Midnight Crossroad

38

Kids didn’t trick-or-treat in Midnight. It was too remote, too spooky. But there was kind of a local tradition in Davy to take the less anxious kids to the Witch’s House. This had begun in Mildred Loeffler’s time, and Fiji had happily continued the celebration. She and other inhabitants of Midnight worked on her house and yard for two days, to the disgust of Mr. Snuggly, who thought Fiji’s time would have been better spent brushing him and stroking his fur and feeding him good things.

Fiji had pressed some of her neighbors into further service this Halloween. Joe and Chuy were wearing silver jumpsuits and huge white wings, and they stood on either side of the steps up to the porch, like patient gleaming angels. They were both wearing long blond wigs, which looked far more natural on Joe than it did on Chuy.

They took turns saying “Enter” to each child, in a deep, forbidding voice. If they’d been dressed like devils instead of angels, it would have been a rare child who had the nerve to claim his or her candy.

All of Fiji’s bushes were draped with fake spiderwebs. She’d positioned huge spiders on each one. Fiji had said a few spells over them, and the eyes of the arachnids gleamed and sparkled and moved in a thoroughly disconcerting way. There was also a huge kettle smoking over a smoldering fire, all of which Fiji had under careful (and magical) control. Parents always thought it was done with batteries, but children somehow knew better.

Prodded by his mom and dad, who’d thought his question was really cute, one boy asked Fiji (dressed in a Morticia dress and a pointed hat) if she weren’t “afraid bad kids would come egg your house someday.” Fiji leaned down to look in his eyes, and he found he was more intent on those eyes than on her cleavage. “I don’t think anyone will ever do that to me,” she said gently. “Do you?”

After a moment of paralyzing fear, he said, “I sure won’t.”

She straightened, with a slight smile, and his parents were proud of him. But for the rest of his life, he dated that as the moment he realized the world would not always think he was as adorable as his parents did.

Manfred had been called into service, too. He made a great devil, somewhat to his own surprise. He was dressed in black jeans and a black silk turtleneck. He’d grown his goatee out and colored it black for the night, he wore heavy eye makeup, and he had a black hoodie drawn up around his face. He would have looked even more striking, but he refused to wear the stretchy outfit Fiji had suggested when they’d gone to the costume store. “I’d look like Gollum,” he said, “but in black.”

“You’re not that skinny,” she’d retorted, disappointed, but he’d kept his ground. She’d asked the Rev to play a part, but he had told her that he intended to spend Halloween in the chapel in prayer for the souls of the dead. He’d stuck to his guns, no matter how she begged. However, in compensation, Bobo had agreed to participate for the first time.

Bobo was the most handsome Perseus anyone had ever seen. He carried a remarkably lifelike Gorgon’s head, and he wore a sort of toga and sandals. In the hand not clutching the head, he carried a large shiny sword from the pawnshop.

“It ought to be curved,” Fiji had said. “And you ought to have winged sandals.”

“Well, no one’s pawned any winged sandals, or sandals of any kind,” he said.

Bobo was not much of an actor—he got upset when children found him genuinely frightening—but when he held out the loathsome snake-covered skull and proclaimed, “Behold the head of the evil Medusa,” it was a showstopper. The least sensitive children wanted to touch the “head,” which was disgustingly slimy and slithery. Every now and then, when Fiji had a free moment, one of the snakes seemed to writhe a bit.

When the second hour of Fiji’s open house was almost at an end, a mother from Davy said, “How on earth do you get it to look like the cat is talking?”

“Oh, did it look realistic?” Fiji had to struggle to keep a smile on her face.

“It was so cute! It said, ‘Get off my tail or I’ll smother you in your sleep.’”

“Just some batteries and a CD!” Fiji said. “And isn’t that just what a cat should say?”

They both laughed heartily. When the mother left, Fiji turned and glared at Mr. Snuggly, who yawned.

At nine o’clock, Fiji went out onto the porch. The house had emptied of outsiders, but in the yard a few families and some teenagers were still enjoying the Halloween decorations. She adopted a dramatic pose on the porch, Manfred pressed “Play” on a CD player, and a fanfare rang out. When she had everyone’s attention, Fiji proclaimed, “This ends the celebration of the season at the Witch’s House!” She made a few grand passes in the air with her hands. The spiders’ eyes dulled, the cobwebs stopped moving, and the two angels bowed and retreated into the house. Fiji herself took a deep bow, to a smattering of applause, and straightened to say, “Have a safe drive home, y’all, and I’ll see you next year!”

She wasn’t spoilsport enough to turn off all the lights in the front yard, but she did lock the front door and draw all the curtains to make sure visitors knew the show was over. Fiji kicked off her high-heeled boots and collapsed into her rocking chair with a groan of relief.

“Good job!” Manfred said. He pulled down his hoodie.

“Thanks, all of you,” she said. “Anyone who wants a beer, there are plenty in the refrigerator. And there are some trays back there, if you wouldn’t mind bringing them out. I’ll get up in a minute. My feet are killing me.”

Soon all the food was assembled on one card table, folding chairs were up and in use, and everyone had a beverage. Chuy and Joe were glad to get out of the silver jumpsuits and into their normal daywear.

Those wings had to be heavy, thought Manfred, who’d been curious about their feathery appearance. He saw the jumpsuits, neatly folded in Fiji’s storeroom/guest bedroom, but the wings were nowhere in sight. Across the hall, Bobo retired to Fiji’s bedroom to pull off his tunic and sandals, and put on his jeans and flannel shirt and sneakers. The golden sparkly stuff Fiji had put in his hair was coming off everywhere. He stepped out to see Mr. Snuggly crouching before his dish in the kitchen, eating some chopped beef for his Halloween treat.

“Though,” Fiji said, raising her voice, “he doesn’t deserve it! After talking to that woman!”

“She stepped on my tail,” a muffled voice called back, and Bobo laughed.

Manfred reflected that all the inhabitants of Midnight had accepted the news that Mr. Snuggly could talk with remarkable equanimity. Even Bobo, who was the most unmagical person Manfred could imagine, had come to take the cat’s conversation for granted after a day or two of expressing wonder. And the death of Connor had become part of the life of the town. It was never mentioned. Only the Reeds had expressed shock and amazement at Connor’s confession and the vanishing act of Shawn Lovell. Teacher was working full-time at Gas N Go, according to written instructions left by Shawn, until he could sell the convenience store. And Teacher seemed very happy with that, though Madonna was predictably grumpy.

The town had closed over the Lovells’ sudden absence.

All in all, Manfred realized as he sipped a beer, he’d had an amazing time of it since he’d moved to Midnight. He felt more and more at home. As the beer took hold, Manfred found himself wondering if his selection of Midnight had been predestination? Fate? Chance? Manfred couldn’t decide and wasn’t sure he needed to. But he still regretted Creek’s abrupt departure. He withdrew into himself a little as he thought of her, letting the conversation of his new friends wash over him.

Bobo stood up, so quickly it startled everyone in the room. The silence that fell jolted Manfred out of his reverie.

“What’s up?” he asked, thinking he’d missed a cue.

“I have no idea,” Joe said. “Bobo?”

“I have something to show you all,” he said. “And I’m going to do it now while I still have the courage.”

“Where?” Fiji said. “If it’s far, I’m going to put on my sneakers.”

“Across the street. In the shop.”

“Okay, just wait a sec.” Fiji hauled herself up, wincing as she walked back to her room carrying the boots that had given her such grief. Very shortly she returned, still in her black costume but with battered Pumas on her feet. “I’m ready,” she said, and they all got up. Manfred didn’t know how the others felt, but he was kind of worried and kind of excited.

They trailed after Bobo as he crossed to Midnight Pawn. Instead of going up to the door to the stairs to his apartment, he went through the main door to the pawnshop. Olivia was sitting in Bobo’s favorite chair, and Lemuel was behind the counter reading a tattered book. They both looked very surprised that Midnight was coming to the shop.

“We’ve had no customers,” Lemuel said. “And it’s been a slow night in every respect.”

“Looks like you had a crowd over there,” Olivia said to Fiji. “Did everyone have a good time?”

“Yes,” Fiji said, but not as if she were paying attention to what she was saying. “Bobo says he has a surprise for us.”

“Really?” Olivia stared at Bobo. “I thought we’d kind of had our fill of surprises.”

He laughed. “You may like this one. I don’t know.”

He walked toward the back of the shop, pulling some keys out of his pocket as he went. When he got to the storage closet, he unlocked the padlock, then the dead bolt, and opened the door.

Manfred first noticed all the televisions on the shelves, maybe thirty—plus a small locked case full of guns and jewelry. And there was a shelf of power tools and appliances.

“That’s a lot of TVs,” he said. “But surely that’s not the surprise?”

“That’s not the surprise. Those are just the first things people think of pawning.” Bobo went down the narrow corridor between the shelves to arrive at a wall at the back. It would have been a good place to put some extra shelves, now that Aubrey’s boxes were gone.

“What are you doing?” Lemuel said.

To Manfred, the vampire sounded not only surprised, but unhappy.

“I found this,” Bobo said, looking over his shoulder at them. He was not-quite smiling. “It made me feel like the shop was the right investment.” He reached up high—he was the only one of them who could stretch that far—and lifted up the corner of an old heat register. It was in a dark corner, and it had looked for all the world like it screwed firmly into the wall. Bobo’s fingers, fully extended, pressed something inside the aperture, and there was an audible mechanical noise. Somewhere, parts had worked together.

Bobo pressed the wall, and it folded back.

“Jesus God,” said Chuy. Bobo reached in to pull a chain hanging from the ceiling, and a bare bulb lit up the closet, which measured about four feet by three feet.

It was full of guns, rifles, grenades, ammunition. Those were the things Manfred could recognize. There were things he couldn’t.

“You had them all along,” Olivia said, after a shocked silence.

“You had them all along,” Fiji echoed.

Olivia sounded admiring. Fiji sounded angry.

Manfred had to bite his lip to keep himself from saying the same damn thing.

“Well,” Joe said. He took Chuy’s hand. “I guess we didn’t know you as well as we thought we did.”