Little Killer A to Z Read online

  Rifka knew he was right. She didn’t have to like it, but her brother was in charge now.

  Suddenly, Boris made a quiet, desperate sound and tightened his grip on the gun. Rifka looked out the window and watched as one of the monsters, the one with the grizzled, graying face, quickly scrambled over the fence until it was standing on the dead grass instead of the dust of the road beyond.

  The two others abruptly followed.

  Vlad immediately stopped picking at dirt on the floor and blowing spit bubbles. He could sense something had changed. Vlad had always been sensitive like that. Others in their extended family from the old country were sensitive, too.

  Like their father had said, everything has a silver lining.

  Quickly, Vlad clambered across the floor to the basement door. When he got there, just a shadow in the slice of dark that bubbled up from downstairs, he gestured for the two of them to follow.

  “I should really shoot them,” Boris said.

  Rifka watched the three monsters staring at the house. The one with the pack slowly lowered it to the ground, crouched, and began rummaging inside. “Maybe we should go hide with Vlad.” she whispered to Boris. “It’s a good hiding place. They won’t find us.”

  Boris shook his head. “They always find us,” he said. “No matter how good our hiding places are.”

  As Boris talked, Rifka watched the monster with the pack pull supplies out and place them on the ground. Whatever the fiend had been carrying was wrapped in burlap. She could see the rough cloth through the dirty window even though it was halfway across the lawn.

  With murderous hands, the monster undid the parcels and slowly rolled them out on the ground. The other two monsters gathered around to see what was there.

  Boris sucked on his tongue and a cold chill ran up Rifka’s spine all the way to her tangled mess of hair.

  “We have to go hide with Vlad,” she said, and grabbed at Boris’s shirt. “Either you shoot them or we have to hide.”

  Boris didn’t budge.

  Rifka didn’t know if he was scared, or angry, or both. Still, she could tell her brother’s resolve was quickening. She had seen that hard look so many times before—in her father, her mother, the others—that it was unmistakable in its meaning.

  “I’m hiding,” she said.

  Rifka turned and hurried after Vlad, who had already slipped into the dark of the basement and the secret places down there.

  “I love you,” Boris called after her as she went. His words made Rifka feel odd because he had never really told her that before. She remembered the rest of the family saying similar things when the monsters came, and each time she heard those words, they were nothing more than a death knell.

  “Me, too,” she said back, even though saying it felt funny coming out of her mouth. If anything, her words felt final, as though there would never be any turning back from them. With dry eyes, too long past crying, she slipped through the partially opened basement door and rushed down the stairs.

  In the gloom of the sprawling basement, she found Vlad underneath the steamer trunks, still blowing bubbles, still being Vlad.

  “No,” she whispered. “We can’t hide there. We have to hide in a better place.” She bent down beside the hidey hole and held out her hand. Vlad slowly reached out and intertwined his fingers in hers, letting himself be pulled out on his stomach.

  Somewhere upstairs there was movement. Dust that was clinging to one of the joists holding up the floor came raining down. Rifka watched it settle. She could tell Boris had moved across the room to be nearer the window behind the broken porch swing that they all sometimes sat on in the evening talking about when they lived in the old country.

  Rifka closed her eyes and concentrated, believing that she could actually see Boris in her mind’s eye and what he was doing. Her imagination told an old story, one in which she already knew the end. Sorrow welled up inside her and brushed the insides of her throat.

  Suddenly more dust fell from above, followed by several loud thuds. Boris had moved across the room, upending furniture as he went, and was now most likely crouching behind their old couch. He was going to shoot the monsters after all. Rifka knew it in the pit of her being. She knew that he was going to fight—for him, for her, for her little brother—and she was glad.

  “Let’s get this over with,” she heard an angry voice bark in the night. The words didn’t belong to her brother. She didn’t know if they belonged to the grizzled monster, the one in all black, or the other with the pack. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that the monsters were coming and Boris was going to shoot them if he could.

  “Get off my property,” she heard her brother cry—words that were dangerously close to the same proclamation her father had said before he was killed. “Go away if you know what’s good for you.”

  Vlad’s eyes grew wide. He covered his mouth with both hands and laced his fingers tightly together.

  “Why don’t you make this easy on us, boy,” she heard another voice say.

  “We’ll make it quick,” a third voice called out. The words either belonged to the grizzled-faced monster or the beast with the pack. Somehow she didn’t think the monster in black would make such promises.

  “I said, get off my property,” Boris cried again, and Vlad began to whimper.

  Rifka grabbed her little brother’s arm and pulled him along in the dark until they came to the faux brick wall that no one would recognize for what it really was. She gingerly pushed on three bricks in the lower left-hand corner and listened for the click of the almost invisible door. Seconds later she leaned up against the brick and it gave way, leading to the large grouping of chambers where everyone used to sleep, hidden safely behind the wall.

  The rooms were filled with loneliness and despair. Once her family had talked, and laughed, and dreamed there. Now it was just Rifka and her brothers. The emptiness left a bitter taste in her mouth.

  “Go to Auntie Magda and Uncle Yuri’s room,” she told Vlad. “Hide in their bed. You’ll be safe there.” Vlad, his fear-filled eyes so big and round that Rifka wanted to scream, pointed at her and shrugged. He didn’t have to say the words for Rifka to know that he was asking where she was going to squirrel herself away. “I’m not hiding,” she whispered. “I’m going to help Boris.”

  Vlad began frantically whipping his head back and forth, tears streaming down his face.

  Rifka put one finger to his mouth and smiled, waiting for her little brother to calm down. Finally his shoulders slumped and he stared at the dirt floor, utterly deflated.

  “I’ll be back,” she whispered to him so softly that her words sounded like a moth flapping around candle light. “I’ll always be back.” Then she left Vlad there, in the chambers of her family behind the fake brick door, and went to the basement stairs.

  Above her she heard footsteps and knew that the three monsters were on the porch.

  “What’s all this crap?” one of them said, talking about the stack of broken chairs and debris that had been expertly laid one on top of the next, to make their home look empty.

  “Just more for us to burn,” said another voice.

  A hatred that was ancient and pure kindled in the very pit of Rifka’s insides and burst into being. “Not my house,” she hissed under her breath. “Never more.”

  Quickly she flew up the stairs and threw open the basement door. She had just enough time to see Boris raise his head from behind the couch, the cool metal in his hand and the muzzle of the gun pointing at the front door. The monster, all in black, was at one of the windows.

  “Look,” it cried. “There are two of them.”

  The grizzled monster laughed. “Then it will be a good night.”

  The front door, though locked, suddenly bulged inward at the force of being kicked in, and the three monsters were inside and Boris was shooting. He had never handled a gun before nor knew how to aim.

  “I’m hit. I’m hit,” cried the monster that was carrying the pack
.

  “Jesus,” cried the monster all in black. “They have firearms.”

  “Jesus has nothing to do with the likes of them, Padre,” the monster with the grizzled face screamed at the creature all in black. The grizzled monster was brandishing a cross in one hand and a stake in the other, the same kind of pointed wood that had taken so many of Rifka’s family before.

  Boris shot again, and this time his aim was true. The bullet found a home directly between the grizzled monster’s eyes and it fell over backwards, dead before its body thumped against the floor.

  “I’m hit, I tell you. I’m hit,” screamed the thing that Boris shot first. It was half in and half out of the front door and blood was streaming out of its side and its leg. The smell of copper and salt rushed through the house in waves and Rifka growled like an animal.

  The monster in black, the only one still standing, also held a cross in one hand and a vial of water in the other. Without a second of hesitation, it dashed the vial to the floor in front of Rifka and the glass exploded in a holy spray.

  “We’re Jewish, you asshole,” she cried as she soared through the air and fell upon the priestly monster, climbing it like a murder monkey until she was at its neck, biting deep and letting the thing’s life splash down her throat and into her stomach.

  Gallons and gallons, and eons and eons, came out until the monster in black, with nothing left to give, fell to the ground an empty husk.

  The last monster, the one that carried the pack, watched in horror as viscous, crimson syrup gushed out of its wounds.

  The ancient boy with the gun stood up from behind the couch, the smoking piece still in his hand, and slowly walked across the room. He stepped over the lifeless bodies of the other two, and came to stand right over the beast.

  “Please,” the monster begged. “Please let me live.”

  Before the boy had a chance to answer, the little girl with the rat’s nest for hair, her mouth painted with death and her eyes bright with hellfire, was at his side. With its free hand, the monster held up its own cross and began spouting old nursery rhymes from a book that never held any meaning for Rifka, Boris, Vlad, their parents, or anyone else in their old, old family.

  “Let you live?” she whispered through her fetid, dead mouth, sharp with fangs and putrid with decay. Rifka suddenly began laughing in a truly horrific way that would make any sane monster’s brain crack in two.

  The monster with the pack that was filled with useless charms and trinkets began to scream.

  It screamed for the monster in black, and it screamed for the grizzled monster that was shot through the head. Mostly, it screamed for its own immortal soul, for in its monstrous, misguided mind, it was damned for all eternity.

  Meanwhile, Boris and Rifka grabbed the monster by its legs and pulled it inside the front door.

  “I like when they scream,” Rifka said to Boris as they dragged the horrible fiend toward the basement door. She turned and looked at it as its arms flailed and a trail of blood flowed across the dirty floor. “Keep screaming,” she told the monster, and flashed a ghoulish grin. “My little brother downstairs is starving and he likes his food fresh.”

  C is for Cassie

  Who Owes Michael Myers

  I’M NEW IN HADDONFIELD. We moved here in August, and most of the time since then I’ve been learning where things live.

  While my mother unpacks, rearranges furniture, and spends hours hanging pictures on walls to minimize change, I rock back and forth in my meticulously recreated bedroom, an exact duplicate of the one I had before. My dolls, Everly, Justine, and Poe, sit on my bed, with Poe in the middle, Everly on the left, and Justine on the right.

  That’s how I always recognize them—in a row on my bed.

  Having a duplicate bedroom is all about familiarity for me. Familiarity is comfort and I have to be comfortable.

  The world is prickly. It itches and burns. If I’m comfortable, I’m happy. If I’m happy, I don’t blow the whistle that hangs on a silk cord around my neck which calls my mother to me every time.

  We came to Haddonfield from the city. The tall buildings and concrete pathways there made me happy. Things never changed in the city. A skyscraper on a corner would look the same the next day, or the next week, or even the next year. We lived in a loft with partitions for walls instead of real walls, and pipes overhead that my mother painted teal and white. They had big black arrows with words on them that pointed to the kitchen, or the bathroom, or the den.

  City familiarity was everywhere and if something urban was to change, signs were put up that said so.

  ‘Bank of New England’ coming soon.

  ‘Chipotle’.

  ‘Olive Garden’.

  Signs gave me time to prepare for newness. Here, I feel as though I’m never prepared.

  There aren’t any skyscrapers in Haddonfield. There aren’t any overhead arrows pointing where to go. There are no more signs. On the rare occasions my mother takes me out of the house, I try and navigate by the trees, but they change.

  Greenery isn’t finite. Growing things are organic and amorphous. Just when I’ve understood that the giant oak on the corner is where we turn right to walk around the block, the canopy changes color, and all the green is replaced by oranges, yellows, and reds.

  What’s worse, the leaves die and fall away, and then the oak becomes unfamiliar again. Each change confuses me and all I want is to be back in our loft in the city, with the big black arrows on the ceiling that are familiar and unchanging.

  We’re not, though. We live here now. My mother has to take care of Grandma Patrice.

  Grandma Patrice lives in the house next door to us—sometimes. If I stand at the doorway to my bedroom and take eleven steps to the window, I can see Grandma Patrice sitting in her sewing room, fingering fabrics and cutting patches for quilts.

  Then again, sometimes I go to my bedroom door, turn, walk the eleven steps, and peer out the window, only to find that Grandma Patrice isn’t there anymore. Where does she go? Where does she live? It’s all so confusing to me, so I huddle on my bed with Everly, Justine, and Poe, clutching my whistle and rocking back and forth because the rocking makes me feel better.

  The rocking calms me down.

  Every night I eat macaroni and cheese for dinner. My mother puts my serving on the left-hand side of my plate. On the right-hand side she puts forty-seven peas because there has to be forty-seven peas or I can’t eat them. I wish I could explain why, but I don’t have the words. My brain will only eat peas in groups of forty-seven.

  After dinner, my mother gives me a Hostess Twinkie. For a time, she got very scared because there were rumors that Hostess was going to stop making Twinkies. She told me so, and I got scared, too. She tried to prepare me with sponge cake and whipped cream but I didn’t understand the new dessert and I wouldn’t eat it.

  I wouldn’t even try.

  In the end, Hostess decided to keep making Twinkies. My mother says their decision was because of me. Her face changed when she told me that, but I couldn’t tell if she was smiling or frowning, laughing or crying.

  That’s because I don’t understand faces. I don’t understand how they work.

  Grandma Patrice sometimes comes over to our house. My mother has a Bentwood rocking chair in our living room. She used a woodburner to write ‘Grandma Patrice’ on one arm so I know the chair belongs to Grandma. It’s funny, but I don’t see Grandma Patrice when she’s in our house and not sitting there. I’m not even sure I hear her.

  She only appears to me when she’s in that chair, and I only hear her words when they come from that part of the living room. Sometimes she scares me because one minute no one is there, and the next, Grandma Patrice is sitting in front of me.

  She materializes like magic. At least, that’s how I understand her comings and goings.

  One day, Grandma Patrice asks me if I can try and talk. “Cassie, can you talk to me?” She moves her face, but like my mother’s, I don’t understand if
she’s laughing or crying, happy or sad. I rock back and forth, sitting cross-legged on the living room floor and picking at individual strands on the carpet. After a while I blow the whistle around my neck and my mother brings my keyboard and holds my hand while I press buttons.

  A lifetime passes before I am able to get the words out and I get frustrated. “No,” I eventually write after my mother steadies my flailing limbs. An electronic voice speaks for me like the voice of that man in the wheelchair who is twisted like a pretzel. “Not today.”

  Really, really, really, I want to be back in our loft in the city with the partitions for walls and the arrows painted on the pipes overhead. I don’t understand why we have to be in a place where Grandma Patrice only appears sometimes in her rocking chair, or in her sewing room in the house next door, eleven steps and a window away from my bedroom door.

  Why can’t she just disappear forever so we can leave Haddonfield and go back to the city? I want everything to be familiar again. I want everything to be comforting.

  I want to be happy.

  I like to spin sometimes. When I do, my brain gets all jumbled up but in a good way. I imagine synapses firing to all four corners of my skull.

  Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

  When they fire away, everything becomes clear for me and I understand the world and how it works.

  I see numbers, and can tell that there are 417 cabbage roses on the wallpaper in the kitchen. I can count the spindles on the staircase, twenty-four, even though anyone can do that.

  I see geometry, trigonometry, and calculus hanging in the air in front of me, and I know that lines, angles, and numbers are a way for me to feel familiar and comfortable.

  Grandma Patrice seems to raise her voice whenever I spin, and my mother seems to raise her voice, too. I think they talk loudly because the pleasure I create by spinning is so thick and real that they have to wade through it like quicksand in order to keep up with me.

  When I finally stop spinning and fall to the floor, with my eyes staring up at the 318 tin tiles that make up the ceiling, ideas come to me. Mostly they are about my mother and my Grandma Patrice and how I can get back to the city and our loft. I want to follow the black arrows again—the ones that my mother painted on the pipes overhead—but I can’t.