Halloween and Other Seasons

SUMMER

By Al Sarrantonio

It was a summer day that was all of summer. Dry heat rose from the cracks in the sidewalks, brushing the brown grass that grew there as it shimmered by. There was a hush in the stilted air, high and hanging, the sun like a burnt coin frozen in the pale and cloudless sky, the trees still, green leaves dried and baked, panting for a breeze.

Rotating window fans moved hot air from outside to inside. Newspapers rustled on kitchen tables, their pages waving until the artificial breeze moved on, then settling hot and desultory back into unread place. The breakfast plates sat unstacked, forgotten; lunch plates with uneaten lunch—curling pumpernickel, wilted lettuce, an inkblot of mustard dry as paper—sat nearby. Morning coffee milled in two mugs, still tepid from the afternoon warmth.

“My Gosh, Mabel, has it ever been this hot before?” George Meadows said from his easy chair; he sat arranged like a man who had eaten a great meal, with his shirt and trousers loosened, but only against the heat.

His wife Mabel, prostrate on the nearby couch, the faded sunflowers of her house dress clashing and merging in a wilted riot with the worn daisies of the sofa print, tried to say something but failed. Her right hand continued to weakly fan herself with its magazine and she tried again.

“Hot as it’s…ever been,” she managed to get out in a croak, and then closed her eyes and ears, discouraging further comment.

“Yep,” George managed to answer before closing his own eyes. He couldn’t resist, he never could, getting the last word in. He rallied to add, even though Mabel was already perfectly aware: “Man on the radio said it might get hotter still.”

~ * ~

Three twelve-year-old boys hated Summer.

They hadn’t always. At one time, Summer had belonged to them. From the first day of school letting out, until the dreaded bell sounded again, they had ruled summer as if they owned it. There had been baseball and bad tennis, and miniature golf and marbles in the hot dust. There had been butterfly hunts with orange black monarchs big as pterodactyls and just as difficult to catch. Trips to the secret pond with jars, and pond water drops under Lem’s microscope to watch the amoebas within. And their own swimming, from dawn to dusk some days, emerging at the end waterlogged beings, raisin boys, to dry and unwilt in the setting sun. And Monk’s telescope at night, the fat dry cold moon sliding across the eyepiece like a pockmarked balloon; Saturn hanging silent and majestic with its golden split ring. Backyard campouts, the walls of Shep’s pup tent lit from within not with fireflies but with the flashlights of boys with comic books, the smell of Sterno and pancake batter the next morning, the metal taste of warm water in boy scout canteens.

Summer had been their time—the time away from schoolbooks and parents’ waggling fingers, the time to be boys. And this year it had started the same—the banishment of black-and-white marble notebooks, pencils thrown under beds spearing dust bunnies, school clothes in the backs of closets.

And out with the baseball glove! Oiled, smelling like new wet leather, sneakers that smelled of dirt, short pants, the dewy morning giving way to a fresh hot feeling and late afternoon thunderstorms scattering the ballplayers with warm wet drops big as knuckles and the temperature dropping and making them shiver. And swimming, and more swimming, and more swimming still, and the cool-warm nights, the sharp cold taste of ice cream, of a bottle of cola drawn from an iced bucket, of a hot dog steaming, hiding under hot sauerkraut. A drive-in movie in Uncle Jed’s pickup truck: two hiding under the tarp until they were in.

Morning noon and night it was summer.

Real summer.

Until:

Something…

…began to change.

It was Shep who noticed it first: in the dangerous tree-house on a mid-August afternoon. They had finished trading baseball cards, arguing over how many cards (always doubles!) to attach to bicycle spokes to make them clack and were halfway through another argument about who was prettier, Margaret O’Hearn or Angie Bernstein, when Shep’s head went up and he sniffed, just like a hound dog might. His leg, swinging through one of the hut’s many floor holes, pendulumed to a frozen stop.

“What’s wrong?” Lem asked, and Monk looked up from his new copy of Vault of Horror with a frown.

“Turn off your brain, Shep,” Monk growled. “It’s summer.”

“Just because you don’t want to talk about girls or leg hair or b.o.—” Lem began, but he stopped dead at the look on Shep’s face.

“Something’s different,” Shep said, and he still held that pointer-at-a-bird look.

Lem tried to laugh, but stopped abruptly, a hiccup of seriousness at the look in Shep’s eyes.

A whisper: “What do you mean: different?”

Shep spoke without breaking his concentration. “Don’t you feel it?”

Monk shook his head with finality and went back to his comic, but Lem’s face had taken on a worried look.

Shep was never wrong about these kinds of things.

“I…don’t feel anything…” Lem offered mildly.

Idly, still scanning his Vault of Horror, Monk kicked out his sneaker and caught Lem on the shin. A scatter of orange infield dust, dislodged from the sculpted sole, trickled down the other boy’s bare leg.

“You feel that, Lemnick?”

“Be quiet—” Shep said abruptly, and it was not a request.

The other two boys were silent—and now Monk sat up, his butt easily finding the structure’s largest hole, which they inevitably called “the crapper.”

Something like a faint hiss, something like the eerie castanet sound cicadas make, passed by his ears and brushed him on one cheek, but there was not so much as a breeze in the early hot afternoon.

“What was—”

“It’s getting hotter,” Shep said simply.

“Maybe it’s because of Hell Cave,” Monk laughed, but nobody joined him.

~ * ~

That afternoon it was too hot to swim. It stayed that way the next three days. They abandoned the tree-house, leaving it’s lopsided openwork collection of mismatched boards and tattooed, badly nailed orange crates, and moved into Monk’s cellar, which was damp but cool.

It had never been too hot to swim before:

Never.

They perused Monk’s comic book collection, which after banishment to the basement was on the verge of mold. Monk had built, from boards too useless even for the tree-house, a lab table in one corner, and they fiddled with the chemistry set, trying to make things that were yellow and then turned red, others that made smoke. They toyed with the rabbit-ear antenna on the ancient television, a huge wooden box with a tiny black and white screen the size of a TV dinner tin—for a while they brought in the monster movie channel, and watched, in a snowy and line-infested picture, the Man from Planet X rampage through the Scottish moors. Monk brought down a bowl of grapes, and they ate some of them, and spit the rest at each other out of their mouths, pressing their cheeks for cannonade.

But their eyes kept drifting to the cellar windows, and the heat and light outside.

“Maybe we should go swimming anyway,” Monk said, finally, on the second day.

They made it halfway to the secret pond, and turned around, dripping and panting.

Overhead, the sun looked hotter, if not larger.

They played darts in the cellar, and set up plastic army men and knocked them down with marbles and rubber bands.

Lem and Shep talked about body odor and shaving their upper lips while Monk scowled.

And always, for three days, they kept looking to the cellar windows, up high, filled with light, and closed against the summer heat.

~ * ~

That night they took Monk’s telescope to the secret pond, and Shep’s pup tent, and Lem’s dad’s battery radio.

The radio played music, and talked about the heat. The air was dry as the insides of an oven. There was a cloudless sky, and a smile of moon tilted at an amused angle, and, after a while, there were stars in the dark but they looked faraway and dim through the hot air. The telescope went unused. They swam for a while, but the water, over the last three days, had taken on the temperature and feel of warm tea. Inside the tent it was as hot as outside, and they shifted uncomfortably as they tried to sleep. When they tried to read comics by flashlight, the flashlights dimmed and then went out.

In the dark, Lem tried to talk again about Margaret O’Hearn and Amy Bernstein, and about Shep joining the track team when they all started Junior High in the fall, but Monk told them to shut up.

Later Shep said, out of the blue, “What do you think about Hell’s Cave?”

“What about it?” Monk sneered. “You think it leads down to hell?”

“That’s what they say.”

Lem was silent, and then he said, “You think that’s why the heat won’t end…?”

“I wonder,” Shep replied.

“You really think—?” Lem began.

“Go to sleep!” Monk demanded.

~ * ~

In the morning it was even hotter.

The sun came up over the trees the color of melted butter. Monk set up the griddle over two Sterno cans, but no one was hungry so he didn’t even start breakfast. They spit out the water in their canteens, which tasted like warm aluminum.

It was getting even hotter.

“Ninety-nine today,” the radio chirped, “and who knows how hot tomorrow. It only went down to eighty-nine last night, folks. Hope you’ve got those fans on high, or your head in the fridge!”

He went on to say the weather bureau had no idea why it was so hot.

“What does that mean?” Shep said. “Isn’t it their job to know?”

As if in answer the chirpy radio voice said, “Apparently, folks, this heat has little to do with the weather! According to meteorological indications, it should be in the middle eighties, with moderate humidity! Fancy that!”

“Fancy that!” Monk nearly spat, in mocking imitation.

The radio voice, again as if in answer, chirped just before a commercial came on: “Hey, folks! Maybe it’ll never be cool again!”

Shep looked at his friends, and there was a suddenly grim look on his face.

“Maybe he’s right,” he said.

~ * ~

It didn’t rain over the next ten days. Thunder heads would gather in the West, dark mushrooming promises of cool and wet, and then break apart as they came overhead, dissipating like pipe smoke into the blue high air. The grasses turned from moist green to brown; postage stamp lawns changed color overnight and died. In town, the few places with air conditioning—Ferber’s Department Store, the Five and Dime with its brand new machine perched over the front door, dripping warm condenser water from its badly installed drain onto entering customers—were packed with customers who didn’t buy anything, only wandered the isles like zombies seeking cool relief. The temperature rose into the low hundreds, dropping into the nineties at night. On the roads, automobiles like ancient reptiles sat deserted at angles against curbs, their hoods up, radiators hissing angrily. Buses, looking like brontosauruses, passenger-less, stood unmoving, their front and middle doors accordianed open, yawning lazily at empty white bus stop benches.

Birds stopped singing in trees; the morning dawned as hot as midday. Dogs panted in their doghouses. There were no mosquitoes, and houseflies hung motionless to window screens. Spiders crawled into shadows and stayed there.

Cold water came out of taps almost steaming.

It was getting even hotter.

~ * ~

Three twelve-year-old boys made one more pilgrimage to the secret pond. They were sick of Monk’s cellar, had done every experiment in the chemistry manual, had recklessly mixed chemicals on their own until one produced in a beaker a roiling cloud of orange choking gas that drove them upstairs. It had become too hot in the cellar anyway, with the windows closed or open. In Monk’s kitchen the refrigerator whirred like an unhappy robot, its doors permanently open to provide a tiny measure of coolness to the kitchen. Milk had spoiled, its odor battling with the sour stench of rotting vegetables. Dishes, unwashed, were piled in the sink. The radio was on, a background insect buzz. Monk’s parents had gone to the five and dime for the air conditioning.

“And even hotter, with record temperatures reported now not only around the United States but in Europe and Asia as well, in a widening area…” the radio said, though the announcer sounded less chirpy, almost tired. “Locally, state authorities are warning anyone prone to heat stroke…”

Monk and Shep and Lem took whatever dry food was left, found Shep’s pup tent, inexpertly rolled and abandoned in a corner, and set out for the pond.

“…forty deaths reported in…” the radio voice reported unhappily as the screen door banged behind them.

~ * ~

It was like walking through a bakery oven. The heat was not only in the ground and in the air, but all around them. They felt it through their sneakers, on their knees, their eyelids. Their hair felt hot. The air was dry as a firecracker.

Shep looked up into the sun, and his eyes hurt.

“I don’t care how hot the water is,” Monk said, “it can’t be worse than this.”

It was. When they got to the pond and stripped, there was vapor rising from the surface of the water, and fish floated dead, like flat plastic toys.

“I don’t care,” Monk said, and stepped in, and yelped.

He looked back at his friends in awe, and showed his retracted foot, which was red.

“It’s actually hot!” Monk said.

Lem sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.

Monk was putting his clothes back on, his hands shaking.

Shep said with certainty, “Someone stole summer, and we’re going to Hell’s Cave to get it back.”

~ * ~

“Ungh?” a weak voice said from the kitchen table. George Meadows sat staring at his half empty coffee cup, watching the coffee in it steam. He had poured it an hour and a half ago, and it was still hot.

He lifted his hand toward it, looked at the sweat stain it left in the shape of a hand on the table and lowered it again.

“Mabel?” he called in a raspy, whispery voice. The sound of fanning had stopped and when George Meadows made the extreme effort to turn his head he saw that his wife’s housedress looked as if it was melting, with her in it, into the sofa. Her right hand, unmoving, still gripped her magazine and her eyes held a fixed, glazed look. Her chest barely moved up and down.

“Oh, Lord…” he breathed, closing his eyes, getting the last word in though she hadn’t said anything. “Gettin’ hotter still…”

~ * ~

Three twelve-year-old boys stood in front of a cave opening buttressed with rotting timbers. With them was Monk’s rusting Radio Flyer, bursting like a Conestoga wagon with their supplies: the battery radio, two new-battery-filled flashlights (one of them worked); three boxes of cereal; six comic books, no doubles; a large thermos of hot ice tea; four cans of warm creme soda; a length of clothesline pilfered from Lem’s mother’s backyard; a mousetrap, over which they had bantered incessantly (“What if we meet up with rats?” Lem debated; “Why not a gorilla?” Shep shot back; in the end Shep got tired of the argument and threw it on the pile), a B-B gun, a kitchen knife with a broken handle, a crucifix, a bible. The last two had been added by Shep, because, he said, “We’re heading down there,” and would listen to no argument.

They headed in.

It was dim, and, compared to outside, almost cool in the cave. But as they moved farther in it got even dimmer and hot and stuffy. Their bodies were covered with sweat, but they didn’t notice. There was a twist to the left, and then a climb that disappointed them, and then a suddenly drop which brought them real darkness and a halt.

Lem, who was pulling the wagon, rummaged through the pile and pulled out the bad flashlight, and then the good one, which he handed to Shep.

Shep switched it on and played the light over their faces.

“You look scared,” he said.

“Can we stop here for the night?” Lem asked.

Shep consulted his watch with the light beam. “It’s two in the afternoon!”

Behind them, they saw how steeply the floor had dropped; there was a circle of light leading out that looked hot and far away.

“I’m hungry,” Monk said.

“Later,” Shep answered, and turned the flashlight beam ahead of them.

There was darkness, and a steep descent, and Monk and Lem followed as the beam pointed down into it.

~ * ~

After twenty minutes that seemed like a day, the black wagon handle slipped out of Lem’s sweaty hand and the wagon clattered past him.

“Look out!” he called, and Monk and Shep jumped aside as the wagon roared down the steep incline ahead of them.

They heard it rattle off into the bowels of the earth, then they heard nothing.

“Why did you tell us to get out of the way?” Shep asked angrily. “We could have stopped it!”

“We’ll catch up to it,” Monk shot back.

“Sorry…” Lem said.

“No matter. Monk’s right.” The flashlight beam pointed ahead, and down they went.

~ * ~

Two real hours went by. Lem was thirsty, and Monk wanted to stop, but Shep kept going. If anything it was hotter than above now, and Lem finally panted timidly, “You think we’re almost…there?”

“You mean hell?” Shep replied, and then added, “If we are, we don’t have the crucifix anymore to protect us. It’s in the wagon.”

Monk snorted, and Shep spun angrily toward him with the flashlight, which at that exact moment went out.

“Ohhh,” Lem mewled.

“Be quiet,” Shep ordered, “it’s just stuck.” They heard him shaking the flashlight in the dark, but the beam didn’t come on.

“Maybe the cover’s loose—”

There was the rattle of loosened metal, a twang, and they heard flashlight parts hitting the floor of the cave.

“Uh oh,” Monk said.

“Help me find them—” Shep ordered, but now there was a note of desperation in his voice.

“I hear rats!” Lem cried, and they all went silent.

Something was skittering in the dark ahead of them.

“Get down and help me find the parts!” Shep said, and for a few minutes there was only the sound of frightened breathing and the pat and slide of hands on the floor of the cave.

“I’ve got the lens!” Shep cried suddenly.

“And here’s the reflector!” Monk added.

“What if there are rats on the floor!” Lem said, but Shep ignored him.

“All we need is the cover, and one of the batteries. The other one is still in the body.”

“I’ve got the battery!” Monk exulted a moment later.

“I can’t find the cover!” Shep said desperately.

“I’m telling you there are rats!” Lem whimpered.

“I can’t find the cover either!” Monk.

There was fumbling in the dark, heavy breathing.

A bolt of light blinded them, went out, blinded them.

“I don’t need the cover—I’ll hold it on,” Shep said.

He pointed the flashlight, clutched together by the pressure of his hand, at his friends, Monk on the cave floor, still probing, Lem with his back against the wall, eyes closed.

The beam shot to the floor, moved crazily this way and that, then froze on a round red piece of plastic.

“The cover!” Monk yelled, and pounced on it.

“Give it to me!” Shep said.

There was more fumbling, darkness, then bright light again.

They stood huffing and puffing at their exertion.

Their breaths quieted.

The scrabbling sound was still ahead of them.

“Rats!” Lem cried, and then let out a wail.

The flashlight beam swung down and ahead of them, and caught the crashed remains of the red wagon on its side, a chewed-open box of cereal, and the long fat gray-brown length of a rat as it put its whiskered, sniffing nose into the mouse trap.

There was a loud snap! which made the light beam shiver, and then, in the darkness behind Shep, he heard Lem laugh nervously and say, “See?”

~ * ~

They stopped two hours later for the night. By Shep’s watch it was 10 o’clock. The flashlight had gone out again, and this time it was the batteries but Shep took the batteries from the other non-working one. They were tired and hungry, thirsty and hot. The wagon was serviceable but now made a loud squeak with each turn of the front wheels. The handle had been bent, but Lem forced it back into shape. They’d found everything but one can of pop, which Monk promptly stepped on when they set out. He smelled like creme soda, and his friends didn’t let him forget it.

“We’ll need the batteries for tomorrow,” Shep said solemnly. He had found a flat wide place to stop, a kind of hitch in the slope. Ahead of them was only darkness.

It was hot and close and sticky, and they felt a vague heat drifting up at them from below.

“What happens when the batteries run out?” Lem asked.

“We’ll have to conserve them,” Shep said.

“But what happens—”

“Be quiet,” Shep said, at the same moment Monk snapped, “Shut up, Lem.”

They ate in darkness, and drank warm soda and un-iced tea, and listened, but there was nothing to hear. No rats, no nearby roasting fires, no dripping water, no sound of any kind. Just the silent sound of heat getting hotter.

“I hope we’re close,” Lem said. “I want to go home.”

“Home to what?” Shep answered. “If we don’t find something down here…”

The rest went unsaid.

They sat in a circle, and moved closer, the flashlight in the midst of them like a doused campfire.

Shep laughed and said, “We never finished talking about Angie Bernstein, did we?”

Lem laughed too. “Or how your pits smell!”

“Or your mustache!” Shep shot back.

Monk was silent.

“Hey, Monk,” Shep said, “you shaving your lip yet?”

“And using ‘B-Oderant’? You smell like creme soda, but do you also smell like a horse?”

Monk feigned snoring.

“Hey Monk—”

The snoring ceased. “Leave me alone.”

Lem hooted: “Creme soda boy!”

“Horse pit boy!” Shep laughed.

Monk said nothing, and soon he was snoring for real.

~ * ~

Shep woke them up at seven o’clock by his watch.

At first he couldn’t move; it was hard to breathe and so hot he felt as if he was under a steam iron. He knew it was growing impossibly warmer. He could feel and smell and taste it, just like he had in the tree-house.

“We have to find the end today,” he said, grimly.

They ate and drank in the dark, just like the night before. Now there was no talking. Lem was having trouble breathing, taking shallow ragged huffs at the air.

“Feels…like…we’re…in a…barbecue…” he rasped. “Hard…to…breathe…”

They turned on the battery radio and there was hiss up and down the dial until the one strong local channel came on. It was the same announcer, only now all of the chirp had gone out of his voice.

“…hundred and ten here this morning, folks,” he said. “And it’s September first! Local ponds are steamed dry, and the electricity was out for three hours yesterday. Same all over, now. Ice caps are melting, and in Australia, where it’s the end of wintertime, the temperature hit 99 yesterday…”

They snapped off the radio.

“Let’s go,” Shep said.

~ * ~

Lem began to cry after a half hour.

“I can’t do this!” he said. “Let’s go home! I want to swim in the pond, and get ready for school, and look at the fall catalogs and feel it get chilly at night!”

“It’s not much farther,” Shep said evenly. He was having trouble breathing himself. “This is something we’ve got to do, Lem. If we do it maybe we can have all that again.”

Shep pointed the flashlight at Monk, who was trudging silently, straight ahead.

~ * ~

The flashlight began to fail as they reached a wall of fallen rocks. Ignoring the impediment for the moment, Shep used the remaining light to rip the battery cover off the back of the radio and pull the batteries out.

They were a different size, so he put the radio on and let it stay on, a droning buzz in the background.

The flashlight went out, then flickered on again.

“Quick!” Shep shouted. “Check to either side and see if there’s a way around!”

Lem shuffled off to the left, and Monk stood unmoving where he was.

Shep pushed impatiently past him, flicking the flash on and off to pull precious weak yellow beams out of it.

“There’s no way around here,” Lem called out laconically from the left.

Shep blinked the light on, off, punched desperately around the edge of the barrier, looking for a hole, a rift, a way through.

“Nothing…” he huffed weakly.

He turned with a last thought, flaring the flash into life so that the beam played across Monk.

“Maybe there’s a crack! Maybe we can pull the wall down!”

“There is no crack,” Monk said dully, “and we can’t pull it down.” His legs abruptly folded underneath him and he sat on the cave floor.

Shep turned the light off, on again; the beam was dull, pumpkin colored but he played it all over the rock barrier.

“Got to be—”

“There is no ‘Hell’s Cave’,” Monk said dully. “It’s just a myth. My father told me about it when I was seven. This is just an old mine that played out and then caved in.”

“But—”

“I made it all happen,” Monk said hoarsely, without energy. “The heat, the endless summer. It was me.”

“What?” Shep said, moving closer. On the other side, Lem sank to the floor.

“It was me…” Monk repeated.

Lem began to cry, mewling like a hurt kitten, and the flashlight beam died again. In the dark, Shep flicked it on, off, on, off.

“Me,” Monk said fiercely, an agonized hiss.

Shep hit the button one more time on the flashlight, and it flared like a dying candle, haloing Monk’s haunted face, and then faded out again.

“I didn’t want it to end.” In the darkness Monk spoke in a whispered, monotone. “I didn’t want it ever to end.”

“Didn’t want what to end?” Shep asked, confused.

“This summer,” Monk answered, sighing. “The three of us. I wanted it to last forever. I didn’t want us to…change. Which is what we were doing. Talking about girls instead of baseball cards, hairy legs instead of monster comics, body odor instead of swimming and telescopes. We used to do everything together and now that was going to change. When we went to Junior High Lem was going to try to date Angie Bernstein and you were going out for track. Then you would go out with Margaret O’Hearn, and the baseball cards and comics would go in the back of the closet, along with the marbles and the pup tent and the canteen and butterfly net. The chemistry set would collect dust in the corner of the basement. I could see it coming. It was all changing, and I didn’t want it to.”

“But how…?” Shep asked.

In the dark, he could almost hear Monk shrug and heard him hitch a sob. “I don’t know how I did it. I just wanted it, I fell asleep crying for it at night, I prayed for it every day. Every time you and Lem started talking about girls and body hair and growing up, I prayed for it louder. And then, suddenly, it happened. And then I couldn’t make it go away…”

Lem cried out hoarsely, then settled into low rasping sobs.

It had become even hotter, and then hotter still. The radio, still on, blurted out a stifled cry of static and then was silent.

In the sweaty, close, unbearably hot cave, the flashlight went on with one final smudge of sick light, illuminating Monk’s crying face.

“I’m so sorry…” he whispered.

~ * ~

“Mabel?” George Meadows croaked. He could barely talk, his words fighting through the heat, which had intensified. His wife lay unmoving on the sofa, her desiccated arm hanging over the side, fingers brushing her dropped magazine. Her housedress was now completely part of the couch’s pattern, melded into it like an iron transfer. The window fan had given up. The sky was very bright. Puffs of steam rose from the floor, up from the cellar, from the ground below. Somewhere in the back of his nostrils, George smelled smoke, and fire.

“Mabel?” he called again, although now he could not feel the easy chair beneath him. He felt light as a flake of ash rising from a campfire.

His eyes were so hot he could no longer see.

He took in one final, rasping, burning breath as the world turned to fire and roaring flame around him.

And, even now, he could not resist getting in the last word, letting his final breath out in a cracked whisper even though there was no one to listen: “Yep. Hottest ever.”