Bards and Sages Quarterly (October 2017)

The Best Halloween Party in Town

By Robin Reed

MRS. BURBAGE ARRIVED first, wearing the finest styles of 1897, her hair exquisitely crafted into a tower of curls, with ribbons woven into it. The hatchet embedded in her skull didn’t detract from her elegant appearance at all.

Not much later, the coal miners came. Since the mine collapse of 1938, they had nothing to do except huddle in the dark, except on the one night of the year when all the best unliving residents of the town came to the party.

Welcome, welcome, Mrs. Burbage said to the new arrivals. Her family had lived in the mansion on the hill, and before what she described as a spot of trouble, when her husband dispatched his wife and two servants with a variety of sharp tools, and himself, she would never have talked to common people, especially dirty, flattened miners. Social classes just don’t seem to matter anymore, she once told me, now that we are all post-corporeal.

Me, I’m the mayor. From 1982 to 1991 I did paperwork and presided over town council meetings. Ms. Katherine Gomberton, or Mayor Kathy, as they call me. I was in my late forties when I won my first election and pushing sixty when a mini-van that should have had its brakes fixed months earlier wasn’t able to stop and pushed me through the plate glass window of the Barker Brothers Bakery.

I was not the first Mayor, and there have been several since, but everyone in the spirit community looks to me as the one to tell their troubles to, and I am the host of the best Halloween party in town.

Guests flooded in. Those who left their bodies behind many years before, and those who recently found out, by becoming one, that ghosts are real. Mr. Thomas, who ran the butcher shop on Main Street for decades, a gaggle of teenaged girls who went too fast in a 1962 Rambler on the sharp curve over the mountain, and seventeen-year-old Juan Garcia, beaten to death by bullies who thought he was gay, just last week. He entered the party wide-eyed and scared so I did my best to make him feel comfortable.

Are th-those real or just costumes? he asked, pointing at a group of soldiers in World War II uniforms. One had only one arm and another had his guts hanging out.

We don’t wear costumes, we just look the same as we did when we, uh, transitioned. I have a lot of bruises and a shattered arm, you have a broken nose and even more bruises. But no one here is scary. Hey, Pete!

The soldier with one arm waved his one hand and grinned. Hey, Kathy! Hey, kid!

There’s a statue of Pete on the downtown war memorial. Everyone here is nice.

That was mainly true. The really nasty ones, such as the aforementioned Mr. Burbage, family slaughterer, rarely showed their ectoplasm at the party. We’ve had a few troublemakers over the years, and some even darker things, from dimensions that we just don’t talk about, but since I took over we haven’t had any disensoulments.

How about you get some snacks? I asked the kid. He nodded and ran to the refreshment table. We eat energy, any kind we can get, to keep our spectral selves in one piece. The snack table looked like it was covered in food and drinks, but it was all power from the house wiring, fancied up by the former kitchen staff of Napolitano’s, the Italian restaurant that burned down a few years ago, along with the chefs.

More guests streamed in. Elderly people who died in their beds, victims of a murder-suicide, those with heart attacks, kidney trouble, and cancer, a grade school teacher who was swept away by a flash flood, almost everybody who left the physical plane of existence since the town was founded, came to the party on Halloween night.

We were all glad to see each other. Most of the year we’re stuck where we died. Me, for instance, in front of the Barker Brothers Bakery. We can pass news and gossip to our ghostly neighbors, who pass it to others. There are enough of us that almost everyone gets the word quickly. Halloween night from midnight to dawn is the only time we are free to go anywhere.

The party really started to hop when the band arrived. Jerry Joy and the Jazz Cats, the house band at the speakeasy on Third Street, had gone their separate ways after prohibition, and some were seen on TV in its early days. They died in places as far away as Hollywood, but on Halloween came back to our town, to play with the best friends and musicians they ever knew.

Let’s get this started! Jerry Joy shouted, and the crowd cheered. Music filled the house and couples jumped to the dance floor to let loose.

I choose a new place for the party every year. We don’t use the Burbage mansion, or the abandoned mental asylum outside town, or the crumbling radiator factory. We avoid the obvious places, where the ghost hunters bring their meters, cameras, and recorders. Those places are completely ghost free on Halloween night.

This year I chose a nice one-level ranch house in a quiet cul-de-sac. It’s been on sale for months, but the owners have the lawn mowed and the leaves raked once a week. I chose a house that looks the least haunted that a house can look.

A living person could walk through the house with the party in full swing and not notice a thing. After all, we exist on a different frequency, partly in a different dimension, than the living. We only make ourselves known when we want to.

This year’s shindig had just started to boom when the trouble started. I heard a noise, a metallic click that came from the physical world. Someone using a key at the front door. The guests at this party didn’t need a key, or a door for that matter. I ran to see who it could be, having to go around many dancers and revelers as I went. It’s not polite to go through other ghosts.

The door opened as I got there and two women came in. Human, living women. I was so shocked I could only stand there and watch. I knew who they were. Rhonda Kerlidge, in her forties, real estate agent; and her grown daughter Shayna, twenty-something and a force to be reckoned with in the local fantasy gaming community. They were the wife and daughter, respectively, of the legal owner of the house, Michael Kerlidge.

Rhonda usually wore a suit and had every dyed blond hair in place, but this late she was a bit frazzled. Shayna was a casual dresser, to put it kindly, but even she looked more messed up than usual in a Green Lantern t-shirt, jeans, and dark hair that looked like it hadn’t seen a comb this decade.

Rhonda hit a light switch and the room became bright. They hadn’t turned off the power, for maintenance and so they could show the house. The light drew the party goers, who all wanted the energy. Soon the living room held hundreds of spirits, who partied even hardier.

Pulling a rolling suitcase, Rhonda looked behind her she said, Get the blankets. I wasn't sure I heard correctly. I had to tune my ears into the living dimension and block out all the phantasmal music and laughter behind me. But it sure sounded to me like Rhonda wanted her daughter to fetch blankets, probably from a car parked outside. And blankets meant they planned to stay.

This was bad. I know what I said before, that a living person wouldn’t notice the party guests, but the sheer concentration of ghost energy in that house could penetrate the senses of the living if they were exposed to it for too long. And Shayna, dealing with the imaginary and fantastic all the time, would be more open to that energy than her mother.

How could they stay? There wasn’t a stick of furniture in the house. Why would they come here?

What’s going on? Who are they? Roy Emberg, a Chartered Public Accountant who had a fatal allergic reaction to a bee sting in 1994, asked. Slowly other guests noticed the intruders. The dancing slowed as people turned to watch the women enter the living room. The music came to a crashing halt.

Rhonda and Shayna didn’t notice any of it, for which I was grateful. The sudden quiet made it easier for me to listen to the frequency of the living so I could find out what was going on.

Kick ME out of the house, Rhonda fumed. I’ll hit him with divorce papers the minute my lawyer returns my calls.

Why did we leave? He was the one in bed with that bitch.

I will own both houses when my lawyer gets through with him.

We could have gone to a hotel. Shayna arranged the blankets on the floor.

We have a perfectly good house here, darling. Why be overcharged for a few hours in a lumpy bed?

A lumpy bed is better than a floor.

Concentrating on the women, I jumped a little when a voice said right in my ear, You got to get rid of them, Kathy. You know what happens when warm bodies come to the party.

It was Jerry Joy. Born in the 1890’s on the poor black side of town, he was raised by a grandmother who taught him all about haints and things that go bump in the night.

We haven’t seen any sign of them in years, Jerry, I said, trying to sound sure of myself.

They waitin’, is all, Mayor Kathy. They waitin’ for this.

I hoped he was wrong. They last made themselves known before I was dead.

Who is he talking about? It was young Garcia, returned from the refreshment table. Who’s waiting?

You’ll hear the story before long, I said, so I might as well be the first to tell it. Halloween, 1977. The organizer back then, Henry Danders, held the party in the Burbage mansion every year. Henry was one of the early settlers, who defended his young daughter from a bear and got himself killed doing it. He was a hard ghost who did things his way and no one could tell him anything.

Really?

"Really. A group of teenagers broke into the mansion during the party and started tearing things apart and spraying graffiti. With the party packed and ghostly energy filling the place, deep currents of the supernatural dimensions stirred and things were brought out that should never interact with humans or ghosts.

"The first to show up was Mr. Burbage himself. When someone dies in a rage he or she becomes stuck in that state. He brought his anger and violence with him and started laying into the teenagers. His tools, though ghostly, were also ghastly, with enough energy in them to slice the poor kids to shreds.

In the wake of all that, the other things, the ones that dwelled deep under the worlds of the living as well as the dead, followed Mr. Burbage and burst into the mansion. The teenagers were ghosts themselves by that time and became the first victims of the things from beyond. When they kill a specter, spirit, or spook, they tear its last essence from the universe. This is what we call a disensoulment, the destruction of the very soul that sustains a ghost."

My friend’s grandma told me about those kids. Not the ghost part, just that they were killed.

It’s almost an urban legend now, I told him, but I was alive when it happened. The police assumed humans did it, but when I joined the spirit world I heard many stories from eye witnesses. The only survivors were those who fled fast enough and far enough, and hid in the deepest and darkest places they could find.

That must be why the mansion has those big fences around it.

Yes. Now excuse me... I turned to the many ghosts who still stared at the two living women. I’m afraid the party’s over, folks. Go to wherever you haunt.

Awwwwwwww, the crowd said in unison. Many of them turned to go, but just then the worst thing happened.

WHAT THE HELL! Shayna Kerlidge shouted.

What are you shouting about? her mother asked.

Who are all those people? Shayna pointed towards the crowd of ghosts.

Go, everyone, I told the party guests. Go, please.

I was too late. The ghosts had been sucking energy from the house so they were visible to sensitive humans. That plus the presence of the live women might trigger a replay of 1977.

Suddenly I felt a strong pressure coming toward me in the ghost dimension, something that felt both evil and insane.

RUN! I shouted, and most of the ghosts took the hint, fleeing through the walls of the ranch house as fast as they could. There were so many that many were still there when Rupert T. Burbage, or whatever spectral scrap that was left of him, dressed in a nice 1890’s men’s suit, burst amongst them, whirling like a dervish with a large handsaw in one hand and a butcher’s knife in the other, laying into the party goers with everything he had.

Fortunately, ghost weapons don’t work on ghosts, but the panic and confusion among the gathered guests drove up the energy in the room so much that Shayna screamed and shot to her feet, followed by her mother, who yelled, I see them! I SEE THEM!

That’s when the worst thing happened. I know I said the worst thing happened before, but at this point, something even worse than that happened. I felt it coming from all directions and all dimensions. Pure malevolence poured into the room as the things came, and soon no ghost would be safe. I think I screamed. I’m not sure, but I was definitely as scared as a dead person can be.

Mr. Burbage found Mrs. Burbage reclaimed the ghost form of the hatchet he had left in her head so many years ago and chased her around the room with it. Then everything slowed down as the things from the death dimensions filled the house. They were tornados of evil energy, formless and impossible to understand, their touch making ghosts burst into nothing, souls flashing into oblivion, their screams echoing throughout all levels of existence, loud enough for both living and dead to hear.

I tried to concentrate on Rhonda and Shayna. I focused on them, trying to materialize enough so they would see me as a calm spot in all the chaos. They both looked at me. I gestured wildly toward the door and mouthed, Get out!

Shayna nodded and pulled on her mother’s elbow. At the exact moment when I thought they would go to the door and be safe in the street, the dark things uttered a shriek that pierced my ghostly senses. They started to circle the women.

Before mother and daughter had time to move, they found themselves lifted off the floor. The dark things took them up toward the ceiling, which exploded outward with a huge crack that shattered both ordinary and spectral sound barriers.

I looked through a huge hole in the roof of the house and saw Rhonda and Shayna Kerlidge flying over the town, turning and flipping through the night sky.

The dark things flew them toward Burbage mansion.

What is happening?

Young Juan Garcia was the only ghost other than myself left in the house. I wasn’t sure what to say to him. I’m not sure. It can’t be good. You should go.

I’m stuck in the boy’s locker room. I hate it there.

I’m going to see if I can save those women. It’ll be dangerous.

That’s cool.

Then follow me. I floated up above the houses and flew as fast as I could toward the hill where Burbage mansion could be seen from almost anywhere in town. Darkness still covered everything, with streetlamps casting pools of light. A few cars moved around, throwing their headlight glow in front of them. I glanced toward the east, over the river. The sun would start to light the valley soon, and then I would find myself in my usual spot in front of the Barker Brothers Bakery.

Or I would be disensouled by then, deader than dead, if I found the things from beyond and got in their way.

Darkness filled the mansion. No human had lived there since the Gaslight era, electricity was never installed. Mr. Burbage left the house to the city in his will since he and Mrs. Burbage had no children. Legal wrangling has kept it from being either restored or razed.

I passed over the chain link fence that surrounded the mansion. The fence was supposed to keep out graffiti artists and couples looking for a private place to meet, but it didn’t.

Juan flew behind me. I motioned to him to stay back. Inside we found everything trashed. A grand curving staircase leading up to the second