Excerpt from All Souls’ Day

Over the mountainous city of Palisades, Pennsylvania, on top of the highest hill sat Hillside Manor rising above the city like a ghoul, vacant of its occupants. Yet there resided one entity whose scream was lodged in its throat. Well, not exactly its throat, just the general area where the throat should’ve been. It squirmed, feeling contained and distorted… somehow… disembodied, wondering if speech was even possible until finally, desperation kicked in, and without even trembling, a scream erupted.

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The Coffin

Screams, shouts, and shrill shrieks reverberated on Holland Drive, where Jose Perez and his best friend Benji Martinez waited for the line in front of the haunted house to taper off. Jose looked up at Hillside Manor, the massive mansion visible from almost any point in Palisades, especially where he stood now in his neighborhood. By noon tomorrow, it would be demolished. One of his teachers, Mr. McDaniels, feeling nostalgic about the local monument getting torn down, spoke to his class about his memories of Hillside Manor being constructed when he was a boy by the local candy maker, Wilfred Ortiz. He explained how Palisades had once been a mining town with mining tunnels running under many city blocks, which included their side of town and Hillside Manor. Now all the mining shafts were closed due to flooding, but to build the estate, Mr. McDaniels had said, a mining shaft running right under the spot where the maids’ quarters were to be made had to be closed. All Jose knew about Hillside Manor were the ghost stories and the rumors of Wilfred’s son killing himself in there—Jose shuddered. He didn’t want to think about that now. He turned to Benji, who was bouncing from one foot to the other like a fighter about to enter the octagon. With two younger brothers at home, Benji had looked forward to the haunted house all week and was glad the line was thinning. Hanging above the dangling skeletons on the door of the haunted house were a pair of rolling eyes and a wooden sign that read:

ONCE YOU ENTER, YOU CAN’T GO BACK

SO, DECIDE CAREFULLY WITH TACT

AND IF YOU THINK YOU’RE BRAVE ENOUGH

THEN STEP INSIDE LET’S SEE WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF

For the last three years, their neighbor had built a haunted house for Halloween in their neighborhood, and Jose had attended the attraction every year. The house glowed red and blue in the hastening evening. Jose was so close to entering he could practically see the fog from the smoke machine. Behind him chirped a group of small girls no older than nine or ten. Jose might’ve seen these girls on the playground at the elementary school on his daily walk to his middle school, but he didn't recognize them. One of the girls, chubby and rosy-cheeked with long braids cascading down her back, shouted over the cacophony echoing from the haunted house to inform her friends that their friend Ana refused to come with her. Ana, she explained, was still sad about her dead brother, and what could she, the freckle-faced cherub, say to Ana about that? Jose stiffened at the girl’s words, perplexed by her insouciance, when the very thing she had mentioned disturbed his dreams and waking hours. He didn’t know the girls, but his palms felt clammy at the mention of Ana and her dead brother, Miguel.        

Jose’s mother had the brilliant idea of going to his classmate Miguel’s funeral—the first funeral he had ever attended—back in May. While they occasionally sat at tables adjacent to each other in the cafeteria, they weren’t friends. Miguel was obsessively into Dungeons & Dragons, and Jose thought that stuff was lame, preferring a game of Fortnite or a pickup game in basketball. When Jose heard the news of Miguel’s drowning, it wasn’t that he didn’t feel anything; he just couldn’t understand how someone he had just seen in his Math class could be dead the next day. Nothing about it made sense, and if there was one thing Jose prided himself in, it was that he was a very logical person with impeccable common sense. His classmate gone? It just didn’t fit into his equation of how life worked. More than anything, he wanted Miguel’s death to fit into a formula where variables add up, making the solution clear. When he approached the open coffin, he was shocked at Miguel’s waxen and unfamiliar appearance; his cold touch when his mother nudged him to show the dead respect. He disguised his hot tears as an irritable itch that wouldn’t go away. The experience left him changed, but at school, it was worse. Miguel’s desk sat empty for three whole weeks until summer break, almost mocking the teacher and his peers who were dutifully in attendance. It was haunting how someone who should be there was no longer breathing. Now every time Jose’s parents left for work, he wondered if they would ever walk through the door again. When he waved goodbye to Benji after school, he wondered if some horrible accident would befall his friend and he’d never see him again; moreover, before going to sleep, he would pretend his parents were dead. He would imagine receiving the news that they had gotten into a car accident so that he could prepare himself for the shock. Observing his melancholia throughout the summer, Jose’s parents urged him to leave the house, ventilate his emotions, get into some trouble with his friends—anything he needed to help him forget his worries. Facing the haunted house now, he thought there was something better than the malarkey his parents were spewing: temporarily stepping into another world for thrills and goosebumps.

“Alright! Next group, you’re up!” shouted Zeke, the congenial neighbor who labored to build this annual amusement plank by plank. “Happy Halloween, everybody!” It was Friday, one day after Halloween, but a harsh storm forced the township to cancel all Halloween activities until today. It didn’t matter, though, as Zeke’s spooky spirit was year-round. “Please keep your phones in your pockets to really immerse yourself in this treat. Your phones will still be there when you get out.” He wrapped his finger with a new Band-Aid and squinted at the group, a frown replacing his effortless smile. “Hey! No pushing. There’s enough time for everyone.”

Jose ignored the scuffling behind him and stepped over the threshold with Benji, who grinned from ear to ear.

“Let’s hang around afterward,” Benji said, grinning at his own mischief. “We can scare some little kids on their way home.”

Jose laughed and pushed him inside. All thoughts of Miguel and his grieving sister immediately slipped from his mind as he entered the ten-by-thirty-foot structure with unrestrained joy, straining his eyes through the smoke until his vision adjusted to the hazy view. He was soon jumping away from clowns, zombies, and the scary chick from the exorcist, who all grabbed and pulled at his hoodie. The sepulchral music, broken by the other visitors’ squeals and howls, deafened Jose and Benji’s laughs. Then, from another corner, a septuagenarian with matted hair and purple circles under his sunken eyes hopped out of the shadows inches from where Jose stood, yelling, “I don’t belong here! Help me escape, or you’ll have hell to pay! Come back here, you little flesh monster!” The spontaneity of the attack sent Jose into a fitful of shivers, and he hurried to Benji’s side, creating a wide berth between him and the loony old guy begging for his help and shouting insults after him. Violins screeched as Jose and Benji balked before a slender woman with light brown hair falling past her pointy shoulders. A sheer tan mask concealed her face. Her feet, wrapped in beige ballerina flats, pointed awkwardly in a way Jose thought would be uncomfortable for anyone to stand. The distorted woman began to twitch and moved her tenuous arms in long, circular motions like a windmill, her head oscillating from side to side; she never left her spot, yet she remained consistently in action. A few people behind Jose squealed, and he nudged Benji to move to the final section of the site, a corner shrouded in darkness.

“Zeke outdid himself,” said Benji, leading the way to the back.  He clapped his hands together, eager for whatever was next. “I was afraid we might be getting too old for this.”

“Yeah, he has more actors this year,” Jose replied, staring at his feet as he walked, careful not to bump into anything in the darkness. “I wonder who—” Crack! The question remained lodged in his throat as the room began to spin—he didn’t know whether the room rotated for everyone else or only him. A yellow light had suddenly crackled to life, illuminating his path where in the corner, loomed a large black coffin whose dimensions seemed too grand for the small space they were in; it was almost unnatural. Paralyzed, Jose watched in silent panic as the coffin’s lid screeched open and a boy, flesh as green as Frankenstein, worms feasting on his arms and face, slowly rose from his bed. His decomposing jaw dropped open, and a banshee’s scream filled half a dozen ears. Suffocating on the infinitesimal amount of air he felt the room offered, eyes welling up with hot tears on the verge of spilling over if he stayed one more second, his chest burning with the weight of a house, Jose did the only thing he could think to do. He ran past the coffin and shoved the door marked Exit with all his might, ignoring Benji’s shouts. Once he was outside he let his tears fall.