It’s Hallows Eve.
Maisie Watson lingers at window, peeking out from the heavy, smelly curtains, a doleful feeling ebbs at the back of her mind. Her neighbourhood is closed and sleepy, dead, the misty atmosphere is stirred by the distant cheering and laughing from adjacent areas. The walkway is deserted, the thawing ice top leave glints under the moonlight. Over the low, broad, vandyke brown rooftops, the moon shyly hides a smile behind a veil of cloud. Here and there, one or two houses have their dingy front porch light.
She usually stays for Halloween at Doctor Vu’s place. “They should call it Hypocrites-ween, not Halloween.” He would wave contemptuously as kids flock from door to door, scowling as he puffs at his cigarette. “The undead wants to be dead, and when they’re dead they wish they are not.” He would scowl when she shoves a candy bag, and his scowl deepens further at her childish excitement, but he would never stop her from handing out candies and dressing up in silly costume.
Doctor Vu lives in a single-mansion area, where people are rich and generous. As soon as the streets dim a fraction, grinning Jack O’Lanterns illuminate the walkway, whispering guidance to the kids. Children spilling onto the smooth chunks of asphalt and hopping over rabbit holes, rushing over lawns and dares each other to go through the darkest, deepest alleys in the neighbourhood. Laughter intoxicant the cool, frigid air.
East Shore has never been enthusiastic on any giving occasions. Kids learnt to view all events as another sombre day of the year. There’s no birthday, no Thanksgiving, no Halloween, no Christmas. No gifts, no candy, no celebration. Just simply tomorrow. Another day.
When you’re poor, you grow up thinking about taking, not giving. Giving free things is a foreign concept here. They’ve to tip off the food bank while nobody is looking, they’ve to hunch in their secondhand, ripped, faded, deflated autumn jackets with feathers spilling out, they’ve to slip their hands in their wealthy white friends’ pockets for a few coins for a bus ride home. It’s all about getting, taking, stripping, draining things away. Everything for another cent in their pocket. East Shore would never get rich. Indigence seems to be more evidence after each generation, already eaten into their DNA and lifestyle. It’s in their eyes, their stoop gait, the hard-working, calloused fingers, the grim-set mouth. It screams poverty, thievery, pettiness. She thinks about Doctor Vu and how obsessed he is to the Life Cycle. The Sin and Redemption convection. How life always balanced out: You take one, life takes one, you give one, life gives one.
Far, far away, six slanted shadows slither across the bellying darkness, an orange lantern marks their journey. “Trick or treat?” They ring in chorus, their marching echoing like heavy bells tolling at a cleansing.
She smiles at their steadfast footsteps. Mama’s snoring softly from her bedroom, snug and warm for the night. Doctor Vu’s medicine really works. Mama is healing much faster. She ate a good bowl of porridge yesterday and beamed a little when Maisie came in to change her bandage this morning. Her complex already gaining back the serene glove. Doctor Vu must have brought something sweet and sleepy for her, Maisie thinks, since Mama didn’t complain at all and sleep off the whole night.
Mrs. McCormick’s dog barks from the window as the kids singing by. The kids are four houses from hers now. Maisie runs down to the basement and roots for her purse. This year she bought a funky witch costume on sales at Value Village, included a black cone hat with frilly, tough-feel materials draping over at the back, and a dress that pools around her ankles, not much different than an oversize burlap. Everything hangs limply over her thin frame, too big for her body.
When Maisie comes up again, she lurks behind the door, anxiously rubbing her fingers. She has mended the dress so that it fits her better, it’s a shame she can’t wear it now.
Soon enough, the little chant near, then coming right on her porch. The knocking comes, Tap-tap Tap, almost like a code. Tap-tap Tap.
She takes in a deep breath, flicks on the porch light and forces herself to slow as she opens the door and greets the kids, ridiculously flutters by their innocent smiles and glittering eyes. The mayor’s children carry his same brown locks and rosy cheeks, their powdered-white face and blood-red smiles shine. A gang of clowns.
“Hello, hello,” She says, imitated the evil-laugh of Cruella De Vil, flinching at herself when her laugh comes out sounding like a crow’s screech. It’s too high to be from her throat, not the same sound that she has practiced in front of the mirror for days. She suddenly feels silly. Not funny silly, it’s stupid silly.
Yet, the kids laugh anyway. Their tiny peals of squeals make her stomach curdles with a long awaiting excitement. She shoves a handful of crumble bills into their little empty baskets. Their angelic, brilliant faces light up at the sight of money, and for the first time, she notices that even the mayor’s kids suffer through the same disease that overtakes East Shore youths. They’re white and decent compared to the little town, and yet they look too old for their years. Their skin tight on their bones, their eyes dark and hollow, and their bare fingertips have hard callus marks on either sides of the nails. Hardship has poisoned them. The simple cherish of chocolate has fades, just like the magic of fairy fables and divine’s doing. They might stubbornly dress up and trudge up and down driveways, but truth is Halloween has already lost its meaning to them.
The mayor’s kids thank her with a loud whoop, bouncing off the cobble steps, their heels lighter and faster. She smiles after them. A small of her flush with pride.
Out the corner of her eyes she spies a black hearse sidles behind the children. The hearse slows to a stop at the edge of a droopy pine. Bodyguards, she thinks.
But the driver eases out of the seat and raises a hand at her. She watches as he steps out of the shadow’s protective palm and leisurely walks up the driveway. He stays a few feet away from the front door, tilting his head at her.
“Ms. Watson.” The man says, his voice is clear like thunder.
Shock comes to her, a tad slow, but hits her full force nevertheless. “Hello—?” His name dies on the tip of her tongue, unreal and ridiculous.
He gives her a tight grin, his pearly teeth gleams in the dark. He is in the same suit she has seen him in the last time, although the darkness melts into him, making him much more of sinister minister than the awkward boy in her short-term memory.
“Happy Halloween.” He says.
She stares at him, speechless.
“I’m Duplessis.” He starts. “We met at Doctor Vu’s house two days ago.”
“Yes, I remember,” She manages hoarsely. Questions threatening to burst out of her chest. She grips the door frame, How did you know my house? What are you doing here? What do you want?
Duplessis seems to sense her unspoken question. “Come with me.” He says, stepping closer to the porch light, but only cautiously allows the light to illuminate his lower body.
“Why?” She asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. Shaking her head, she retreats back and closes the door.
“It’s about your mother.” Duplessis says loudly without missing a beat, his voice muffled by the door. “No, actually, it’s about you and your whole family.” Maisie Watson’s fingers freeze around the door knob, a breath hitches in her throat. Instinctively, she glances back over her shoulders, sweeping her gaze across the distrew mounts of books and beers and cold food take-out boxes. The hair along her skin raises.
She is skeptical, yet suddenly she’s aware that darkness has talons sharper than knife. And as she stares harder into the murky black, blight shapes form and shift, as if hiding Death from her plain eyes.
“You’re being imprisoned by Doctor Vu.” Duplessis says from the other side.
You should call the police, the voice—the voice that she thought has already go mute—rings out. This boy is a stalker.
The static silence of the house idles around her, and she startles at a searing sensation that she has almost forgotten: someone is watching her. Scrutinizing from hooded eyes, observing her every movements, analyzing her words. Expectant.
“Leave,” She says, sounding less severe than she intends.
“I—we—know a way for you and your mother to get out of West Bass.”
“Go away, I’ll call the police.” The sentence comes with an automatic question mark at the end, just like any other sentence that spills about of her mouth.
A long pause. She hears tiny rocks crunching under one’s soles. Then she feels Duplessis’s presence in front of her, his body warmth radiating through the thick wooden door. She can hear his breath, hear him leaning close to the wood and whispers. “I know how to clear away your murders.”
She clamps her teeth shut, willing herself not to fall for a trap. But her ears are straining, her muscles aching with the tension taunting.
“They’ve deduced some rough looks of the suspected. Soon enough, they will find out it’s you. Might take a couple of weeks, but Galsworth is known as a good Homicide Detective down in Wintermere.” Duplessis speaks, slowly and calmly. “His words have power. He can either give you away or cover your track.”
She doesn’t breath. Doesn’t allow herself to shatter the fragile truth as it sinks it.
“Imagine how your mother and brother would be ashamed of you, Maisie. And imagine it for a fact that you didn’t even kill for your own goods, it’s for a man who will never pay you the true love you crave.”
Maisie Watson swallows hard. A tremble travels from from her elbows to her wrists. She inhales slowly, steeling herself.
Duplessis coos, his voice gentle and kind, as if he’s whispering Good night to a kid. “But you can get away with them all if you leave this town early. Kill two birds with one stone. Get away from your father and your past forever, for good.”
“It’s impossible.” She murmurs. Because you can’t run from your past. Because your past will always find a way to claw out and gnaw you off. Because it doesn’t matter how far she can run, when the night falls and she’s alone with her thought, her mind would turn to those gruesome deaths caused by her hands. The sights of blood blacker than her own pooling at the crevices of her nails and palms had sear into her, warm and beating and alive.
He can’t fool her. How can a boy like him understand the weight of guilt like her? She’s nearly fifty, forty-six deads on her head. Even magic cannot cleanse her sins. She’s deemed for hell.
“Come with me.” Duplessis says. “We know a way.”
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