The Halloween Moon Read online

  Dedication

  To Leaf, Caleb, Olsen, Elliette, and Iris.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  After

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  THE BENNINGTON MUSEUM of the Unusual and Rare was not an attraction that received many visitors. Most people had no idea it existed, which was exactly how the museum wanted it.

  The only regular visitor was James Bennington, who was also its owner and curator. He had put the greater part of a vast inheritance into it, and so he felt entitled to his nightly private tours, given only to himself, smirking proudly at his trophies.

  Other than James, the most frequent visitors were those delivering new items to the collection. As a courtesy, he would usually show them around, although even then he would keep back some of the more rare and famous pieces. It was better that no one knew about those. And he also took care on such tours to emphasize and demonstrate the scale and severity of the security systems in the building. Given the occupation of these visitors, and the temptation that his collection represented, it was wise to make clear up front that any attempt to steal from him would end abruptly and poorly.

  Once in a great while, he would have a friend in the museum, a fellow collector of the priceless. These occasions were rare because James had almost no friends. He liked to think that his collection was all the friend he needed. But if a collector of his caliber visited, he would give a tour on the understanding that this would be reciprocated later with a tour of the visitor’s collection. These were the only people James allowed to see the rarest pieces, partly to show them that he had definitely outdone them with his collection, and partly so that when he visited them, they would not hold anything back from him. There was an understanding among collectors such as he. They did not live ordinary lives, nor did they follow ordinary rules. They were better than that, and the scale of their collections was proof of their extraordinary natures.

  The Bennington Museum of the Unusual and Rare showed up in no guidebooks and had no reviews on the internet. It was not registered with any organization. In fact, to the world, it was not a museum, but simply James’s house, tucked safely away behind walls and gates and security cameras on a nondescript cul-de-sac in one of the many hillsides of Southern California settled by the wealthy and famous.

  James was not famous, had no interest at all in fame. Many of his neighbors were celebrities, and this only annoyed him, since it meant that cars and tour buses came by to look at the neighborhood where this actor or this sports star or whatever lived. He didn’t care about who his neighbors were. He only cared about his collection, and the absolute privacy of himself and his visitors.

  The reason he detested publicity was simple: his collection was not legal. Every item in it had been stolen, from museums mostly, or heavily guarded storage facilities, or sometimes from the homes of other collectors, although very rarely, because of course stealing from a fellow collector was only an invitation for them to steal from you. The illegal collecting community was built on a mutual trust that was, in turn, built on a mutual distrust.

  On this particular night in early October, an uncomfortably dry and warm fall evening, with the wind whipping hot and fast in from the desert, spreading a fire through the hills so the air was smoky and palpable even in this cloistered little neighborhood, miles from danger, James was expecting no visitors at all. Even a minute outside in these conditions left him choking and wiping at his eyes, so he had spent the day tucked safely away in the filtered and conditioned air of his museum.

  All to say that he was confused and frightened when there was a knock at the door. No one should have even been able to knock on his door, since it was behind a secure fence and past several sensors and cameras. But there was definitely a knock. He pulled out his phone and texted his chief of security, Donna. He had an on-site security staff at all times, and Donna herself practically lived at the house, overseeing its protection. She responded to any texts within seconds, twenty-four hours a day. But Donna did not reply to the text. Minutes passed with no reply. The knocking continued.

  He went to the intercom and flicked it on. “Go away,” he said, in a voice he incorrectly thought sounded brave. “There is armed security on its way. If you leave now, we won’t press charges.”

  “That’s not very welcoming at all,” a voice from close behind him said.

  He screamed and whirled around. There was a man wearing a uniform like an old-fashioned diner waiter, black pants and white shirt, and a white paper hat. Every part of his outfit was perfectly pressed and neatly maintained.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” the man said. He smiled, a warm and utterly false smile. “It’s only that no one was answering my knocking.”

  “The police are on their way,” James said. “You need to leave.”

  “The police?” the man said. “But you said it was armed security. Which is it, Mr. Bennington?”

  James heard a skittering sound. Like a swarm of insects. And was that a child who just ran down the hallway behind the man? It had looked like a child. No children had ever been allowed in the museum. He shuddered to think what a child might do to a collection like his.

  “No one is on their way, Mr. Bennington, are they?” the man said. He didn’t come any closer, leaning on the mantelpiece of one of the house’s eight fireplaces. “And you are fine. You are totally fine. We merely need one item from your collection.”

  “My collection is not for sale.”

  The man’s smile got wider. Hungrier. “We aren’t buying.”

  This time three children most definitely ran down the hall. They were wearing ragged and dirty Halloween costumes, although it wouldn’t be Halloween for another three weeks. One, dressed like a pirate, turned to look at James as they ran by, but the light flickered oddly and he couldn’t see the child’s face.

  “I have a security staff at all times,” James said. “They have the house surrounded.”

  “Oh?” the man said, looking around with a gleeful performance of curiosity. He examined the complete lack of other people in the vicinity, and then listened to the utter absence of approaching footsteps outside. He held up his hands, a pose that said, What are you going to do? Good help is hard to find.

  “I’m sure it’s as you say, sir,” the man said. “And while it’s true I myself don’t have a security staff to match the one that is undoubtedly on its way to arrest us, what I do have”—and here he unfolded one long, pale fi
nger to indicate behind James—“is her.”

  The woman was in the doorway behind him. She hadn’t been there before, and he was sure he hadn’t heard her approach. She was simply not there and then there. Pure power radiated from her. She was small, but her shadow stretched strangely across the room, far too long for her diminutive human form.

  “Hey there, sorry!” the woman said, scrunching her face apologetically. “This won’t take a sec, and then we’ll be totally out of your hair. Promise. I know I certainly hate unexpected visitors. Come on, Dan.”

  The peculiar man and the terrifying woman turned and walked down the hall toward the collection. James, despite his fear, hurried after them. No matter who these weirdos were, he would never let anyone touch his collection.

  But, to his horror, they already were. There were filthy, costumed children crawling all over the place, like an elementary school Halloween party, sitting inside cases that he had been assured were completely theft-proof, curiously picking up ancient urns and putting handprints on pieces of Renaissance art registered in international databases as “Permanently Lost.” It was his worst nightmare.

  The woman and her paper-hatted sidekick ignored the children and walked through the collection with a focused intent.

  “As we were told,” the woman said, stopping at one particular case. “Exactly what we needed.”

  James flapped his arms frantically.

  “Absolutely not. That statue is priceless. The artist died while carving it. You can see where he chipped the elbow as he collapsed. There have been entire books written about that statue. There is no piece of art like it in the country. In the world.”

  The paper-hatted man casually lifted the theft-proof plexiglass case, like it was the cover on the scrambled eggs at a free hotel breakfast.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart,” said the woman with the strange shadow. “I’ve no interest in the statue. See?”

  Like a cat knocking a glass off a table, she playfully scooted the statue to the edge of the display while James’s guts twisted, and then the statue fell and shattered. James couldn’t breathe. He would rather she had killed him. His collection was more than him. It was his legacy to the world, although he would never let the world see it.

  The woman laughed, and he knew then that she was not a woman. She was some seething, deep power, wearing the flimsy costume of a human, as false as the costumes on all these children that had somehow gotten into his museum. It was like the sun had put on a plastic dollar-store mask and strolled about the earth, pretending to be a person.

  “What I want,” the woman said, “is this.” She picked up what had been next to the statue and tossed it lightly from hand to hand.

  “That?” James said, when he found air again. “But that’s . . . I mean, in a collection like this . . . it has some interest, but it barely has value outside of the novelty . . .”

  “Perfect!” the woman said. “Then you won’t even miss it. It’ll be like we weren’t even here.”

  And just then they weren’t. James was once again alone with his collection. No children, no paper-hatted man, and no woman who was not a woman.

  He looked around and assessed the damage. The statue was unrecoverable, and that hit him in the guts all over again. And of course there was the theft of the trinket. But his museum was sprawling, with countless rare, one-of-a-kind items. All in all, he had made it through this okay. Terrified but okay. He put one hand on his chest, felt the air going in and out of his body, and let his racing heart settle back down to its usual pace.

  Which was when he heard the sound that had haunted his dreams for years. The wail of police sirens in his front drive.

  ESTHER GOLD LOVED HALLOWEEN.

  Maybe you love Halloween. Maybe you dress up every year and put a lot of time and care into your costume. Maybe you watch scary movies and then can’t sleep but also can’t resist watching more. Maybe candy corn tastes better to you than other candy not because it tastes better (it doesn’t) but because it tastes like a moment in time, like a season.

  But you don’t love Halloween the way Esther did.

  Esther refused to watch anything that wasn’t a scary movie. Her dad liked to watch sitcoms. Her mom liked to watch important dramas starring important people. Her brother liked watching movies in which people kissed, although he pretended he didn’t. But Esther only liked movies with darkness and Dutch angles and the part where the main character leans down to the sink to wash their face and then when they look up again there is a pale, menacing creature behind them in the mirror.

  Esther made three different costumes every Halloween. One was for school. One was for trick-or-treating. And one was in case the other two didn’t turn out as well as she had hoped. She put more time into her backup costume than most people put into any costume they would ever wear.

  Esther didn’t even like candy, but she collected as much as she possibly could for the sheer act of collecting it. She would eat some of it, sure, it was fine, but mostly the contents of her overflowing bag went to friends and to her brother or sometimes to the trash, if her parents discovered how much candy she had managed to collect.

  “Unhealthy,” her father often said. He was right.

  “Greedy,” her mother often said. She was wrong.

  Esther wasn’t greedy about the candy. She didn’t collect it merely to have it. She collected it because it was part of the ritual of Halloween, and more than anything, she loved this annual night when everyone gave up on being realistic, and clearheaded, and being too old for scary stories, and just let themselves pretend a little.

  This is what Halloween was to Esther. It was a night in which the whole neighborhood came together to tell a story, and, above all, Esther loved stories.

  Yes, Esther Gold loved Halloween. But one year, Halloween was not a holiday about getting together to pretend a scary story. One year, the scary story became real.

  ESTHER HAD ALWAYS BEEN the only Jewish kid in her grade. This had usually not mattered to her. Being Jewish wasn’t that big of a deal anymore, she would tell herself. But also it mattered a lot. It was both important and unimportant at the same time.

  If she had been asked to explain this, she wouldn’t have been able to, but she felt it.

  When she was eight, she and all the other kids she had grown up with had moved to a new school. They were leaving the school for the little kids and going to the school where they would be staying through junior high. It was a defining moment, as far as such terms apply in towns where not a lot ever happens.

  The first day of school had been on Yom Kippur. No one who set the calendar for the school district knew they had scheduled it this way. They didn’t know what Yom Kippur was.

  As the other kids got to know their new school, Esther spent the day in her synagogue, which was a thirty-minute drive from the town she lived in. When she arrived on the second day of school, everyone else knew where the bathrooms were, where to go for recess and lunch, and all of the new rules that had been explained to them while she was at synagogue. It felt like vertigo. Her hands shook, and she couldn’t make them stop.

  The teachers did their best to help her out, but none of them were very sympathetic. None of them could understand why she didn’t just show up to the first day of school.

  Her grandmother had been the one who taught Esther to love her Jewish identity, to be proud of it even if perhaps people treated her worse because of it. Her grandmother’s name was Debbie, and Esther’s parents would have named her after Debbie, except that Jewish people don’t name children after people who are still alive, so Esther had been named after her great-grandmother instead. It was Debbie who had first introduced Esther to a love of Halloween. Esther’s parents didn’t get it, but Debbie would have Esther over when she was little, take her trick-or-treating, and show her spooky movies probably a touch too old for her at the time.

  Now Esther was thirteen. Her bat mitzvah had been four months earlier. It was Halloween themed of course
, even though it was in June, which the kids at her synagogue would have found incredibly dorky if she had invited even a single one of them. They were all from the same town, which wasn’t her town, and so it felt like all of them were already friends with each other. There had never been room for her to join their close-knit cliques. And so while they invited each other to their bar and bat mitzvah parties, she only invited her family and a few non-Jewish friends from school. It was okay. The party ruled. She had a magician perform. She loved magicians for the same reason she loved Halloween; they told a story that promised a world more interesting than the world she had to live in. Grandma Debbie had loved it. The rest of the adults were less sure.

  “You know,” her dad had said at the party, looking over the paper cut-out bats and ghosts on the wall, “this means you’re an adult now. And adults don’t go trick-or-treating.”

  She had ignored that, and it hadn’t come up again since. She knew that eventually there would come a last year she could go door to door, walking past a few plastic pumpkins scattered half-heartedly on a lawn or past elaborate front yard displays full of fake body parts and light-up ghosts. There would come a last year she would feel that moment of anticipation and apprehension as she knocked on a stranger’s door and waited to see who would answer. There would come a last year for the satisfying weight of a full bag of candy after a round of trick-or-treating. But this was not that year. Next year maybe. Or the year after. Or the year after that.

  ON THE DAY BEFORE HALLOWEEN, Esther started her walk home from school by herself. Her parents let her walk alone because their house was only ten minutes away from the school, and the roads between were all quiet and suburban. Still, many of her friends’ parents gawped in horror as they watched her go right past the waiting line of SUVs and minivans in the school parking lot, shocked to see her step out onto a public sidewalk rather than get into an air-conditioned vehicle.

  Sasha Min’s mother called, “Do you want a ride, honey?” And Sasha groaned from the back, where she was sitting next to her brother, Edward, in his car seat.