Johnny Halloween

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Authors: Norman Partridge

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JOHNNY HALLOWEEN:

Tales of the Dark Season

NORMAN PARTRIDGE

CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS

Baltimore

2010

First appeared in
Cemetery Dance #14.

First appeared in the lettered edition of
Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales, Subterranean Press.

First appeared in
Chills #5.

First appeared in
Blood Review #4.

First appeared in
At the Sign of the Snowman’s Skull, Earthling Publications.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cemetery Dance Publications

132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

Forest Hill, MD 21050

http://www.cemeterydance.com

First Digital Edition

ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-284-2

This one’s for Minh Nguyen.

May your treat bag always be full, pard!

INTRODUCTION: Dark Seasons Past

My first memories of Halloween are the monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man…you can toss in the Mummy, too. We’re talking early sixties here, when the Universal Studios creepers reigned over the popular culture landscape—one they’d dominated, at that point, for more than thirty years.

I cut my imaginative teeth on those movies, and then I went looking for more stuff that would provide the same kind of thrill. It was a good time to do that, because the late sixties and early seventies marked a golden age for young horror fans. Monster culture had trickled down into kid culture in a big way, and not just in film and television.
Famous Monsters magazine was easily found at the local bottle shop (my mom’s polite parental euphemism for “liquor store”). Bill Warren’s black & white horror comics, Creepy and Eerie , had taken the place of the EC Comics horror line—right down to their cackling horror host characters. Paperback anthologies featuring classic horror stories were plentiful and cheap in creaky turnstile racks.

If kids wanted more, they could even get up-close-and-personal with their favorite horrors. Head down to the local hobby shop and you could buy Aurora monster model kits for just under a buck, featuring the Universal standbys and a few others to boot. Grab one of those kits and some Testors paints, and you were in business. If it was the right time of year, you might even hear “The Monster Mash” blaring from the local Top 40 station while you turned your bedroom into a glow-in-the-dark Chamber of Horrors.

Needless to say, that’s exactly what I did. I had all the Aurora monster models on my bookcases—at least until I got my Daisy BB gun and they turned into targets. The day after the grand shootout, I moped around like an impulsive dictator who’d lined up his best friends against a brick wall and executed them—which I admit is a metaphor that really pushes the envelope, but I hope you’ll indulge it because I really did feel that way. Add to that weekly viewings of Bob Wilkins’
Creature Features on television, and a couple of Super-8mm monster movies to my name,
[1]
and I guess that made me a card-carrying monsterkid .

That’s the term du jour for monster lovers from the Boomer generation. Many years have passed since then, but I still love that stuff. Admittedly, there’s more than a little nostalgia mixed in with that love, plus what I like to think of as the thrill of the original scare.

Let me explain that last part. It’s my opinion that the strongest horror experiences are our first ones—and that’s why each generation of writers points to different touchstones with equal enthusiasm. So while writers younger than me might reference zombies in a variety of media, music videos like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and horror movie remakes of seventies grindhouse fare, my particular touchstones remain the Universal monsters, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and Night Gallery , and the group of writers I like to think of as the California Sorcerers. And—surprise, surprise—I’ve found that most writers my age mention exactly the same influences when asked.

Not to say movies like Night of the Living Dead and seventies drive-in horror movies didn’t influence me, too, but those came later. Like I said, the work that bites first bites hardest. Pre—
NOTLD
movies, TV, and comics were my very first horror experiences. It took me awhile to find the real-deal books. But when I did graduate from the ghost story anthologies and the Alfred Hitchcock compendiums I found in the kid’s section of the library, I couldn’t have encountered a better group of teachers than the aforementioned sorcerers from California: Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont. As I grew older, several paperback crime writers joined them. They all left distinctive marks on my imagination.

So did Halloween, of course. The holiday had its own set of original scares for me. Even today, memories of my early Octobers seem stronger, more vibrant somehow. Like carving pumpkins with my dad’s jackknife (I’ve still got a zigzag scar on my thumb to prove it).
[2]
Or taking days to plan a costume, or weeks to build a horror display with my buddies.

One year we built a cemetery in my front yard. It certainly wasn’t the kind of thing you’d plop down money for at a Halloween Superstore—my dad made our half-buried coffin out of leftover fence boards, and our headstones were scrap wood cut-to-order on his table-saw and hand-painted by my friends and I. But we thought it was great, and so did most of the kids in the neighborhood. Hey, we even had a looted grave complete with unearthed corpse. I, of course, was the live-action ghoul digging the guy up—which always seemed to me a particularly terrifying creature to be, and one of the creepiest endeavors I could imagine undertaking .
[3]

When it comes to the stories in this collection, I’d have to say I haven’t changed much. Certain things still give me the chills. Like cemeteries. There are a lot of those in my stories, and some pretty disturbing monsters inhabit them. Some are supernatural, and some are human—and that leads to another Halloween experience that helped shape me as a writer.

I’m talking about Halloween 1969, when I was eleven years old. That was the year I realized that the scariest monsters wore human skin, and the realization didn’t have anything to do with the fictional creatures I read about or watched on television. The monster in question lived right in my blue-collar hometown, a San Francisco Bay Area suburb by the name of Vallejo.

Vallejo had two claims to fame in those days: 1) a naval shipyard that turned out nuclear submarines, and 2) the nation’s first modern-day serial killer: the Zodiac. I won’t say too much about the Zodiac here—you’ll get a much fuller picture in “The Man Who Killed Halloween,” an essay included in this book—but I will say that the Zodiac’s crimes had a strong impact on me. He taught me about a new kind of fear. One that didn’t have anything to do with creatures that went bump in the night, or the roller-coaster rides they took me on in movies or comics or stories contained neatly between hard covers.

By then I understood those monsters. I knew their secrets, their strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, they were easy to recognize. But the Zodiac was different. There were no bolts in his neck requiring periodic recharging. He didn’t sleep in a coffin by day, powerless, afraid of the sun. No pentagram marked his palm. No. Looking at that old police artist’s depiction of the killer today, I still recognize the thing I saw when I looked at the front page of The Vallejo Times-Herald and confronted that artist’s rendering for the first time. His was the face of a very human monster—without a doubt containing a cancerous growth of evil, and at the same time not evidencing a single cell of that particular disease on the surface.

I couldn’t have articulated that perception then, but that’s exactly the way the Zodiac’s picture struck me. It strikes me the same way today. He didn’t look at all like a monster, though that’s exactly what he was. His face was like the faces of a half-dozen fathers who lived in my very own neighborhood, right down to the horn-rim glasses. He could have been sitting at a breakfast table down the block, eating Corn Flakes while I stared at his picture on the front page. And that sudden realization broke down something very simple for me: the Zodiac could walk among us, and no one would know they needed to fear him until it was MUCH TOO LATE.

That was one of the most terrifying revelations of my youth, and I remember it to this day. It changed the way I saw people. It changed the way I thought. If you’ve read my Halloween novel, Dark Harvest , you know it made a mark on my fiction, too…and a pretty big one. It influenced several of the stories you’re about to read, as well.

Of course, the other stuff did, too—those original scares from movies and comics and television. I still love them, and I still love Halloween, too. These days, my bride and I stretch it into a month-long celebration. For us, the holiday is mostly about the fun stuff. We uncrate the old-fashioned Halloween kitsch and decorate the living room. We get an early jump watching those classic Universal creepers. We eat lots of home-popped popcorn. And when the big day comes I always carve a couple of pumpkins, which may seem a dangerous tradition given my past history. But, hey—the good news is that I haven’t sliced open my thumb in years.

But it doesn’t take much to stir those deeper fears, even today. The ones first planted by a serial killer who blended in so well he was never caught. Once the celebration is over and the quiet of another fall night settles in, it’s the simple things that creep me out. Like the kid in the mask who’s too old to be knocking on our door—the one who comes late and stands there just a little too long, staring, after I’ve dropped candy into his bag. Or the car that lingers in front of the house when I step outside to blow out the flickering candles in those Jack o’ Lanterns. Or the sound in the backyard in the shank of the night—the one I can’t identify, the one I shouldn’t have heard at all.

Yeah. That’s the stuff that really gives me the creeps.

And that’s why I always keep one eye on the shadows.

Fact is, I found these stories there.

I hope they scare you…and good.

—Norman Partridge Lafayette, California

[
1
]
The Ghoul was about five minutes long and had a body count three times that. Dracula vs. the Wolf Man was a love letter to the Universal gang.

[
2
]
My old man didn’t believe in stitches. He believed in cotton and that sticky white medical tape…lots of it.

[
3
]
Hey, I’ve mentioned Robert Bloch and Uncle Creepy in this introduction. You’ve got to allow me one bad pun.