All Hallows' Eve: 13 Stories Read online

  All Hallows' Eve

  13 Stories

  Vivian Vande Velde

  * * *

  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  * * *

  Copyright © 2006 by Vande Velde, Vivian

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

  transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

  including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and

  retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work

  should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed

  to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  "Morgan Roehmar's Boys" copyright © 2004 by Vivian Vande Velde;

  originally published by Candlewick Press in

  Gothic!: Ten Original Dark Tales, edited by Deborah Noyes.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vande Velde, Vivian.

  All Hallows' Eve: 13 stories/Vivian Vande Velde.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Presents thirteen tales of Halloween horrors,

  including ghosts, vampires, and pranks gone awry.

  1. Halloween—Juvenile fiction. 2. Supernatural—Juvenile

  fiction. 3. Children's stories, American. [1. Halloween—Fiction.

  2. Supernatural—Fiction. 3. Horror stories. 4. Short stories.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.V2773All 2006

  [Fic]—dc22 2006005439

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-205576-9 ISBN-10: 0-15-205576-2

  Text set in Bembo

  Designed by Cathy Riggs

  First edition

  A C E G H F D B

  Printed in the United States of America

  * * *

  Contents

  Come in and Rest a Spell

  1

  MARIAN

  9

  Morgan Roehmar's Boys

  29

  Only on All Hallows' Eve

  61

  Cemetery Field Trip

  71

  Best Friends

  97

  Pretending

  111

  I Want to Thank You

  137

  When and How

  141

  When My Parents Come to Visit

  155

  Edward, Lost and Far from Home

  175

  My Real Mother

  189

  Holding On

  215

  * * *

  To the members of RACWI

  (Rochester Area Children's

  Writers & Illustrators),

  whose support is legendary

  Come in and Rest a Spell

  Don't be shy. Don't be afraid. Come on in. Granny doesn't bite. See, Granny has hardly any teeth left. I couldn't bite if I wanted to.

  Are you nervous because it's All Hallows' Eve? This is a spooky night. The dead walk, witches convene, a door opens between the world of the seen and the world of the unseen.

  And sometimes that door lets all sorts of evil onto the earth.

  No, no, don't leave. I'm just telling stories. Silly old granny that I am. The night is cold and dark, and you've walked so far to get here, and I just want to help you.

  Eye of newt

  Mandrake root

  Tear of pity from a heartless soul...

  Granny is good at helping people. No one has ever complained.

  Let me guess what you need.

  You're such a pretty young thing, with skin so soft and smooth, and your hair thick and dark, and your eyes clear, and your limbs firm and strong, and you even have all your teeth. Lucky, lucky you.

  Granny misses her teeth.

  What could a girl like you possibly need? What keeps you from being happy?

  Is there sickness in your family? No, no, don't answer: Granny is guessing. And Granny would have guessed, even before you shook your head, that you don't have the look of someone dealing with that particular sorrow.

  Are you needing money to survive? No, you're too beautiful to have done without meals or to be having no place to lay your head at night.

  Is there someone who has crossed you, someone you want to put a curse on? Maybe ... but Granny thinks you probably know how to get back at people, so you wouldn't need magic for that.

  Granny guesses she sees a light in your eyes—not fever, or hunger, or the thought of revenge.

  Granny guesses it's love. Granny guesses you're in love with a boy who doesn't love you back.

  See! Granny's good at this.

  Granny can help.

  Wing of bat

  Tooth of rat

  Water that someone has drowned in...

  Is he handsome? Is he rich?

  Oh, yes, Granny knows the young man you mean. Granny thinks he's a fine choice. If Granny were younger, she'd want him for herself.

  Granny has just the spell to bind him to you.

  Granny must mix this, and this, and a little bit of this.

  Yes, yes, it smells bad, but it's just what you need.

  Drink it all.

  All.

  Yes, every last bit.

  He will love your face, and your form, and your voice, and the way you move.

  To be happy, he will need to see your eyes, to hear your laugh, to smell your scent, to touch your skin, to taste your lips. To be happy, he will need your happiness.

  He will find completeness only in you.

  Stain of blood

  Graveyard mud

  Dying breath of a murdered man...

  You may feel light-headed.

  Oops, Granny warned you. Here, take my hands. Granny will hold you steady while the spell works its way through you.

  Yes, you're perfectly right: He needs to drink down the potion that will tie him to you.

  Or should I say: to your beautiful, healthy, young body.

  I'll make sure he drinks that.

  The spell I just did? That lets us trade, you and Granny.

  Don't struggle. It's no use, and you'll only bruise our beautiful skin.

  Do you feel your limbs growing sore and weak? Do you recognize your features forming on me?

  It's no use screaming; Granny is the only one who can hear.

  Fine, then. Be that way: Let go of my hands. Too late now, anyway.

  Oh, Granny sees. You're not so much recoiling from me as convulsing from the poison.

  Did I forget to mention the poison?

  I can't very well have you complaining about me. Granny has never had any complaints.

  You just go ahead and lie there on the floor. It won't be too much longer, and the pain won't get much worse.

  I'll go see to your young man.

  He and I will be very happy together.

  And if we're not—I have a spell for that, too.

  MARIAN

  Justin saw the sign that said SPEED LIMIT: 8 MPH, and he saw the sign that said SPEED BUMP. But he wasn't a wimp, so he didn't slow down.

  He didn't know why they even bothered putting numbers lower than twenty on the speedometer, anyway. There was driving, and there was parking, and as far as Justin was concerned, thirty miles per hour was the cutoff between the two. Even in an apartment complex, there was no need for such exaggerated care. They should give people credit: Anyone backing out of a parking space would know enough to look before pulling into the lane; and yeah, yeah, sure there were kids—there were enough signs warning KIDS AT PLAY— bu
t any kid who lived in an apartment complex grew up knowing you play on the grass, not the pavement.

  Besides, it was past eleven o'clock at night. Even on Halloween, that was later than the time kids should be out roaming and looking for opportunities to dart in front of cars.

  Besides all that, Justin figured he was a better-than-average driver, and—as opposed to, for example, his parents' generation—his reflexes were honed by years of playing computer games.

  And on top of everything else, adding bumps to a driving surface seemed not only counterintuitive but an affront to a civilized society.

  So when he saw the SPEED BUMP sign, he figured he could slow down to a crawl and ease his car over it—thump, thump, front wheels; thump, thump, back wheels—or he could hit it fast enough that his car would momentarily become airborne and sail right over the obstruction in one smooth move.

  He'd perfected this technique at his own apartment complex. But this night he'd been visiting Andrea—whose party had turned out to be as lame as kindergarten once her parents had come home earlier than expected from helping Grandma hand out Halloween goodies in her building. The speed bumps in this complex were taller, or wider, or steeper, or something different from what he was used to.

  His car went up, then bottomed out with a force that he felt all the way up his spine and into his teeth.

  The car was secondhand—or more likely third- or fourth- or fifth-hand—and had lousy springs.

  One of the warning lights flickered—CHECK ENGINE, DOOR AJAR, FASTEN SEATBELTS—it was gone too fast to know which it had been. And something seemed to have rattled loose in the dashboard. There was a noise like static, as though the radio were coming on between stations.

  This didn't seem likely, as the radio hadn't worked since September—since about five minutes after Justin gave the guy the money for the car. You knew you were pathetic when you bought a car a college kid was dumping. But Justin turned the volume dial up, anyway.

  A sexy female voice said, "This is MARIAN: Mobile And Regional Interactive Assisted Navigation. How may I help you?"

  Justin took his hand away from the radio dial so he could turn the steering wheel as he pulled out of Andrea's apartment complex and onto the street. He expected that whatever radio program he'd happened upon—the law of probability indicated it would be a commercial—would continue.

  But it didn't.

  The face of the radio wasn't lit up, and he wondered if two wires had made momentary contact during the jostling, only to disconnect again.

  Still, Justin was an optimist, and he turned the volume knob up a bit higher, then he changed the station to see if anything came in.

  Slightly louder, the voice repeated, "This is MARIAN: Mobile And Regional Interactive Assisted Navigation. How may I help you?"

  The most logical explanation was still a commercial. Just his luck to get the same commercial on two different stations. But Justin repeated—softly, even though there was no one to hear him making a fool of himself—"MARIAN?"

  The voice asked, "What is your destination?"

  Feeling like an idiot, Justin again said, "MARIAN?"

  The voice said, "Mobile And Regional Interactive Assisted Navigation."

  Just when it seemed the conversation was doomed to go in circles forever, the voice added, "This system is similar to a GPS, but with higher interactive capability."

  A voice-activated Global Positioning System. The college kid certainly had not said anything about a built-in GPS. He had pointed out there was a CD player, without mentioning it was so motion-sensitive it was useless. There was air-conditioning, but it took about an hour and a half to cool the car down. Obviously the GPS had stopped working—a loose something-or-other, which the speed bump had repositioned.

  But it probably still didn't work properly—that would be too much to ask for. "MARIAN, huh?" Justin asked. Still not believing, he went on, "If you're so smart, where am I?"

  The voice—MARIAN—enunciated each word distinctly but didn't have a synthesized sound to it at all—more like a slightly prissy English teacher than a mechanical device. She—It—It was hard to know how to think of the thing. She said, "You are in the town of Waverly in the county of Lancaster in New York State. You are traveling sixty-seven miles per hour going eastbound on Church Street between Cricket Hill Lane and Ferguson Road. Would you like your latitude and longitude?"

  Justin let up on the gas to slow down just enough to read the oncoming street sign.

  "Sixty-six miles per hour," the voice amended, "sixty-five, sixty-four..."

  Sure enough, when he saw the sign, it said FERGUSON RD.

  The GPS may not have been working before, but it sure was working now.

  "Naw," Justin said. "No latitude and longitude. And you don't need to keep telling me my speed—you sound like my mother."

  "The MARIAN system does not mean to criticize your driving. The MARIAN system was simply reporting statistics."

  It was a good thing the college kid who'd sold him the car hadn't known the GPS was so easily fixed or he would have charged even more. As the car had almost a hundred thousand miles on it, Justin already felt he had been overcharged. One fender was primer gray and the rest of the car was dull blue dotted by rust. Maybe the guy hadn't even known about the GPS. It wasn't like there was obvious equipment, like Justin's uncle Herm needed to set on the dashboard of his car. Just this sexy voice coming out of his radio speaker.

  "Okay, MARIAN," Justin said, "how about you tell me the best way to get home from here?" Not that he needed a GPS for that.

  "Please state your home address," MARIAN said, "and define 'best' as 'most scenic,' 'shortest distance,' or 'quickest time.'"

  "Three seventy-six Buggy Whip Lane," Justin said, "in Baldwin. And of course 'best' means 'fastest.'"

  "Calculating route," MARIAN told him.

  A moment later the voice resumed: "Normally, the fastest route would be via the 790 expressway, but there is an accident in the eastbound lane 4.3 miles beyond the Jefferson Avenue access road."

  "How do you know that?" Justin asked.

  "From monitoring police-band frequencies. A gasoline tanker has overturned and is leaking, so traffic is being detoured off the expressway at Jefferson Avenue, then being routed through the town of Hadleyport and sent via Goose Hill Road to Route 37 in Craigmont. Unfortunately, the satellite feed shows there are construction delays on Route 37 due to a repaving crew working from 7:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M., but—"

  "Never mind," Justin said. Even this late at night when the traffic wouldn't be too heavy, he didn't want to do that. It was a good thing MARIAN had turned on when she had. "What do you recommend?"

  "Recalculating," MARIAN said.

  Then she said, "You can avoid the expressway entirely by turning right at the next intersection, Pinnacle Road. Estimated time of arrival at 376 Buggy Whip Lane is 11:42 P.M., eastern time, twenty-five minutes, twenty-six seconds. Pinnacle Road intersection approaching in 2.66 miles, approximately two minutes, twenty-five seconds away—estimations made at your current speed of sixty-six miles per hour. The speed limit on this stretch of Church Street is posted at fifty-five miles per hour."

  "Yes, Mother," Justin grumbled.

  "A speeding ticket that indicates a speed of eleven miles per hour over the posted limit would range in cost—"

  "You aren't going to turn me in, are you?" Justin whipped his foot off the accelerator. That would be worse than being caught by radar—having his own vehicle report him to the police.

  But MARIAN said, "The MARIAN system can listen in on the bands used by emergency vehicles but will not contact them except when the driver directs me to, or when catastrophic system failure of the car has occurred, indicating an accident."

  "Okay," Justin said, putting his foot back on the accelerator. He made the right-hand turn onto Pinnacle Road with a screech of tires. Perhaps slowing down a bit might not have been a totally bad idea.

  "You are now traveling southbound on Pinna
cle Road. Recalculating. Estimated time of arrival to 376 Buggy Whip Lane, twenty-two minutes, forty seconds. Next turn will be in 5.8 miles—a left-hand turn, east-bound, onto Lincoln Road/Route 81."

  "This is great!" Justin said. He slowed down or speeded up simply to hear MARIAN say, "Recalculating."

  "Would you like to utilize the points-of-interest function?" MARIAN offered.

  "We're in the town of Waverly," Justin said. "There are no points of interest."

  "You have crossed the border into the town of Stewart," MARIAN corrected him.

  "Whatever. All I see is farms."

  "Gus's Auto Transmission and Fresh Vegetable Mart is on the left-hand side of the road in another 167 yards."

  Sure enough, they passed Gus's, though, being almost eleven thirty at night, the place was closed—much good it would have done him, even if he had been looking for it. The chalkboard sign in front of the place advertised: HALLOWEEN SPECIAL—PUMPKINS 75% OFF.

  Just to see what would happen, he intentionally drove past Lincoln Road, even though MARIAN reminded him of the turn at five hundred feet away. She then said, "Off route. Recalculating." Rather than telling him to stop the car and turn around, she figured out a new route from the point where he currently was.

  A few more turns, and Justin had absolutely no idea where they were, but that was okay since MARIAN obviously knew exactly.

  And then, suddenly, out there in the middle of nowhere, the engine stopped and the car coasted to a standstill.

  Justin checked the gas gauge, but it indicated he still had a little more than a quarter of a tank.

  "What's up?" he asked.

  MARIAN was just a GPS, but she was so interactive—so personable—he was not surprised when she turned out to be an engine diagnostician, too.

  "Vapor lock," she said.

  "'Vapor lock'?" Justin repeated. "While I was moving?"

  "Coupled with bad antifreeze."