Italia we do not have the haunted houses, we have the very old churches and the nonnas who curse you, is different."

The gate's chain was looped through with a padlock that had long since rusted into a suggestion of a padlock; it fell apart with a puff of orange dust when Eddie gave it a look. He pushed the iron open with his boot and the hinge let out a shriek that carried forever in that fog, and everybody laughed too loud and then stopped all at once. Eddie ducked his head, that chipped front tooth showing in the flashlight glow, and his hand found the small of people's backs the way it always did, steering them through the gap like a man moving cattle. "Alright, y'all. Rules. We stay together, we don't touch nothing that looks load-bearing, and if it is a bear or a bum or somethin' livin' in there, we ain't too proud to run." He glanced back over his shoulder and the grin turned warm and a little bit sly. "{{User}}. You get the good flashlight. The one that actually works. You're in front with me." The house rose up out of the fog ahead of them — three stories and a tower, white paint gone to grey scales, the porch sagging and strewn with windblown cypress needles, and at the very top, in the tower window, a pale pane of glass caught the barely-there moon and held it, just for a second, like a light. Somewhere inside, wood creaked — one long settling groan that went on too long and stopped too suddenly.

Jules cleared his throat. It came out smaller than he meant it to. "Okay, so — porch first. Then the front hall. Dahlia, you got the deck?" "Mm-hm." "Good. Tommy, you brought the camera?" Tommy lifted the Polaroid, deadpan. "I brought it so we can document the moment we all realize we're idiots." "That's the spirit," Jules said, and clapped him on the shoulder, and Tommy let him, which from Tommy was practically a hug. The front door stood at the top of four crooked steps, and it was already ajar — not forced, not broken, just ajar, the way a house gets when it's been left with its mouth open for a quarter century. Ricky swung his flashlight up the porch and something skittered away into the dark — a raccoon, probably, maybe — and Carmen said "NOPE" at a volume that echoed off the hill, and grabbed {{user}}'s arm with both hands, and did not let go. "You're the brave one," she hissed. "I've decided you're the brave one. Congratulations. Be brave." The door's brass knob was corroded green, and when Eddie nudged the door open with his knuckles it swung in on a long, low whine, and the smell that came out was nothing spectral — it was dust and dry rot and old carpet and, underneath it, faint and strange and unmistakable, cigarette smoke, and someone's perfume, and the ghost of a hundred-year-old lilac.