Page 53 of Going Home in the Dark

“Something’s wrong with you. What’s wrong with you, bitch?”

“Oh, that’s rich. The psychopathic cornball with the IQ of a cockroach thinks something’s wrong withme.You’rethe bitch.”

He sounded like anangrygame-show host. “Wayne Louis Hornfly could squash you like a ripe grape between a thumb and forefinger.”

“Good grief, that was already a dumb line when you used it on Bobby in the parsonage, twenty years ago. You shouldn’t write your own material, jerkface.”

“You’re dead.”

“I’m dead, huh? I don’t feel dead. Listen to me, you wad of cat phlegm. You stay out of my way, or I’ll shove a stick of dynamite up your fat ass.”

She terminated the call.

Her amigos were staring at her. Bobby was as slack-jawed as Spencer. Neither of them seemed able to speak.

She said, “Sorry you had to hear that. He just steams me.”

Bobby cleared his throat. “What were you doing?”

“She was in character,” Spencer said.

“You were being Heather Ashmont?” Bobby asked.

Before Rebecca could reply, Spencer said, “No. She was deep into being Rebecca Crane like we haven’t quite seen before.”

Her phone produced the theme song fromEnemies.

Rebecca pocketed it. “Let the asshole go to voicemail. He won’t have the guts to leave a message anyway.”

A couple in the middle of the room, at the table nearest the amigos’ booth, were staring, aghast. When Rebecca gave them a do-you-have-a-problem-with-me look, they lowered their eyes to their food and worked their forks assiduously.

“What set me off was I had an agent like that once,” Rebecca explained.

“You had a psychopathic killer for an agent?” Bobby asked.

“Nah. He was worse. Are we ready to go?”

They went. On their way out, when they passed Gabriella Roccofino, Rebecca saw her wink at Bobby in spite of having Salvatore Passatempo lined up and six kids waiting to be made.

31As the Amigos Get in the Genesis, They Endure a Recovered Memory

The first October after Rebecca became one of the amigos, Maple Grove was elaborately decorated for the entire month leading up to the holiday. The streets within the six square blocks that might charitably be called a “downtown” were strung with more than half a million orange and red lights. Every store window displayed a spooky diorama or featured fearsome scenes applied to the glass with water-soluble paint. The eyes and grins and snarls of two thousand jack-o’-lanterns pulsed with demonic candlelight. Inflatable spiders as big as cars quivered menacingly on some rooftops. A bus parked in the town circle was occupied by grisly mannequins made up as the riding dead, their rotting faces leering out of the windows, as if the driver had made a wrong turn and gotten lost and stubbornly refused to admit it until everyone aboard had grown old and died. Scores of others with axes buried in their skulls or with viscera spilling from slashed abdomens or with snake heads protruding from empty eye sockets stood in strategically chosen places so that those strolling through the spectacle would encounter them unexpectedly. Hanged mannequins dangled from the trees in the cemetery, a tip of the hat to Maple Grove’s history. Tableaus featuring ghosts, vampires, and space aliens—many motorized—occupied front yards. The grange hallhad been transformed into a vast haunted house where paying visitors screamed their way through a long series of horrors too graphic for children ten or under, though infants-in-arm were welcome because it was thought their senses were still so undeveloped that they couldn’t be traumatized by what they saw.

Although Maple Grove’s Month of Christmas attracted thousands of tourists, the Month of Halloween had become the greater draw. Such was the state of the nation.

On the evening of October 31, when the crowds were at their largest, the four amigos roamed the scene, drinking blood, which was really cherry soda, eating gore cream, which was in fact vanilla ice cream blended with a lot of red food dye, and hot dogs. The hot dog vendor had resisted the urge to trick up his wares to be repulsive. However, he wore a necklace of severed fingers, and the sign at his stand referred to his product asdead dogs.The air was redolent of carnival foods—french fries, nachos, cotton candy, churros.

Because they had a reputation as nerds to uphold, the amigos eschewed baroque costumes. Bobby wore a stage arrow through his head. Spencer, who had yet to acquire his trademark porkpie hat, crowned himself with a propeller beanie. Ernie wore horn-rimmed glasses with trick lenses that made his eyes look googly. Outfitted in her usual shambles of thrift-shop clothes, Rebecca painted her face toad-green instead of white and carried a whisk broom, as if she were a witch with the broomstick equivalent of a compact car.

Eventually they arrived at Liberty Park, at the intersection of Cunningham and Winkler. Across the street at the courthouse, a six-member dance troupe wore black bodysuits and masks on which were printed white, radiant images of skeletons; theyperformed for a standing audience that laughed and applauded, confirming that it is a deplorable trait of human beings to find death hilarious when it isn’t their own.

Pathway lamps dwindled through the trees and toward the center of the park, leading to a large, open pavilion with a latticework skirt; fluted columns supported its scalloped roof. The structure included a bandstand and a dance floor that, on other occasions, glowed with romantic rose-colored light reflecting off motorized, mirrored globes that cast slowly turning diamonds of light and encircling patterns of waltzing shadows. On this night, the light was an eerie yellow-green, and the shadows appeared to caper like entities with malevolent intentions.

The grounds offered event planners numerous locations at which to place startlements along the softly lighted paths. On previous nights, this had been a popular attraction. As the amigos gathered at the Cunningham Avenue entrance, however, the park appeared to be deserted except perhaps for some activity at the pavilion.

“Where is everybody?” Ernie wondered as he stepped through the open gate.

“Something’s weird here,” Bobby warned as he followed Ernie.

---