The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [153]
To Melony, nothing seemed real since her night with Andrew.
But it was Halloween, she knew that much was real, and perhaps only the time of year and the days on the calendar held within them the sole hope she had on retaining some form of sanity. It may be that the television kept her in line as well; it proved an amusing distraction and was these days rarely silent. Right now, it projected a broadcast of Halloween IV from its corner perch.
About and around Melony’s shoulders a $19.99 witch’s gown spilled down her arms, splashing across her hips with daggers of frills after overcoming the obvious stretch of black fabric over the terrain of her obtrusive belly. Swaying to and fro above her head and with her was a pair of Playboy bunny ears, harnessed by an elastic pink cotton band fastened beneath her chin.
She entered the kitchen and passed the French double pantry doors.
Digging both hands into a plastic bowl of mini M&M packages resting upon the kitchen counter completed half her mission, but through the process of delivering these treats to the children who’d come for them, she felt herself increasingly on the verge of emotional collapse.
Another doorbell ring was her salvation for the moment; she wasn’t about to allow the M&Ms she carried to trigger a breakdown anyway, even though they were Max and Melony’s favorite plain chocolate and goddamn sentimental candies.
As she unlatched,unbolted and opened the front door, she wondered if a handful of treats would be enough. She wondered how many children were at the door. She wondered if they’d already departed impatiently. In the next instant, she didn’t care. As she beheld them, the children outside her door beneath the moth-magnet porch light were dressed as Watchers with black hoods and full greyish latex head masks with pasty black oblong alien eyes. By some stunned reflex, her candies fell from her hand, bouncing off the doorway’s metal threshold and skidding just short of the unnerving band of all six of them.
Eerily and simultaneously, the alien children knelt to fetch their treats, stooping, then placing the candies into each of their own UFO alien plastic Halloween bags.
All but one of them then departed down the walkway to collect the next free hand-out without saying a word.
The single remaining trick-or-treater rose up straight to face her and the kid’s alien guise began to speak as it lifted a free hand in a hesitant effort to remove its mask.
“Oh, by the way,” it was a timid male voice, deliberative, apologetic, “trick or treat...”
He grasped his mask’s latex underchin and pulled it up and over his face and head until it flopped backwards freely and hung down his back, hood and all. What appeared at first to be a second mask beneath, began once again to speak, but the near-lipless horizontal slits of its mouth were much too animated for Melony to remain unwitting of its innocent masquerade. Its eyes were bulbous diagonal teardrops, still human enough to embody dilated black/brown pupils so immense that its bony sockets were twice the normal size to accommodate them. Its face was pale and gave an effect of having been stretched somewhat from chin to forehead silly putty-style, sloping up top into a hairline of fleshy flat tree branch shapes with remnant clusters of hair strands still falling like autumn leaves.
It fell short of the mainstream image Melony had grown used to in what she’d expected of a Watcher, but she knew as sure as the paralysis of reality gripped her that this half-breed creature clenching a bag of candy upon her doorstep was not quite yet a Watcher.
And as it spoke with a voice still human and far, far too familiar to her, she knew that this being was the same being she carried inside her, the dying half of her child awaiting rebirth, the other half of a one-night-stand with the Devil.
This was Andrew Erlandson: “Sorry. Take a deep breath. I know you’ve been waiting to hear from me. I know of your sudden fear-flooded