"Not any," she said. "Go."
I wanted to hit her. I wanted to hit the walls and the counters and the dead farmer on the table and pick up the trocar and jam it into Mom's stupid face and suck her brain right out—
No.
Calm down.
I closed my eyes. I was breaking too many rules. I couldn't think like that; I couldn't let that rage take over. I kept my eyes closed and slowly peeled off my gloves and mask.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I—" I couldn't just walk out of here and never come back, I had to fight, and . . .
No. Calm down.
"I'm sorry," I said again. I took off my apron and walked out the back door. I could deal with this later. Right now my rules were more important.
I had to keep that monster behind its wall.
I hated Halloween. It was all so dumb—no one was really scared, and everyone walked around covered with fake blood or rubber knives or, worst of all, costumes that weren't even scary. Halloween was supposed to be the night when evil spirits walked the Earth—the night when druids burned children in wicker cages. What did that have to do with dressing up like Spider-Man?
I stopped caring about Halloween when I was eight, about the same time I started learning about serial killers. That doesn't mean I stopped dressing up, just that I stopped picking my own costumes—each year my mom would choose something, and I'd wear it and ignore it and then forget about it until the next year. Someday I'd have to tell her about Ed Gein, whose mother dressed him as a girl for most of his childhood.
He spent most of his adulthood killing women and making clothes out of their skin
This year, you'd have thought that Halloween would be pretty cool—after all, we had a real demon in town, with fangs and claws and everything. That ought to count for something.
But none of us knew about it yet, and it had only killed two people so far, so instead of cowering in our basements praying for salvation, we ended up in the high school gym pretending to enjoy a Halloween dance. I'm actually not sure which is worse.
School dances in junior high had been pretty terrible, and Mom made me go to all of them. Since she had no intention of changing that policy when I got to high school, I hoped that at least the dances would get better. They didn't. The Halloween dance turned out to be especially stupid—a time for all the awkward, ungainly, half-developed mutants in high school to get together, in costume, and stand by the walls of the gym while colored lights flashed anemically and the vice-principal played year-old songs over the school PA. As part of Mom's "make some real friends" initiative she was, as always, forcing me to go, though in a gesture of goodwill she allowed me to pick my own costume. Because I knew it would piss her off, I went as a clown.
Max was an army commando of some kind, wearing his dad's camouflage jacket and some blobby brown makeup on his face. He'd also brought a plastic gun, despite the school's repeated warning not to bring weapons, so of course the principal had taken it at the door.
"This sucks," said Max, punching his fist and glaring across the gym at the principal. "I'm going to go steal it back, dog, I really am. You think he's going to give it back?"
"Did you just call me 'dog'?" I asked.
"Dude, I swear I'm going to get my gun back, and he won't even know it. My dad showed me some sweet moves—he'll never know I was even there."
"You're wearing the wrong camouflage," I said. We were in our regular position, lurking in the corner, and I was watching the flow of people to and from the refreshments and the walls.
"My dad got this jacket in Iraq," said Max, "it's as real as it gets."
"Then it'll be awesome when Mr. Layton hides your gun in Iraq," I said, "but we're at a school dance in midwestern America.
If you don't want him to see you, you need to dress up as a car-crash victim. There's a lot of those tonight. Or you need a fake bullet hole in your forehead." Cheap prosthetic gore was the order of the day for at least half of the guys at the dance.
You'd think that two gruesome murders in the community would make people a little more sensitive about that, but there you go. At least no one dressed up as an eviscerated auto mechanic.
"That would have been sweet," said Max, looking at a passing plastic bullet hole. "That's what I'm going to do tomorrow night for trick-or-treating—it'll scare the crap out of 'em."
"You're going trick-or-treating?" laughed a voice. It was Rob Anders, walking past with a couple of his friends. They'd all hated me since third grade. "Couple of little babies going trick-or-treating—that's for kids!" They walked past laughing.