Simon hadn’t thought about Halloween since he’d bought the masks for his game with Dorie a week and a half ago. But unable to sleep, and with the blind rat closing in on him, he wandered into the living room, poked up the fire, and channel-surfed the larger TV there until he found a pre-Halloween-weekend-horror-thon on one of the Turner channels. Cat People, with Simone Simon-“She was marked with the curse of those who slink and court and kill by night!”-was just ending and Curse of the Cat People, the quasi-sequel, was about to come on. A real stinker, as Simon remembered it from the Horror Club days. No curse, no cat people-it hadn’t even scared Nervous Nellie.
The film proved to be a lot more enjoyable on Ecstasy, but not good enough to stay awake through. Eventually exhaustion and serotonin trumped the crosstops: Simon fell asleep in the Barcalounger. Not surprisingly, Nelson featured prominently in his dream. They were kids again-or kids still, however it works in dreams. They were bicycling through Tilden Park, as they often had. Nelson skidded to a stop, pointed to something in the bushes by the side of the trail. It was a body. A man’s body, nude, face-down. Nelson ran away, leaving Simon alone with the body. Simon wanted to run away, too, but he knew somehow that Grandfather Childs was waiting at the head of the trail-he’d get a beating if he went running out like that scaredy-cat Nelson. He rolled the body over, brushed the mud, the damp leaves and clinging leaf mold, from the face.
“Who’s that?” Grandfather Childs had somehow materialized, and was standing over him.
“It’s Nelson, sir,” said Simon. “That’s what he looks like now.” Simon had also turned into his present, grown-up, self, and the body was now in the tub of the master bathroom of 2500.
“Did you kill him?”
“Sort of. Sir.” An adult now, Simon was no longer cowed by the old man-he just wanted to show him how he could do everything by the book.
“Sort me no sort of s, boy. You either did or you did not.”
“Indirectly, sir. I glued him to the bathtub, but he turned on the water by himself.”
“Going to bury him in the basement with the others?”
“You know about the others?”
“Of course I know about the others. Don’t be stupid. And, boy?”
“Yes, sir?”
“While you’re at it, dig yourself a hole this time.”
“I’ll see you in H E double L first,” said Simon.
“Yes,” said the old man in the dream. “Most likely you will.”
In the basement, Linda was sure he’d left the horror movies on to torment her. The screams, the spooky organ music-it had to have been deliberate.
But it was also pointless. What kind of wusses does he take us for? she asked the coral, rhetorically. By now, she was as glad for its companionship as it seemed to be for hers, and as she went back to sawing at the rope binding her wrists, she would have been willing to stake her life-she was, in fact, staking her life-that at this point in their relationship, the coral was no more likely to bite her than she was to bite it.
By morning, however, that would all change.