Horror at Halloween, Prologue and Part Three, Tina

Book 3: Horror at Halloween

by Stephen Jones

Genres: Horror

Synopsis

OXRUN STATION HAS ALWAYS BEEN DIFFERENT. Nobody can really explain it. You just have to understand that bizarre things happen there. They just do. Weird things. The kind of things you don't even want to dream about in your worst nightmares. Trick-or-treat is crazy enough, with ghosts and goblins and witches and warlocks and all manner of other horrors roaming the streets. But in Oxrun Station, the masks aren't always made of rubber. With the doors between worlds thrown open, the Old Gods have returned, and only Tina Broadbent and her friend Cerise Fallon have the knowledge and power to prevent the great Devouring . . . The fabric of the cosmos is unravelling and dark and dangerous things are leaking across the borders . . . For five unsuspecting teenagers, their lives will never be the same again as they discover the hidden terrors lurking beneath the surface of their quiet town and experience the most horrifying Halloween of them all . . . This year in Oxrun Station, THE TRICK IS TO STAY ALIVE!

Release date: October 14, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

TINA

DIANE DUANE

When Tina Broadbent got home from school, her dad was making breakfast. Well, breakfast was what he called it, it being his first meal of the day: but her dad was not the
bacon-and-eggs type. Breakfast today, she could tell as she swung in the front door and dropped her book-backpack on the chair in the front hall, was going to be some kind of noodle with –
she sniffed – probably that weird Thai hot sauce again, the one made out of pickled fish and hyper-hot chillies. Sometimes she would have agreed with the other kids’ assessment that
her dad was slightly crazy . . . except that (as Tina occasionally felt forced to remind them) it was her father who took care of the crazies, and therefore had the next thing to paperwork
stating that he was sane. In the status-conscious world of senior year in Oxrun Station, this peculiarity counted for something . . . if not as much as money, the older, the better.

She wandered down the hall, pulling her sweatshirt off over her head as she went, and came into the kitchen, dropping the sweatshirt over the back of the nearest kitchen chair; then paused and
looked around her with a sigh. Tina occasionally felt annoyed that her dad couldn’t afford as big a house as some of the other kids at school had. But his pay cheque – none too big to
start with – was raided every week by what he called “the Alimony Fairy”, so that Tina and her dad had to make do with a little two-bedroom clapboard house, hardly more than a
cottage, on Thorn Road. The situation was not exactly comfortable when you had to deal every day with kids who lived in big old Colonials and Victorians, and whose parents seemed to effortlessly
exude money from all their orifices. The kitchen in particular was not as cool as, say, Chuck Antrim’s mother’s, all stainless steel and shining granite worktops; this kitchen
was resolutely stuck in the Formica Age, with a fridge that had trouble making ice cubes at all, let alone dispensing them from the door, and linoleum that must have seen better days once . . .
possibly when dinosaurs walked the earth. Tina did not bring many people home, at least not the ones that cared a lot about such things. This limited her social life: but limitations were something
she had got used to since her mom and dad broke up, and Tina had learned to deal with it . . . for the time being.

“Two heavy sighs in half a minute,” said her dad. He was over by the stove, bending over a pot and favouring it with a critical expression. “Bad day at the madhouse?”

She pulled out one of the chairs around the old scrubbed-wood kitchen table and flopped down in it. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sure you do, when you make noises like that.”

He looked over his shoulder, and Tina hurriedly bowed her head over the table, fiddling with one of the beige woven-linen placemats, so that her dad wouldn’t see her grin. It could be a
real pain in the butt having a psychiatric nurse for a father. Not that he wasn’t occasionally wrong about what was going on in your head . . . but he was too good at being right and at the
same time not pissing you off, which was simply unfair when all you wanted was a good fight. “Noises?” Tina said, and made another one: sppllpppplllltttt, a prolonged
raspberry.

Her dad went over to one of the cupboards and started rummaging around for a colander. “Maths teacher or science teacher?”

It really wasn’t fair. Tina would have given anything sometimes to be able to scream “You don’t understand me!”, except that in her father’s case it would
have been so blatantly untrue. “Maths,” Tina said. “She keeps calling me ‘innumerate’ in front of everybody.”

Her dad put the colander down in the sink, got the pot off the stove and drained his pasta, then started to shake it around. “Unimaginative,” he said. “You can count all
right.”

“Oh, if it were counting, I’d graduate tomorrow,” Tina said, starting to pull apart the fringe on the placemat. “The problem’s the calculus.”

Her dad moaned softly. “I thought we were done with that unit.”

“Not yet,” Tina said. Her dad insisted with “helping with her homework”: mostly what it helped Tina with was her sense of being the most hopeless person in the world as
far as calculus was concerned, for her dad was worse.

“I don’t know,” he said as he came over to the table with a plate with the drained pasta on it, and sat down, reaching for the jar of weird Thai sauce that was already sitting
there waiting for him. “Maybe we should see about getting you some tutoring. SATs are coming up . . . and if you’re going to take that advanced placement one . . .”

“I’ve been studying with some of the other kids in free period,” Tina said. “It’ll probably be okay.”

“Which others?” her father said. “Not that Antrim kid, I hope.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him!”

Her father reached for his fork. “I think we’ve discussed this already.”

“You mean you’ve told me what you think about him. That’s not a discussion.”

Her father raised his eyebrows. “Tina,” he said, “leaving out the fact that the kid has a nose for trouble, and a gift for following his nose . . . he’s even more
innumerate than I am.” He tested a bite of the pasta, then reached for another bottle: hot sauce this time. “He’s not going to do you any good with your calc.”

Tina made a face, since he was right again, and she hated it when he was right in this reasonable tone of voice, without yelling or making a scene. She opened her mouth. “Maybe he’s
the life of the party,” her dad continued, “but try to find other help, for the maths anyway. Tell me what you’ve sorted out at the end of the week, okay?”

And he would wait for her to sort something out, too, and ask her then, and not nag her about it. Tina’s dad could be really annoying sometimes, and not in the usual ways. She
watched him put the hot sauce on his pasta and dig in enthusiastically. He was a big, dark-haired man, broad across the shoulders, going a little thick around the waist now, and continually
complaining that he didn’t have enough time to exercise; though Tina privately considered that a little less pasta wouldn’t hurt him. “You’re going to give yourself ulcers,
eating that stuff,” she said.

Her dad shook his head as he chewed, swallowed. “No medical effect whatever,” he said. “More likely to kill the bugs that cause ulcers than to cause new ones.” The sweat
popped out on his forehead.

Tina shook her head and got up to make herself a sandwich. “How long are they gonna leave you on evenings, Daddy?”

“Another month or so,” he said. “Then Norma and I switch shifts.”

“I wish it was sooner,” Tina said. It wasn’t that she disliked being alone at night: she wasn’t the panicky kind. But she saw less of her father when he was on evening
shift, between four and midnight, than at any other time, and she didn’t much care for never having him to talk to, even when he was annoying.

“Yeah,” he said, “so do I. Wouldn’t mind changing over right now.” He wiped his forehead.

Tina was unwrapping the bread, and she stopped; his tone of voice wasn’t usually quite so revealing. “You got some bad patients now?”

He would never discuss this with her in any detail. “No worse than usual,” he said. “It’s just . . . the time of the month.”

“Uh oh,” Tina said. “Well, you’ll be okay. You always are.”

He grinned at her. “Yeah,” he said.

“It’s not like they turn into wolves or anything,” Tina said, getting a knife out of the knife drawer and then rummaging around in the cupboard for the peanut butter.
“They’re just crazies.”

“Oh, they turn into things, all right,” said her dad. “Pains in the butt, mostly . . .”

Tina laughed out loud. “Not as big a pain as Cerise, I bet!”

Her dad laughed too. “And what has the divine Miss C. come up with this week?”

“Same as last week, but worse.” Cerise Fallon was one of Tina’s better friends at school, partly because Cerise was another of those kids who were relatively new to town and
having trouble “breaking in” to the circles of those kids whose families had been here for a long time, and didn’t mind letting you know it. Cerise went out of her way to be
different at a time when this was usually fatal. Her hair was never the same colour two days in a row, her clothes were always one shade or another of black, and her constant discovery of newer and
weirder forms of “spirituality” had caused Chuck Antrim to claim that the initials C.F. should actually stand for Colossal Flake. “The Flake” Cerise had indeed become to
most of the school, and she wore the title like a banner, looking down with what seemed like good-natured scorn on the rest of the school that scorned her.

“It was astrology, wasn’t it?”

“It’s always been astrology with her, more or less,” Tina said, spreading the peanut butter on thick. “At least, that’s the first thing I remember her really being
interested in, when we first moved in. But she’s got this really detailed book on it out of the library, and now you can’t tell what she’s talking about half the time. Half of it
is maths, and the rest of it, I don’t know what it is, angles and crap like that: she keeps saying that now she knows what trigonometry is for.” Tina . . .