The Halloween Game

My name is Steven Kerns.
Yes.
That Steven Kerns.
If you are reading this, it is probably because my lawyer released this document after something happened to me. I told him to put it somewhere people might at least consider whether it was true.
I wish it weren’t.
If you grew up anywhere near Sun Valley, you already know the story they told on television. You know about the old Swenson Mine. You know about the missing students. You know about the cave-in, the memorial service in the football stadium, the candles on the chain-link fence, and the parents holding school pictures in front of news cameras, begging for answers no one could give them.
You know the official version.
A Halloween party got out of hand. Someone brought drugs. Someone dragged industrial speakers into an abandoned mine. The bass shook loose old stone, the ceiling came down, and a fifth of Grover Cleveland High vanished into the earth.
That’s the version people can survive.
This is the version I have spent twenty-six years trying not to tell.
I have started writing this stupid thing at least a hundred times. Sometimes I get through the first page. Sometimes, I only type my name and close the laptop. Once, a therapist told me that putting trauma into words can give you power over it.
That sounds nice. But really, words don’t give you power over anything. They just make a door into the past.
The past can’t hurt you, can it?
I guess you’ll figure that out.
First, I need to tell you about Sun Valley.
It was the kind of town people moved to when they wanted their kids to ride bikes until dark. Big trees. Wide streets. Little League fields. Churches with signs that said things like GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL. Enough woods and farmland around the edges to make every kid believe there were still places adults had not ruined.
My dad owned a restaurant downtown: Kerns Kitchen.
Nothing fancy. Burgers, sandwiches, fries, homemade pies in a glass case near the register. The kind of place where cops came in for coffee, old men argued about baseball, and every waitress knew who was getting divorced before their spouse did.
By the time I was eleven, I was delivering sandwiches on my bike. Dad called it “building character.” I called it child labor. He paid me in tips and free Tae Kwon Do lessons from Master Brown’s Dojo-Rama across the street.
Master Brown got a Cuban sandwich every day.
I got thrown around by bigger kids twice a week.
It was a fair trade, I guess.
My real love was horror. Monsters, slashers, haunted houses, graveyards, urban legends, fake blood, cheap masks, late-night creature features, all of it. I loved being scared because fear had rules. The monster came out. The girl screamed. The music swelled. The credits rolled, the lights came on, and you went home.
I had three best friends who understood.
Carl was our photographer. Sandy hair, permanent smirk, medium build, always looking like he had just thought of something that would get him punched if he said it out loud. He usually said it anyway.
Karen was our researcher. Dark hair, glasses thick enough to weaponize sunlight, and the uncanny ability to disappear in plain sight. She wrote for the school paper and spent half her life in the library reading microfiche like it was holy writ.
Then there was Jeri.
Jeri was our glue. She had acquired all of us at one point or another. She lived four streets over from me. We had known each other since first grade. Strawberry-blonde hair. A dash of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Blue eyes that crinkled at the corners when she smiled.
That was the thing people noticed about Jeri. Her smile always reached her eyes even when she was sad.
People would say that she was fearless, but that wasn’t true. She was afraid of plenty of things. She was just angrier than she was afraid when something was unfair.
In fifth grade, a seventh grader shoved Karen into the mud after school. Jeri hit him with a right cross so clean he sat down like somebody had folded him.
In middle school, she was the only girl who would ride bikes with us down the drainage ditch behind Miller Park. She was also the only one who would call us cowards if we braked too early.
For most of my life, Jeri was just Jeri.
Then, slowly and all at once, she was not.
The first time I remember feeling the change, even though I would not have had the guts to name it, was one night after closing at my dad’s restaurant.
It was mid-July. We were fourteen. Maybe fifteen. I was mopping the front while Jeri sat on the counter by the pie case, eating fries out of a red plastic basket.
“You missed a spot,” she said.
“You’re stealing fries.”
“I’m Quality Control.”
The restaurant was strange after hours. During the day, it was all noise: orders, dishes, fries hissing in the fryer, the bell above the door, my dad’s voice calling through the pass. At night, after the chairs were flipped onto the tables and the neon sign went dark, it felt hollow and lonely.
Jeri looked out the front window at Main Street.
When I was little, every window downtown had something in it. Shoes. Flowers. Used books. Hardware. Poofy dresses on headless mannequins. By then, a few had gone dark. A few more had papered-over windows and COMING SOON signs that never seemed to come soon.
“Do you think you’ll run this place someday?” she asked.
I leaned on the mop. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I don’t know. Dad’s been asking me to work more weekends. He keeps muttering about crazy developers and rent going up. Plus, I’m pretty good at carrying sandwiches. Those are basically management qualifications around here.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I want to be an architect,” I said. “Maybe. If I can break away from the shop. I don’t know if Dad wants to afford more help that isn’t me and my slave wages. The penny-pinching Scrooge.”
She nodded, but not like she agreed.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Jeri.”
She pushed a fry around the basket. “Do you ever get scared Sun Valley is just going to keep us?”
I laughed because I thought she was joking.
She was not.
“I mean it,” she said plaintively. “Like one day we wake up and we’re still here. Same streets. Same people. The same old stories. Everybody knowing everybody’s business. You become your dad. I become my mom. Carl takes pictures of kids with bad haircuts for their yearbooks until he dies. Karen writes newspaper articles about the annual bake sale and city council meetings. And we all pretend that’s what we wanted because leaving just never happened.”
I did not know what to say to that. I was fourteen. I thought sadness was something that happened when your pet died.
I paused for a moment, not knowing what to say at first, and eventually said, “Being stuck somewhere with the right people wouldn’t be the worst thing.”
Jeri looked at me then. Not smiling. Just looking.
“Maybe,” she said.
Then she threw a fry at my face and told me I had missed another spot.
For years, I remembered the way that night ended as sweet.
Our other thing was October.
Every year, the four of us tried to scare each other. Karen found the legends. Carl handled props and photographs. Jeri pretended not to be scared. I made sarcastic remarks until I actually got scared, at which point I made louder sarcastic remarks.
The year before everything happened, Carl got a bootleg copy of Children of the Corn from his cousin and we watched it in my basement.
It was fitting, as my house backed up to an actual cornfield.
So afterward, naturally, Jeri said, “Let’s go.”
Karen said, “Absolutely not.”
Carl said, “Allergies. Sorry.”
In the end, Carl and Karen stayed inside, arguing over whether Malachi was creepier than Isaac. Jeri and I went out the back door.
It was late. The moon was thin and high. The corn stood over our heads, dry leaves rustling against each other in the dark. The field belonged to Mr. Granger, who did not care if neighborhood kids cut through it as long as they did not knock down rows.
We stepped in.
Ten feet.
Twenty.
Then far enough that my house disappeared behind us.
Jeri walked ahead, dragging one hand along the stalks.
“Still not scared, Kerns?”
“Of corn? No.”
“Of He Who Walks Behind the Rows?”
“That movie had a budget of twelve dollars and a goat.”
She laughed.
Somewhere deeper in the field, something moved.
We both stopped.
It was not the wind. Wind moves through corn in waves. This was different. A single shape pushing against the rows, then stopping when we stopped.
“Rabbit,” I whispered.
“Pretty tall rabbit.”
The corn ahead of us bent.
Not left.
Not right.
Down.
As if something behind the stalks had lowered itself.
I felt every clever thing I had ever said drain out of my head.
“Jeri,” I whispered.
She looked at me, and for once, she actually looked scared.
She stared, paralyzed, at the sight of what was in front of us. Then she said, “Just don’t run before I do?”
The sound came again, but now it was behind us.
A dry, sliding scrape.
Then a hitching breath.
The stupid thing is, I still do not know what it was. Maybe a deer. Maybe some older kid messing with us. Maybe a farm tarp caught on some wire. Maybe nothing. When you’re afraid, you can rationalize that nothing is something, and that nothing wasn’t the worst thing you could imagine.
But I know what I saw next.
The rows in front of us parted.
Something pale moved between them.
Not walking.
Shifting. Like it was turning around using the wrong joints.
I started to turn to run.
Jeri grabbed my wrist.
Her hand was cold.
“Don’t,” she whispered.
The thing in the corn shifted again. I thought I heard a muffled clicking noise.
Jeri slid her fingers between mine and squeezed hard enough to hurt.
“Take my hand,” she said.
Then she pulled me, and we ran.
Not gracefully. Not bravely. We crashed through rows, gasping and almost falling, corn leaves whipping our faces. Something moved behind us for a while. Maybe it followed. Maybe it didn’t.
We burst into my backyard and kept running until we hit the porch steps.
Then we collapsed there, out of breath.
Carl opened the back door staring at us in mild concern. “You guys okay?”
Jeri looked at me.
I looked at her.
We both started laughing so hard Karen thought we had lost our minds.
Later, when Carl and Karen were gone and Jeri was walking her bike to the driveway, she turned back.
“Promise me you’ll never run before I do,” she said.
“Deal,” I said.
She pointed at me. “I mean it.”
“So do I.”
I did.
Help me, but I did.
Before I tell you what happened next, I need to tell you about Jack Vance.
Every school has a version of him, or thinks it does.
Handsome. Blonde. Rich. Athletic. Effortless. The kind of kid adults called “a natural leader” because they did not have to sit behind him in 4th grade while he shot rubber bands at the back of somebody’s neck.
Jack and I first met when we were both five at Valley Montessori Kindergarten and Pre-K. My mom ran the school out of a storefront about a block from the restaurant. I went there because my mom could keep an eye on me. Jack went there because it was legitimately a good school and met his parents’ high standards.
Jack and I both loved He-Man.
At five, that was basically a blood oath of loyalty.
We played together all summer. We brought plastic swords. We fought imaginary Skeletors. We both hated Teela because she was always ruining perfectly good fun with responsible behavior.
One afternoon during rest time, I cried.
I do not remember why. Maybe my mom was out that day and I missed her. Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was five, and five-year-olds are just weird little people. I hid my face in my blanket and tried to be quiet, but Jack saw.
He sat beside me and said he would not tell anybody.
I was grateful.
On the first day of first grade at the elementary school, Jack came in with new shoes, new clothes, and a backpack that looked like it belonged to a kid in a commercial for a better life.
I had the same backpack and clothes I had all summer.
When I saw Jack, I started toward him.
He saw me coming. Then he turned to a boy in nicer clothes than mine and said, loud enough for me to hear, “That’s the kid who cries for his mommy at nap time.”
The other boy laughed.
I stopped.
I remember that more clearly than I remember whole years of my life. I remember the waxy smell of the hallway floor. I remember my throat closing. I remember my eyes burning as I held back the tears, because crying right then would have made me a baby forever.
Then a strawberry-blonde girl stepped in front of me.
She held out her hand.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Jeri.”
That was it.
No speech. No dramatic rescue. She just chose me at the exact moment Jack threw me away.
I took her hand.
And with my new friend in tow, I did not give Jack a second thought.
I stayed away from Jack after that. He was a talented douche. His father was the most successful attorney in town. People said he mostly handled real estate contracts, development deals, and whatever else rich men paid other rich men to make look legal. That was why Jack wore clothes that cost more than my bike and drove a silver BMW Z3 before most of us had licenses.
Jack did not bully like stupid kids bullied. He rarely shouted. He almost never got into fights.
He did not need to.
Jack made people move out of his way and thank him for the privilege.
In elementary school, he was spoiled. In middle school, he was a jerk. By high school, something around him had changed.
I don’t mean he changed. Everyone else did.
Teachers laughed too hard at his jokes. Girls watched him like they were waiting for him to decide whether they existed. Guys who should have hated him saved him a seat and repeated his opinions.
Some people wanted his attention.
Some people were afraid of it.
During sophomore geometry, Mr. Lewis handed Jack back a test with a B+ written at the top. Mr. Lewis’s hand shook when Jack stared at the grade.
Jack did not say anything. His face just went still.
Mr. Lewis started stammering. He said Jack could stay after class for fifteen minutes and tidy up the room for extra credit. Enough to make it an A.
Jack stared at him. Then he smiled.
“No problem,” Jack said. “I can do that for you.”
For you.
Like it was a favor for Mr. Lewis.
That was Jack. If he liked you, doors opened. Mr. Lewis became vice-principal the next year, which I am sure was a total coincidence with his mom being president of the PTA. If Jack did not like you, other things happened.
Ask Hayward.
Hayward transferred in halfway through junior year. Big kid. Size seventeen shoes. Basketball player.
One afternoon during gym that winter, Hayward blocked Jack hard to the ground, stole the ball, and sank the winning shot while Jack was still down.
Nobody cheered.
Hayward tilted his head back in ritual one-upmanship, then offered him a hand.
Jack slapped it away and walked into the locker room.
That afternoon, Hayward was killed in a crosswalk by a Dew Drop Dairy truck that should have been parked across town. The driver tested negative for drugs and alcohol, had no medical episode anyone could prove, and had no memory of leaving work.
Jack’s dad represented him.
He got probation.
Nobody connected it to Jack.
Nobody wanted to, or even could.
Later that year, Karen signed the four of us up to make banners for the marching band’s trip to compete in the Bands of America regional tournament. She played flute and took band more seriously than most people take organ donation.
We had about three gallons of poster paint, and a few hundred yards of poster paper on big rolls. Carl’s little brother Ian came to help, but mostly kept trying to turn people’s names into dirty words.
After the third warning, we rolled him in about ten yards of poster paper and taped him into a cocoon.
For safety.
Then Ian lost his balance and fell face-first into a roller tray of red paint.
That was when Carl named him the Tampon of Terror.
Karen was not amused.
Jeri tried very hard not to laugh and failed completely.
“I’m telling Mom,” Ian yelled from the floor.
Carl said, “Tell her you became a man today.”
Karen threw a paintbrush at him.
Jeri volunteered to get paper towels, partly because she was nice and partly because she wanted to laugh somewhere Karen couldn’t glare at her.
After several minutes of listening to the Tampon of Terror complain about his condition, I went to find her and escape the caterwauling.
I turned the corner and saw someone standing in front of Jeri with his back to me.
Even before he turned, I knew it was Jack.
He held two tickets between his fingers like they were religious artifacts.
“I’m going to Smashing Pumpkins this Saturday,” he said. “My dad’s friend is the promoter. We scored backstage passes. I’m probably getting Billy Corgan’s autograph again.”
Again.
That was Jack. Even his bragging came with a receipt.
Jeri looked over his shoulder and saw me.
Her face lit up, and for one stupid second I felt like somebody had opened all the windows in the school.
“Wow,” she said to Jack. “You’re soooo cool.”
Jack smirked.
Then Jeri tossed me a roll of paper towels.
“But I have to help Kerns with a feminine hygiene emergency.”
Jack’s smile stayed where it was, but the rest of him went cold.
I held up the paper towels. “Sorry. The Tampon of Terror waits for no man.”
Jeri linked her arm through mine as we walked away.
Carl started singing before we even got back to the art room.
“We’re off to see the tampon,” he sang, in the tune of The Wizard of Oz. “The terrible tampon of—”
Karen yelled, “Absolutely not.”
Jeri laughed so hard she had to lean against me.
I felt Jack watching us from the hallway.
I was too happy to care.
That was my mistake with Jack, over and over again.
I kept thinking he was angry about big things.
He was usually angry about small ones.
The summer between junior and senior year, we watched Demon Knight at Jeri’s house and ate pizza by her pool. Carl went inside for another slice. Karen went to the bathroom. The pool lights reflected off the water, highlighting Jeri’s face. Her hair billowed slightly around her face, moved by a soft breeze.
I looked at her, and something in me quietly ruined itself forever.
I realized Jeri was possibly the most beautiful girl I had ever seen.
She noticed.
“Kerns?” she said. “Is something wrong?”
I told her I thought there was a fly on her face.
A fly.
That was my best move. Call me Don Juan.
For the next two weeks, I became the worst version of myself. I made dumb jokes, then explained them, then tried to save the explanations with worse jokes. Karen watched me like I was a medical case. Privately, Carl told me it was obvious that I had become “romantically concussed.”
Then came the worst news I had ever received up to that point in my life.
Jeri was going on a three-week Hawaiian cruise with Jack Vance’s family.
And Jack Vance.
The official story went that Jeri’s father’s law practice was being bought out. Apparently, Jack’s dad had offered Jeri’s dad a position at his firm. To celebrate, both families were taking a cruise together.
Jeri was furious.
“I cannot spend three weeks with that creep and his creepy family,” she said in my driveway, pacing circles around her bike. “Three weeks. That is not a vacation. That is a hostage situation.”
“Fake an illness,” I said.
“I tried.”
“Which one?”
“All of them.”
She tried to stay with Karen instead. Her parents said no.
My stomach started to knot. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen.
The day before Jeri left, Carl, Karen, and I went to her house with a going-away gift: two disposable cameras and a list Karen had typed up of Hawaiian ghost stories, haunted places, and monsters Jeri should try to photograph.
Karen hugged her.
Carl high-fived her.
I waved like an idiot and started to leave, then turned back.
“Jeri,” I said, “don’t let Hawaii mess with your head.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I mean, you’ll be somewhere beautiful. With Jack. He has a reputation… J-just don’t get caught up in the moment.”
A smile pulled at the corner of her mouth.
“Why, Kerns,” she said, “are you jealous?”
I must have turned red enough to be visible from space.
She stepped closer and put her hand on my wrist.
“Don’t worry about me,” she whispered. “I know who I want to be with.”
Then her dad called from inside.
She turned and yelled that she was coming. Then she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
“See you in three weeks,” she said.
I rode home grinning so hard my mother asked if I was on drugs.
My father looked up from the newspaper and said, “Yeah. Hormones.”
That was the happiest night of my life.
Three weeks later, she came back.
I knew because I saw her father’s Lexus turn into the neighborhood while I was standing in our driveway pretending not to watch the road.
I had been planning the smoothest date possible for days. I found an old laserdisc player at the thrift store and, sitting right on top of the stack: Children of the Corn. It was meant to be. I bought the player and the movie for fifteen dollars. I hauled a tube TV and a card table to the edge of the cornfield behind my house. I borrowed four extension cords. I even wrote an invitation by hand.
One private screening.
Nine o’clock.
Just us.
I waited until three in the afternoon to bike over because I had decided to act cool.
A silver BMW Z3 was in her driveway.
I almost turned around.
Instead, I knocked.
Jeri’s mother answered. She looked tired, but happy in a polished way, like her house had company she wanted to impress.
“She’s out back,” she said. “You can go around.”
I walked along the side of the house with the invitation folded in my pocket.
Through the gap in the tall bushes, I saw the pool.
Jeri sat at the edge with her legs in the water. Her hair was wet, slicked back from her face. She looked different. Older, maybe. Sharper. As if someone had taken the girl I knew and increased the contrast.
Jack was in the pool beside her.
I could not hear what he said.
Jeri turned her face away.
Jack reached up and touched her chin.
Not hard.
Not gently either.
Just enough to turn her back.
I stepped backward before either of them saw me.
Maybe she pulled away. Maybe she slapped him.
But I saw her let him touch her face.
That was enough.
I rode home with the invitation crushed in my pocket.
After that, Jeri was gone without being gone.
She still came to school. She still smiled sometimes. But not at us.
Carl noticed first.
“She’s not herself,” he said one afternoon while we were supposed to be doing homework at my house.
Karen looked up from her notebook. “No. She’s performing herself badly.”
That was exactly it. Every time I saw her, it felt like a knife was cutting and re-cutting the same spot over and over again in my gut. The pain turned to despair. And just like that, Carl, Karen, and I started to become strangers again.
Jack’s table at lunch had grown. It was not just jocks and rich kids anymore. Stoners. Theater kids. Student council girls. A sophomore who used to eat alone. A janitor. Sometimes, young teachers hovered nearby, laughing at things they could not possibly have heard.
People came into Jack’s orbit all day.
They did those fake handshakes everyone recognizes even when no one says what they are. Whatever they passed around, people called it Glow.
I heard the name in bathrooms, behind the gym, under the bleachers, whispered like a password and begged for like water.
It came in pills. Sometimes powder. Pale yellow, almost white, until the light hit it wrong.
Jack never touched it. That was something I noticed without understanding why it mattered. He would hand it out. He would let others kiss his ring for it. He would smile while people crawled for it. But when someone offered to share a bag with him once, he slapped the kid’s face hard enough to split the boy’s lip.
“Not for me,” Jack said.
The boy started apologizing so fast he could barely breathe.
Jeri watched from beside Jack, one hand resting lightly on his shoulder. She looked, of all things, like a Roman statue. Pale and breathtaking. She did not say anything. She just looked at the bag on the floor like it was something dirty.
The first time I saw what Glow could do, a freshman with gray skin and dark bags under his eyes pushed through Jack’s crowd and dropped to his knees.
He said something I could not hear.
Jack’s face went cold.
Then Jeri put her hand on Jack’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.
Jack smiled.
He said something to the freshman.
The boy shook his head.
Jeri leaned close and touched his cheek.
The freshman stood, walked into the center of the hallway, stripped naked, and began screaming the school fight song until two security guards dragged him away.
Jack’s crowd laughed until they cried.
Jeri laughed too.
A small laugh.
Careful.
Like she was trying it on.
I tried to stay away after that.
I lasted four days.
Then I saw something worse.
It was between classes near the trophy case outside the gym. Jack was holding court with Jeri tucked under his arm. Not trapped exactly. Displayed. Like a watch. Like a car. Like something expensive he wanted other people to notice.
Someone in the group mentioned Halloween.
One of Jack’s stoner friends said he did not understand why people liked being scared.
Jeri said, “Because being scared is fun when it ends.”
My head snapped up.
That was something she had said to me once. Years before. Almost exactly.
Maybe she had forgotten.
Maybe she had not.
I do not know why I spoke. I should not have.
I said, “I hear you’re still scared of He Who Walks Behind the Rows.”
The hallway did not go silent all at once.
It thinned.
That is the only way I can explain it. Conversations lost volume. People still moved, but slower. Like the whole school had stilled like a jungle when a predator was near.
Jeri looked at me.
For half a second, she was there.
The real Jeri.
Her eyes widened. The corners crinkled.
She almost laughed.
Not the new laugh, the practiced one.
Hers.
Then she saw Jack watching her.
The laugh died.
Jack’s face did not change much. That was the frightening thing. No rage. No sneer. Just attention.
He looked from Jeri to me.
Jack smiled thinly.
“It’s an old joke,” she said.
Jack stepped toward me, assessing me.
I wanted to disappear. I wanted to stand my ground. I did neither. I just stood there, sweating through my shirt.
Jack looked me up and down.
“Rent going up?” he said.
I had no idea what he meant.
Jeri did.
I saw it in her face.
Calculation.
Then the smile.
“Oh my gosh, Kerns,” she said, loud enough for everyone nearby to hear. “Don’t be weird.”
Someone laughed.
I looked at her.
She rolled her eyes. “It’s obvious you have a thing for me. I feel embarrassed for you.”
My face reddened.
More laughter.
Not much.
Enough.
Jack kept watching me. He was not enjoying the humiliation the way everyone else was. He was studying it.
Jeri’s arm slithered through his.
“I was only nice to you because I felt sorry for you. You three really are a bunch of freaks,” she said.
I looked at the floor.
The crowd started to disperse as the first bell rang.
Jack passed close enough that his shoulder brushed mine.
“Are you still here?” he whispered.
Then they were gone.
For weeks, I told myself that was the end.
It should have been.
October came.
That used to be our month. Horror marathons. Costume planning. Fake cobwebs. Arguing over whether Halloween or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was scarier. This year, no one had the heart for it.
Then Jeri called.
After nearly three months of nothing, she called my house and asked if the band of misfits could come over on October 30th.
I almost said no.
I should have.
But her voice sounded small.
Not cold. Not cruel.
Small.
So I went.
Carl and Karen came too.
Jeri answered the door in jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt. She wore more makeup than she used to, but not enough to look strange. Just enough to look older. Her hair was pulled back. Her eyes were tired.
For the first few minutes, no one knew what to say.
Then Jeri started crying.
She told us Jack had trapped her.
She said her father’s practice had been failing. She said Jack’s father had offered him a job, but only after Jack approved. She said Jack had threatened to ruin her family if she embarrassed him. She said the cruise had been a nightmare. She said she had tried to get away from him but did not know how.
She said Jack had not been awful the whole time. That was what made it worse, she said. Sometimes he was funny. Sometimes he listened. Sometimes he made Sun Valley seem so small that she felt stupid for ever being afraid of leaving it.
“I hated him for making sense,” she said.
Karen put her arm around her.
Jeri wiped under one eye. “I hated myself more.”
She said the hallway scene had been self-defense.
“I saw his face,” she said, looking at me. “When you said that thing about HE WHO WALKS BEHIND, I saw what he was going to do. I had to make him think you meant nothing.”
Carl muttered, “I’m going to put that guy’s head through a windshield.”
I said nothing.
Jeri looked at me.
“I’m sorry, Steve.”
That was all I needed.
That was the shame of it.
Not proof. Not logic. Not time.
Just those three words from the person I had wanted back.
Then she told us Jack was out of town for the weekend with his father. She wanted one night away from him. One night like before.
She pulled a half sheet of paper from her pocket.
It looked like it had been cut by hand.
Come one, come all
to the scariest puzzle
you’ll be dying to solve.
THE HALLOWEEN GAME
Swenson Mine
October 15–31
6 PM–11 PM
Admission $5
Karen frowned. “I’ve heard people talking about this, but I never saw an ad.”
“They ran out of money for advertising,” Jeri said. “Some of the rich kids have made it a hangout after school. I also heard that some other kids from school are working there. It’s supposed to be amazing. There are some really tough puzzles, and plenty of scares.”
Carl grinned. “A haunted house in an abandoned mine. That sounds legally indefensible.”
Jeri smiled.
“Finally, a real smile,” I thought.
“I thought you guys would like it.”
I looked at her.
She looked back.
“I’m in,” I said.
On Halloween night, Carl drove us in his dad’s old Chevy pickup.
Karen sat up front. Jeri and I sat in the back. The cab was too small, so our knees touched every time Carl hit a bump. Jeri did not move away.
For twenty minutes, it almost felt like before.
Carl did a terrible Dracula voice. Karen corrected his pronunciation of “Samhain” three separate times. Jeri laughed at both of them. Once, when Carl took a turn too fast, Jeri grabbed my hand to steady herself. As she grabbed my arm, her sleeve moved up and I saw dark bruises on the inside of her arm.
She let go after a second.
Then, quietly, where only I could hear, she said, “See? I still take your hand.”
I believed her, and a knot in my stomach that I didn’t know had formed there started to loosen.
The entrance to Swenson Mine was marked by a cardboard sign taped to a wooden stake.
THE HALLOWEEN GAME
THIS WAY
Two dozen cars sat in the gravel lot. I recognized most of them from school.
A girl from our grade stood at the mine entrance dressed as a witch. Megan. Or Morgan. I don’t remember. She wore a pointed hat and a black dress too thin for the cold.
She stood very straight.
“Are you ready for the game?” she asked.
Jeri said, “We are.”
We handed the girl $5 each, and in turn she handed us a novelty flashlight shaped like a skull.
“Don’t get lost,” she sang.
The mine swallowed sound.
Twenty steps in, the air turned cold. Yellow utility bulbs hung every twenty feet, making weak circles of light along the tunnel. Between them, the dark looked thick.
Actors jumped out at us in cheap masks.
A vampire.
A scarecrow.
A man with a chainsaw that had no chain.
One boy in a pig mask stepped too close to me. He did not yell. He did not laugh. He just leaned in until the rubber snout almost touched my face.
His breathing clicked behind the mask.
Jeri’s voice went flat.
“Back off.”
The boy backed away quickly.
We came to a fork.
A sign stood between two black openings.
DO YOU CELEBRATE SAMHAIN?
Under the left arrow:
CHAN EIL.
Under the right:
THA.
Karen adjusted her glasses. “Tha means yes in Gaelic.”
Carl swept his arm toward the right tunnel. “Ladies first.”
The lights went out as soon as we stepped through.
Jeri’s hand disappeared from mine.
Something dropped over my head.
A sweet chemical smell filled my mouth and nose.
Then nothing.
I woke up with my ribs on fire.
At first, I did not know where I was. I did not know if my eyes were open. My tongue felt swollen. My mouth tasted like pennies and dust.
Someone was crying next to me.
“Steve,” a voice whispered. “Steve, please wake up.”
Jeri.
I forced my eyes open.
I was lying on stone. My hands were tied behind my back. My ankles were bound. Carl and Karen lay nearby, still unconscious.
Jeri was on her side facing me. Her wrists were tied too. Mascara streaked her cheeks. She looked terrified.
“They’re going to kill us,” she whispered.
My mind rejected the sentence.
“Who?”
“Jack.” Her voice broke. “He set it up. The Halloween Game. All of it. He knew. He knew I came with you. He said he needed four sacrifices.”
I pulled against the rope until it cut my wrists.
“Jeri, listen. We’ll get out.”
She shook her head.
“You don’t understand. This is because of me.”
“No.”
“It is. I’m sorry,” she cried.
I looked at her in the dim yellow light, dirty and crying and beautiful in a way that made my chest ache worse than my ribs.
For the last time in my life, I believed that love could still fix all of this.
“I love you,” I said.
Her face crumpled.
“I love you too, Steve.”
Then she asked, in a trembling voice, “Are you a virgin?”
The question was so strange I almost did not understand it.
“What?”
“Jack said the sacrifices have to be virgins.”
I stared at her for a few moments.
“Yes,” I said softly.
Jeri closed her eyes.
She began to sob.
Her shoulders shook.
Then the sobbing changed.
Not a little laugh.
Not a broken laugh.
A full, bright, delighted laugh.
The sound of someone who had been holding it in all night.
“Oh, Steve,” she said, sitting up.
Her hands were not tied anymore.
“That was perfect.”
Lights snapped on.
The cavern erupted.
People surrounded us. Students. Teachers. The driver who killed Hayward. Mr. Lewis. The girl from the entrance. Jocks. Stoners. Girls from student council. Kids I had known since elementary school.
They packed the cavern wall to wall, laughing at us.
No.
Not laughing.
Clicking.
Jack Vance stepped into view.
He wore a black suit and expensive loafers dusted white from the mine floor.
His eyes were black.
Not dark.
Black.
He crouched beside me and roughly grabbed my hair, lifting my face until I had to look at him.
“Welcome, freaks,” he said.
The cavern cheered.
Jeri walked to him.
Not ran.
Walked.
Slowly, so everyone could see her.
She threaded herself under Jack’s arm and kissed his cheek.
“Did I do good?” she simpered.
Her voice had changed.
Not entirely. That was the worst part. It was her voice. But there was something curled inside it now. Something off and pleased with itself.
Jack smiled.
“You were perfect, Baby J.”
She beamed.
I stared at her.
She looked down at me and smiled with those same blue eyes that used to crinkle at the corners.
They didn’t crinkle now.
“You should see your face,” she said.
Karen came awake just then. She lifted her head from the stone.
“Jeri?” she whispered hoarsely.
Jeri turned toward her.
For a second, I hoped.
I still hoped.
Jeri crouched near Karen and brushed the hair from her face.
“Oh, Karen,” she purred. “You never knew how annoying you were to me.”
Karen flinched.
Jeri leaned closer.
“So self-righteous. I always wished someone would put you in your place.”
Then she slapped Karen hard enough that Karen’s head cracked against the stone.
Carl started shouting through the fog of whatever they had drugged us with. Someone kicked him in the ribs until he stopped. All I could hear then was ragged breathing.
Jack raised both hands, and the crowd quieted.
“I know what you’re wondering,” he said. “Why you? Why tonight? Why all this effort for three people of no value?”
He glanced at Jeri.
“Go on,” he said. “Tell them.”
Jeri stood.
I had seen her give presentations in English class. I had seen her read lines from bad plays in Karen’s basement. I had seen her tell ghost stories around flashlights with a blanket over her shoulders.
She wasn’t doing any of those now.
She was worshiping.
“We needed clean offerings,” she said loudly. “No serious drugs. No alcohol. No contamination.”
She smiled beatifically at me then.
“The virgin thing was extra. That was for me.”
She looked at Carl. “Carl was easy to get there. He’s just a follower. Nothing to him.”
Carl spat blood onto the stone.
Jeri smiled at Karen. “Karen needed a puzzle to solve so she could prove she was worthwhile.”
Karen closed her eyes.
Then Jeri looked at me.
“And Steve needed to think he mattered.”
There are sentences that split your life into before and after.
That one was mine.
“You knew I’d come,” I said.
“Of course I knew.” She sounded almost offended. “I knew exactly what to say. Jack said we could just grab you, but Yoth rewards a deeper cut. You had to walk in. You had to choose to be taken.”
Jack rested his chin on her shoulder.
“She really does hate you, Steve,” he said.
Jeri reached up and touched his cheek.
“I wanted it done right.”
My throat tightened.
“The crying,” I said.
She smiled wider.
“I practiced.”
The crowd laughed.
“The hallway?” I asked.
For the first time, a flicker of annoyance crossed her face.
Then it was gone.
“The hallway was a demonstration,” she said. “Jack reminded me how you wanted to trap me in HELL.”
Jack’s hand slid around the back of her neck.
She relaxed into him.
“You said that movie thing,” she continued. “Do you know how stupid you sounded to everyone?”
I could not answer.
“Jack knew how pitiful I was, and how you are,” she said. “Hawaii was boring sometimes. So, we talked. I told him about the restaurant. The cornfield. The pool. The little kiss. All of it.”
Jack kissed the side of her head.
“She kept saying your name,” he said.
Jeri rolled her eyes. “I was trapped.”
“You were unfinished,” Jack said indulgently.
She smiled at that.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s better.”
Then she looked at me again.
“You know what the funny thing is? You thought you were saving me from him. But he was the first person who ever understood ME.”
“You wanted this?” I asked.
“I wanted OUT.”
Her voice sharpened.
“I wanted more than Sun Valley. More than being nice. More than being the only brave one. More than sitting in your dad’s restaurant pretending that eating fries after closing was a life.”
That hit hard.
She stepped toward me.
Jack let her go.
The crowd made a low sound as she crossed the stone floor. Not cheering. Not laughing. Something expectant.
She came close.
Too close.
Close enough that I could smell her breath. Sweet. Chemical. Like a gift shop at a hospital.
Her face stopped inches from mine.
I thought she might touch me.
I thought she might slap me.
I thought she might kiss me.
She did none of those things.
Her hand lifted a little, almost lazily, then stopped before her fingers reached my cheek.
Her face twisted then into something ugly and disgusted.
I could not breathe.
“You were suffocating me, Steve,” she said. “I always had to do everything.”
She leaned even closer.
“You never stopped being that crying boy in the hallway.”
Images flashed in my mind: Jack. First grade. The hallway. Crying for my mom. Jeri’s hand held out to me.
Hi. I’m Jeri.
“You loved that girl, because you knew she would do all the work,” she whispered. “Not me. I was going to let you drain my life away.”
“That’s not true.”
Her smile widened.
“I choose what happens now.”
Behind her, Jack’s smile changed.
It did not disappear. It only changed shape.
I saw him see it. Not concern. Calculation.
Jeri did not notice.
Or maybe she did and did not care.
She was too bright by then. Too full of whatever was running through her. Her eyes were not wild. They were worse than wild.
They were certain.
Jack removed a small vial from his pocket.
The liquid inside was yellow. It glowed faintly between his fingers.
Jeri’s expression changed when she saw it.
Blank fixation.
Not hunger.
Naked need.
“Please,” she whimpered.
Jack held the vial just out of reach.
“Ask nicely.”
She pressed herself against him sensually in a way that made my cheeks burn.
“Please, Jack.”
The crowd went quiet.
“Say it.”
Jeri looked at me while she said it.
“Please, Jack. Give Baby J her Glow.”
He handed it to her. A vial that glowed like a light underneath thick glass.
She took it with shaking fingers.
I will not describe everything she did next. I have spent too many years trying not to remember it. I will only say there was incredible, practiced efficiency and a needle. When the yellow fluid entered the bruised crook of her arm, the veins beneath her skin lit black-purple for one terrible second.
Her mouth opened.
The sound she made was not pleasure, exactly.
It was recognition.
Like something inside her had heard its name.
Her body started to convulse involuntarily. She went to her knees and then to the ground, her back arching. Her eyes rolled back into her head, her mouth agape. A couple of boys picked her up and moved her to a raised portion of the cave at Jack’s signal.
Jack turned back to us.
“I hate this part,” he said.
Carl groaned. “The part where you talk?”
Jack sighed. “Exactly, the boring part.”
Then he told us about Yoth.
Not everything. Not the way people online try to explain old things with charts and dead languages. Jack talked like a spoiled kid reading scripture.
Yoth was old.
Yoth was hungry.
Yoth had mouths in hidden places, and one of them had slept inside Swenson Mine since before Sun Valley had a name.
It spoke to Jack in dreams.
It told him his desires were sacred.
It told him wanting something was the same as deserving it.
When Jack was thirteen, it had him bring his mother’s dog into the mine.
He said the dog whimpered in fear, wetting the floor before the wall opened.
When the mouth closed again, it left gifts behind.
A yellow sac for Jack.
A pale mineral for everyone else.
Glow could be refined. Changed. Strengthened. Shared. Sold. Given. Used.
It made the chosen brave, strong, and beautiful.
The others were made blissful and obedient.
And every offering produced more.
“The common stuff is for them,” Jack said, nodding at the crowd. “Pills. Powder. Scraps. They love scraps. It makes them grow.”
The crowd teemed and laughed like they were honored.
Jack held up his hands.
“But the chosen stay clean.”
He smiled at Jeri.
Jeri smiled back.

At some point during his liturgy, Jeri had risen from the floor. She didn’t look different per se, but something awful radiated from her.
I did not understand it then.
Not fully.
I only noticed that when he said it, everyone looked at the bags of yellow pills in boxes held by the stoners with hunger, and Jack looked at them with contempt.
“Tonight,” Jack said, spreading his arms, “we grow.”
The crowd screamed.
The stoners began throwing handfuls of the pills into the crowd.
People dropped to their knees to grab them. Teachers. Students. Adults. Kids. They shoved one another, scraped at the stone, stuffed pills into their mouths with dirty fingers.
Music erupted from hidden speakers.
Bass shook the cavern.
A black curtain at the far wall dropped.
Behind it was a circle in the cave wall, six feet wide and glowing yellow.
Not a hole.
A mouth pretending to be light.
The glow pulsed with the music.
That was when I saw them.
The people around us changed.
Or maybe the light finally showed what had been there all along.
Skin melted into plates. Black eyes bubbled open along cheeks and forearms. Mandibles pushed through lips. Fingers bent backward and multiplied. A girl from my English class danced with a segmented leg twitching from where her right eye should have been. Mr. Lewis’s jaw unfolded into four wet pieces, each one clicking independently.
One boy’s mouth was full of roach legs.
They were all laughing.
They were all dancing.
The cavern became a mosh pit of bodies and chitin, and Carl and Karen and I were in the middle of it, tied on the floor.
Someone kicked me in the ribs.
Someone’s stiletto heel stepped on my hand.
I screamed, but the music swallowed it.
A body fell across me. I felt something fall from its pocket.
A plastic baggie.
Pills.
Then another foot struck my face. Something cracked in my mouth. I spat out blood and a tooth.
My wallet pressed into my hip.
The stupid wallet survival kit Carl had mocked me for carrying since freshman year.
I twisted until I could reach it. My fingers found the tiny serrated blade. It took forever. It took seconds. I sawed through the rope behind my wrists while monsters danced around me.
When my hands came free, I cut my ankles.
I grabbed the pills without thinking, and stumbled upright.
No one noticed.
Under the pulsating yellow light, I probably looked just like one of them.
At the front of the cavern, Jack stood before the mouth with his arms raised, sickly light leaching out into the crowd.
Jeri stood beside him, swaying slightly, smiling up at the light like a saint in a stained glass window.
The crowd lifted a body overhead.
Karen.
They passed her forward, hand over hand, claw over claw.
I saw that she was awake.
I wish I had not.
Her glasses were gone. Blood ran down one side of her face. Her mouth moved, but the music and the clicking swallowed whatever she was screaming.
Jack opened his arms to receive her.
I do not remember deciding to move.
I remember the bag of pills in my hand.
I remember Jack saying “chosen”.
I remember “pure”.
I remember Jack’s mouth open, grinning, his eyes reflecting the yellow light.
I remembered the way he had slapped that bag away in the hallway.
I remember Master Brown yelling, “Drive through the target, Steve.”
I ran and pushed my way through the cavorting bodies towards the front of the cavern.
I shoved a fistful of pills between his teeth and drove my shoulder into his stomach.
Jack involuntarily gulped, swallowed, and folded backward, slipping on dust.
For one beautiful second, he looked surprised.
Then the back of his head touched the mouth.
The yellow light turned red.
Jack screamed.
Not like a king.
Like a little boy.
The wall opened around him.
Folds of wet stone and flesh peeled outward, gripping his shoulders, his face, and his hair. His body stretched. His skin bubbled. Something underneath him tried to crawl away in every direction at once.
Jeri screamed.
Not grief.
Not love.
Something worse.
“No!”
She lunged for Jack and grabbed his arm with both hands.
The mouth pulled.
Jeri planted her feet and pulled back, howling his name.
“Jack!”
The whole cavern seemed to tilt toward the sound.
Jack’s face was still visible inside the red light. His mouth was full of yellow-orange foam and broken pills. His eyes were wide and terrified.
“Jack!” Jeri screamed again.
She was not looking at me.
She was not looking at Carl or Karen.
She was looking at the future she had murdered herself for as it fell to pieces in front of her.
The mouth caught her around the waist.
A fold of pale, wet flesh wrapped her like a hand.
She clawed at it with one hand and kept hold of Jack with the other.
The cavern cracked.
A line split the wall above the mouth and raced toward the ceiling.
Every creature in the room started convulsing.
The music cut out.
Stone fell.
I stumbled backward.
Carl screamed my name from somewhere to my left, his voice cracking as he said it.
“Steve!”
I turned, but bodies slammed between us. Dust exploded from the ceiling. Something with too many arms crawled over the spot where Carl had been.
I never saw him again.
Karen was on the floor near the mouth. She had fallen from the crowd when Jack went in. She was trying to push herself up on one elbow.
“Steve!” she sobbed.
I started toward her.
I took maybe two steps, and a boulder the size of a microwave dropped between us and hit the stone hard enough to bounce. It shattered at the bottom, sending dust and chips of rock into the air. For a second, I saw Karen’s hand through the cloud.
Then nothing.
Just red.
Just coughing.
Just the cave coming down.
Carl screamed my name again.
Maybe.
Or maybe it was someone else.
Or maybe it was the mine turning every voice into my name.
I turned my head and saw Jeri still trying to pull Jack out of the mouth.
She screamed so loud and hideously that I thought her vocal cords would tear.
The mouth’s light vanished and flared again, red through the dust. The utility bulbs swung wildly, throwing shadows in every direction.
Someone screamed my name.
A girl’s voice.
Maybe Karen.
Maybe Jeri.
I froze.
The cavern groaned.
A crack opened across the ceiling.
Dust poured down like water.
Then something inside me broke in the oldest, simplest way.
I turned and ran.
That is the part I come back to every night.
Not the monsters.
Not the blood.
Not Jack screaming as the mouth took him.
Me running as everyone I loved died.
The utility bulbs swung in a crooked line ahead of me, and I followed their cords through smoke and dust, one hand over my head, the other against the wall.
The mine groaned behind me.
Sometimes I heard screaming.
Sometimes clicking.
Sometimes Carl.
Sometimes Karen.
Sometimes Jeri.
After dead ends and rocks colliding with my arms, head, and legs, I reached the parking lot battered and covered in dust and blood. Dust billowed from the entrance. The cardboard sign had been trampled flat.
Carl’s truck was there.
I did not have the keys.
I found a Miata with keys in the sun visor and drove away without thinking.
When I came back to myself, I was parked in front of Jeri’s house.
I put my head on the steering wheel and cried until there was nothing left.
At 1:34 in the morning, Jeri’s father knocked on the window, startling me awake.
He asked where she was.
He asked why I was covered in dust.
He asked whose car I was driving.
I could not answer him.
Later, I lied.
I said Jack threw a party in the mine. I said there were drugs and music, and the giant speakers must have caused the cave-in.
People believed me because the truth would have destroyed them.
The school closed for the rest of the year. You cannot hold algebra class when one-fifth of the student body and three teachers are missing or dead.
Families moved.
The Vances went to California.
Jeri’s parents stayed for a while. Her father never practiced law again.
Sun Valley healed the way towns heal: badly, then quietly, then not at all.
New families moved in. New kids used old lockers. People stopped lowering their voices when they said Swenson Mine.
I left as soon as I could.
I became an architect. I design towers now. Hotels. Glass buildings full of light and life. I live alone in the Pacific Northwest in a house with too many locks and no basement. I run every morning the same route that I’ve allowed nobody to know. My life is running, eating, working, and sleeping. Rinse. Repeat.
I have gone back to Sun Valley twice.
Never in the fall.
For twenty-six years, I told myself Jack died in that cave.
I told myself Jeri died with him.
I told myself Yoth’s mouth closed.
Last month, on October 30th, I was finishing the last leg of my run at 4:30 AM. I spotted a piece of paper lodged in the flag of a neighbor’s mailbox, fluttering in the wind.
I came closer and realized it was a folded piece of paper.
I stopped and, without thinking, pulled it out and unfolded it.
Inside was a kiss mark in bright yellow lipstick.
Still glossy.
Some of the yellow got on my thumb when I opened it. I wiped my finger clean on my pants.
Beneath the kiss, written in the same yellow smear, were three words.
You ran first.

Credit: FoundInTheMine