Horror at Halloween [The Whole Book]

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. Like the tings that happen this Halloween to Sam Jones, Eleanor Trent, Tina Broadbent, Chuck Antrim and Cody Banning . . . Maybe it really is the rare conjunction of Mars and Saturn with Venus, lowering the barriers between our world and another, shadowy realm . . . or maybe it is just that the full moon always brings out the strangeness in that place. 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. 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 31, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 160

Sample

PROLOGUE

Snow has a way of calming things down. Once it covers the ground, everything gets soft and quiet. The kind of quiet you can almost hear. The kind of quiet that tells you what
has happened overnight, even before you look out of the window.

And when you do finally get up and look outside and see all that unbroken white on the ground, and the snow still falling without any wind, it kind of makes everything okay for a while, you know
what I mean?

Everything is beautiful; everything’s at peace.

You almost hate to go outside and spoil it.

That’s the way it used to be for me.

That’s the way it always used to be, before I moved to Oxrun Station.

Now, watching the season’s first real storm, watching a bluejay try to hop through the snow to fallen bird seed beneath the feeder, all I can do is remember Halloween.

Weird, right?

Well, no, not really . . .

See, the Station is different. I can’t really explain it. And, if nothing else, you have to understand that things happen here. No-one knows why, they just do.

And when they do, nothing . . . nothing . . . is ever the same again.

You wouldn’t know that to look at it, though. I mean, it’s real small, and it has lots of money and it’s tucked away in a corner of Connecticut that hardly anyone ever visits
unless they’re on their way to somewhere else. It has a big park and a college and a train station; there’s a cinema and lots of places to eat, a graveyard and a few churches. All the
blocks are pretty long and the houses pretty big and old – for America, that is. The cops are okay, for cops, and even the teachers aren’t all that bad, for teachers.

I mean, if you came here, you’d think everyone is just like everyone else, everyplace else.

Well, they are.

Except . . . things happen to them.

Weird things.

The kind of things you don’t even want to dream about in your nightmares.

Like what happened on Halloween.

The snow keeps falling and there’s a breeze now and then, and the flakes twist and dance and kind of form pictures.

I don’t want to look, but I can’t help it.

Over there by the big maple tree I can see Eleanor Trent from New York; on the sidewalk I think I can see Sam Jones from Norwich, all the way over in England; and across the street, getting out
of his father’s car, the snow lets me see Chuck Antrim, born and bred right here in the Station. Cody Banning is right beside him. Tina Broadbent, smart as her dad, is whispering something to
her best friend Cerise.

It wouldn’t be all that bad, seeing them again, but they’re all gone now.

It’s not exactly that they all . . . lost.

It’s more like they had to get away – those that were left.

And I know I said that strange things just happen in Oxrun Station, but this Halloween was different. Maybe it really was the rare conjunction of Mars and Saturn with Venus, lowering the
barriers between our world and another, shadowy realm . . . or maybe it was just that the full moon always makes the weirdnesses come out in this place. Trick or treat is crazy enough, I guess,
with ghosts and goblins and witches and warlocks and all manner of nasties roaming the streets – and it’s true that you can never tell what’s really going on underneath a mask . .
. it’s just that in Oxrun Station, the masks aren’t always made of rubber . . .

And now the guys want to tell me what happened to them to change their lives so totally . . .

Some are telling their own stories, others are showing me just what happened to them when the moon was full in the sky, Saturn gleamed yellow and Venus shone down so brightly, making the shadows
even more dense and threatening . . .

Whether I want it or not, they’re going to tell me.

You see, they want me to know what really goes on in Oxrun Station.

I have no choice now. The snow is telling me why . . .

SAM

JOHN GORDON

1

Two years have gone by since I left Oxrun Station. It is autumn again, the leaves have begun to fall, and I keep thinking of a girl who lives in Mildenhall Woods in the hills
above the town. I long to see her again.

Something strange happened to me on the evening we arrived in Oxrun. It was a welcome – and a warning, although I didn’t recognise it at the time.

We came to Oxrun because my father’s work took him there – and my mother loves to travel. He is a researcher in plant biology at the John Hammond Institute in England, and when the
chance came for him to take up an appointment to carry out a project linked up with Hawksted College in Connecticut my mother jumped at it. Dad is much more cautious than my mother, but he is the
true ‘plantsman’ that he calls himself, and investigating the medicinal properties of the bark of a fairly rare woodland shrub is what lured him to the United States and to the forests
of Oxrun Station.

There is mystery in the air at Oxrun. Not everyone thinks so – perhaps you lose the sense of it as you become familiar with the place – but as we stepped off the little plane that
brought us to Harley Airport, just the other side of the mountains, I already sensed that I was entering a hidden world. The air was heavy with the scent of the pine and spruce forest and as I
breathed it in I felt that I was in a land cut off from everything I knew.

It was dusk, there were no more flights that summer night, and the silence that seeped down from the darkening hillsides seemed to smother the putter of the engine of the private plane as it
found its parking place for the night.

London was twenty-four hours behind us, and the noise of aircraft, which had been our constant companion, suddenly ceased. The luggage trolley had gone on ahead of us and had disappeared among
the airport buildings, leaving a straggle of passengers to cross the tarmac on foot. The noise of our footsteps was lost in the huge silence around us, and it was then that I heard the whispering
for the first time. I stood still.

“What is it, Sam?” My mother turned to look back.

I shook my head, trying to clear my hearing. “My eardrums,” I said. “The cabin pressure’s got through to me.” Which was hardly surprising considering all the
plane-hopping we’d had to do to get here.

“A good night’s rest is what you need,” she said, and my father, loaded down with hand luggage, grunted.

But the whispering, an illusion or not, was in my ears again. There were no words, but somewhere, just out of reach of my hearing, words were being formed only to die like the lisp of wavelets
on a beach. Even stranger than the sounds themselves was that I sensed they came from a particular direction. I found myself turning to face the source, expecting to see ground crew talking quietly
among themselves as they came out to service the aircraft. It was true that the intensity of the whispering increased as I turned, but the tarmac was unpeopled.

I paused, and the formless whispering steadied. It was as though I had tuned in to a radio beacon and had found the direction of its source, so I listened carefully as my eyes scoured the
shadows of the airport buildings. Something in its tone encouraged me to lift my eyes beyond the roofs and radio aerials. On the nearest hills the shapes of the trees were already dissolving in the
twilight, and further away the slopes themselves were blurred, but the whisper, as if it came from the heart of the dark forests, increased in intensity until, obeying it, I shifted my gaze to
where one hill, above the rest, lifted itself on the distant horizon.

It was then, with a thin shriek, that my ears cleared themselves. A huge silence swept over me as if the night, satisfied that I had arrived as expected, had fallen asleep.

“Stop daydreaming, Sam!” It was my mother’s voice. “You’re keeping everyone waiting.”

Mr Galbraith, who was to be a colleague of my father, was there with his camper – and his daughter – to welcome us and take us on the last lap of our journey. Oxrun Station, he said,
was just over the horizon, which was a strange way to put it but was very much in tune with my state of mind. Oxrun was a place out of this world, but it wanted me. And Penny Galbraith was very
pretty.

2

That night, as he drove us to our new home, Mr Galbraith told us a lot about ‘the real friendly folk’ who would soon absorb us in ‘community activities’,
but it was his daughter, sitting next to me and saying hardly a word, who told me most. Just to look at her made me realise I would enjoy Oxrun.

Mr Galbraith, who taught at Hawksted College and would be working with my father, was a tall, lanky man with a slow way of speaking that seemed to exasperate his daughter but which I’m
sure he exaggerated in order to amuse us, me in particular.

“Getting dark,” he said, “and we’re going to climb.” The road snaked steeply upwards through the forest. “Penny, give these good people some candy to suck to
stop their ears popping.”

“Father,” she said, “stop being so childish.”

“My ears have been popping ever since we got off the plane,” I said.

He glanced back at us over the wire frames of his glasses, and even in the dimness inside the car I could see the amusement in the faded blue of his eyes. “You’ll have to excuse her,
Sam,” he said, “but she’s a little excited to discover you’re in her grade at school and she’ll want to show you off to her friends,” he chuckled, “as a
novelty.”

“Father!” I’ve never really believed that girls look beautiful when they’re angry, and it is true that the sudden redness in Penny’s cheeks did nothing for her
looks, but when she caught me looking at her and turned away as if to hide herself she added to the mystery of this unknown world that was already beginning to absorb me.

Mr Galbraith drove with one elbow resting on the sill of the open window. He asked us if the rush of air troubled us, but we all said no, not at all.

“It’s such a hot night,” said my mother, “and the scent of all these trees is lovely.”

He was pleased, and tried to bring his daughter into the conversation. “We hardly notice it, do we, Penny?”

Beside me in the back seat she shrugged and gazed indifferently at the columns of black trees that pressed so close to the road that the branches seemed to be reaching out to touch us. We
rounded a bend that made our headlights swing suddenly beyond the road edge and their beams were lost in nothingness. For an instant I felt giddy, as if we had suddenly become airborne, and all of
us, except Penny and her father, gasped.

Mr Galbraith heard us. “Night flying,” he said, “it’s one of our pleasures hereabouts.”

“Pay no attention to my father,” said Penny, speaking directly to me, “he’s an embarrassment.” She raised her voice. “Daddy, will you stop being so
scary!”

Now it was my own father’s turn to speak. “Don’t worry about us, Penny,” he said, “we just find it all so stimulating.”

That’s one of my father’s words, ‘stimulating’. The grotty bits of bark he peels off trees and puts into test tubes are ‘stimulating’, and I feared a little
lecture coming on. ‘Instructive’ is another word he goes for, and when he went on to say that a stimulating experience was also instructive, I had to interrupt.

“I like it here,” I said quickly. “It’s not the same as Norwich.”

“Where’s that?” said Penny, and her father answered.

“You’d likely call it Nor-witch,” he said, and repeated it. Fathers were being a pain.

“Oh,” she said, not at all impressed. “Is that near London?”

London, I was soon to discover, was the only place in Britain that any of Penny’s friends seemed to know about. “No,” I said, “it’s nowhere near London. It’s
at least a hundred miles away.”

“Oh,” she said again, and I could tell that a hundred miles didn’t mean much in a country where cities were separated by thousands. “Is it old?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said. I’d never before been asked if a place was old. “It’s very old.”

“I’d love to live somewhere old,” she said. She raised her voice, “And Daddy, you can be quiet. I’m not going to ask him about castles and dungeons and stuff.
I’m not a kid any more.” She turned back to me. “He thinks I still believe in fairy tales.”

“Well,” I said, not quite sure what effect it would have, “there is a castle. On a hill. Right in the middle of town.”

“Oh.”

“And it does have dungeons.”

She drew in her breath. “There you are, you see,” she said. “My father is probably the most ignorant man on this planet.”

Mr Galbraith laughed, and he and my parents in the front began talking among themselves.

“There’s also a place inside the castle where they used to hang people,” I said, “and it’s probably haunted.”

She was very matter of fact. “Quite likely,” she said. “I don’t like to go any place where people have died.”

Then I made myself wince as I asked, “Do you have ghosts here?”

“Oh, yes,” but she no longer appeared interested.

I thought I must have offended her. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry?” She was mystified.

“It’s stupid of me to be talking about ghosts when I’ve just arrived.”

“Do you always apologise about everything?” she asked. A hand flew to her mouth. “Have I embarrassed you, Sam? I’m so sorry!”

We were both laughing as the car, having crossed the pass, began to slide downhill into Oxrun.

3

That night I slept well, but I dreamt. The house we were to occupy for the next year and a half was on Thorn Road, and was larger than anything I was used to in England, but not
as large as the house in my dream. The rooms in that house were enormous and were connected by corridors and staircases that were endless, and they were magnificent but empty. And I was lost, and
no matter how loudly I cried out there was no-one to hear me. And when I woke up in the night, in a strange room, the house on Thorn seemed too big, and the whole of Oxrun outside was too
mysterious, and faintly menacing.

But in the morning the sun shone and I thought I saw a bluejay in the garden. A bluejay was something new and it made a change from starlings. And the refrigerator in the kitchen was twice the
size of the one we had at home. Bluejays and refrigerators – just two things among many that came to me that day so vividly that they appeared to be deliberate signs showing me into a world
that, like an enchanted forest, would be full of surprises.

And the streets were very wide and the kerbs higher than any I had known. Penny Galbraith laughed to see me hesitate before crossing the road. “Sorry,” I said, “I can’t
get used to the traffic coming at me from the wrong direction.”

“There you go again,” she said, and when I looked puzzled, she added, “Apologising – you don’t have to be sorry about everything, do you?”

“Sorry,” I said, and she dragged me across the road to the Herbert Bass Museum. We were on Chancellor Avenue and she was showing me the town. “I don’t know what you think
of museums and stuff,” she said.

“Now it’s you who’s apologising. Museums are just what I need.” And I did. There was so much around me that had to be digested that I welcomed the chance to breathe the
air in some quiet place.

And the museum was quiet. Apart from a fat lady who sat at a desk in the hall and was busy on the phone or answering letters, there was just one other person, a girl with long, pale blonde hair
and quite startling green eyes, who was peering intently at a display of ancient folk customs and traditions. She tucked her left hand into her pocket as we passed her.

“Who’s she?” I whispered, and got a sharp jab in the ribs from Penny.

“That’s stuck-up Eleanor Trent. She’s kind of new in Oxrun Station. She’s definitely not your type – so keep your mind on why we’re here.”

Penny kept her voice lowered as we walked through the rooms. “This place is weird,” she said. “My parents recall when it was still a house and people actually lived
here.”

“Mr Herbert Bass,” I said, “and his wife Ida.” The lady at the desk had given me a leaflet.

Penny giggled. “Well, Mr Bass was a little before Mom’s time,” she said. “He built the place way back.”

The leaflet said 1898, which was about the time our own house in Norwich had been built, and that wasn’t reckoned to be all that old, but it was nevertheless strange to be walking through
rooms and opening doors and hearing the floorboards creak where once the footsteps of Herbert and Ida or one of their four daughters had made the same soft sounds that we were making now.

“I can just hear their dresses swishing as they went up these stairs,” said Penny, and in a room at the top there were some of the very dresses the girls had worn, preserved in glass
cases. “Elegant,” said Penny, and a bluejay outside the window gave a harsh cough that made us both jump.

The windows were large and filled the room with sunshine, but that solitary sound from outside reminded me that we were upstairs in an almost empty house and brought my dream to mind with all
the hollow loneliness of the empty mansion I had been lost in while I slept. I was not sorry to leave the room and come out on to the landing where we were once more in sight of the curator in the
hall.

The landing circled the stair well, and Penny had gone ahead to a room at the back of the house.

“Sam,” she said, “this will interest you more than a bunch of old dresses.”

She was right. The room was set out to show the earliest years of Oxrun, which happened to coincide with the early generations of the Bass family, so there was a great deal about the interests
of Herbert Bass himself. He was a businessman involved in hotels, stores and homesteading, and even telephone lines – but he had made his fortune in logging, and it was the forests
surrounding Oxrun Station that dominated the room. It was then I realised why, ever since I’d entered it, the house had seemed to remind me of something that just eluded me, as haunting as
the dream but not quite the same. And then, as we trod the floorboards, it came back to me.

“It’s the way the house is built!” I exclaimed suddenly, and saw instantly that I had puzzled her. “What I mean,” I said, “is that it’s built of
wood.”

She had startling light blue eyes. “Uh-huh,” she said, and kept those eyes fixed on me until I explained myself.

“It’s the way it smells,” I said. “It’s the scent of all the wood and wax.”

“Don’t you like it?”

“Yes I do, very much. But it’s just the same as when you step off the plane at Harley – all those trees fill the air with a . . . I don’t know, a woody kind of smell that
goes with the whispering.”

I had said too much.

“Whispering?” She was puzzled again, and I couldn’t blame her. So I told her about the aeroplane noise that had lingered in my ears.

“Well, sure,” she said, trying to understand. “I guess we’ve all had that, getting off an air-o-plane.” She was laughing at my accent again. “And don’t
you dare apologise about it, Sam, or I won’t buy you a coffee.” She puckered her brow. “You do drink coffee?”

“Sure,” I said, putting as much of her drawl into the word as I could.

“Help!” she cried. “That sounds awful! Just speak the way you do, Sam, or I won’t think you’re cute any more.”

Cute was not quite what I wanted to be, but it was what she certainly was. And at least I had changed the subject.

4

Last night’s dream had faded, but strolling with Penny Galbraith through the streets of Oxrun Station was a kind of waking dream. Facts that had lain, half-forgotten, in
the base of my mind, kept floating to the surface so that I recognised a fire plug when I saw it, although there are no such things in England, and I was familiar with huge flat-fronted trucks as
if I’d known them all my life, storm drains, and traffic lights on long stalks bending over roads like praying mantis. All from films I had seen. But when we paused before crossing to The
Luncheonette on the corner of High and Centre, a much more vivid picture leapt to my mind.

“Nighthawks,” I said.

Penny’s blue stare was on me again, waiting for an explanation. I nodded towards The Luncheonette. Its long window on Centre was continued around the corner so that the whole length of the
counter was in view. “It’s that painting,” I said. I even remembered the artist’s name. “The one by Edward Hopper – you know, with three people sitting on stools
at the counter and a waiter at the bar stooping to get them coffee.”

There was no waiter visible in The Luncheonette, but it did look exactly like that late-night picture of a lonely lunch counter in a deserted street, and there were three people hunched on bar
stools. Whether Penny knew the picture I never found out because at that moment she recognised one of the customers and waved to him.

It was, after all, only a small coincidence, and I was about to follow her across the road when a waitress came from the kitchen and moved along behind the bar. I smiled at the little surge of
disappointment I felt, for the waitress should have been a man with a white hat to match Edward Hopper’s picture, not a dark-haired girl. She bent forward to take care of something behind the
counter, and as she did so the little white cap pinned to her hair showed for the first time, and for one long second her solemn profile was exactly where it should be . . . and the whole
night-time picture, in which nothing moves, was frozen there in the middle of Oxrun on the corner of High and Centre in broad daylight.

“Sam, I want you to meet Jeff Dacre.”

I had walked into Edward Hopper’s picture with Penny, but it was no longer “Nighthawks”, and Jeff Dacre was not a lonely man wearing a fedora. He was tall and blond, and he
wore a baseball cap.

We sat in a booth. “I was in England once,” he said. “London – you know it?”

“Doesn’t just everybody ask you that?” said Penny to me, and then she turned to him. “He lives in Nor-witch and he doesn’t know anything about London because
it’s too far away.” She laughed at me. She had very even white teeth. “And he says sorry all the time, which is very sweet – not like you, Jeffrey Dacre, you
hulk.”

He grinned. He never took offence – not, at least, at anything a girl said to him. “I apologise,” he said. He stuck out a hand across the table even though we had shaken hands
just a moment before, and I shook it. “It was just the same for me in your country, Sam, when they asked me where I came from and I’d say Oxrun Station and they’d say
where’s that – is it a part of New York?” He sat back. “I guess we all think that where we live is the centre of the world. Isn’t that so, Penny?”

“Oxrun Station may be the centre of your world, Jeff Dacre, but it certainly isn’t mine.”

His face fell a little at that, and for some reason I shared his disappointment. Before I’d thought about it I was backing him up.

“Well,” I said, “I think Oxrun Station might just possibly be the true centre of the earth.” And that sounded so phoney that I blushed. “Sorry,” I said, and
saw Penny grin, “but I’ve had a strange feeling ever since I arrived that there’s more going on here than you’d believe.”

That made him laugh and slap the table. “You can say that again,” he said. “What’s Penny been telling you?”

“Isn’t that truly typical!” Penny turned her eyes to the ceiling. “Everything’s got to have a double meaning for him.”

He was about to respond when the waitress came from behind the counter to take our order. She was a girl of about our own age, maybe a year or two older, and they both knew her. “Hi,
Glyn,” said Jeff and introduced her to me. She nodded but remained silent. “Glyn’s folks come from England,” he said, but this seemed to embarrass her.

“Way back,” she said, as if apologising. She paused, biting her lip. “And they didn’t come from England. They were from Wales.” Her eyes flickered towards me as
though she had said too much and needed help.

“There’s a big difference,” I said. Wales was like Norwich, neither Penny nor Jeff had much idea about either, and for the first time I realised that I was as much a mystery to
them as they were to me. But the girl knew about Wales. I had opened my mouth to say more when she became the waitress once again. “Coffee,” she said abruptly, and hurried away.

“That Glyn.” Jeff shook his head. “She never did say much to anyone.”

Penny had looked sourly at the girl as she retreated. “She’s so uncouth,” she said, which told me that further questions from me would be unwelcome.

Jeff, intent on making me feel at home in his town, asked if I went fishing, and when I said yes but my tackle was far away, he was all for lending me some right now and taking me to a
particular stream he knew in the woods.

“Can’t you see Sam’s jet-lagged?” Penny protested. “Give him a chance.”

He held up both hands in surrender. “Me,” he said. “I’m the dumb ox of Oxrun. Sorry, Sam.”

“That’s my line,” I said.

He laughed. “But really, Sam, you’ll love it up there in the hills, won’t he, Penny?”

“It all depends where you take him.”

This amused him. “Do you know what this girl’s worried about, Sam? She thinks those woods are spooked.”

Penny was indignant. “I don’t think so – I know so!”

He was having a good time teasing her, and neither of them noticed the waitress returning with our coffee.

“Penny thinks there’s a great old ghost up there amongst the trees just aching to get his slimy old hands on any living person and snatch them away to hell and damnation.”

“Well, I’ve heard of it,” she said, “and so has everyone.”

Jeff had been waving his arms about so that the waitress had had to wait before she could set down her tray. He noticed her. “Glyn lives out of town,” he said.

“What of it?” Her voice was as cool as the expression in her dark eyes.

“Hold on!” Once again he held up both hands. “I didn’t mean any offence, Glyn.”

“Okay.” There was a suggestion of a blush in her cheeks. “I guess I’m a little tired this morning.”

“Look, all I meant was that you live a little way out among the woods and you don’t find anything to be scared of . . .” His voice died away and he looked awkward as she poured
our coffee and left. “Wow!” He pretended to mop his brow. “That was a close one.” He saw I did not understand, and he lowered his voice. “I shouldn’t have spoken
about that old ghost in front of her – they say it was a member of her family.”

Penny was unimpressed. “But so far back it hardly matters,” she said. “That Glyn’s so touchy it’s ridiculous.”

“Well,” said Jeff, “she’s certainly got nerve, I’ll say that for her.” He was big and good-natured and he smiled as he said to me, “Now Penny, she
wouldn’t dare live up there in those woods. She’d be up among the top branches like a squirrel if a little old mouse squeaked.”

“Pay no attention to him, Sam,” said Penny.

There was mischief in Jeff’s face. “Okay, Penny,” he said, “if you’re so big and bold, just tell us the name of that little old ghost.”

She lifted her nose and sniffed. “Don’t be so silly.”

He spoke to me. “This ghost was a lumberjack, up there in Mildenhall Woods – where Glyn lives. And he was reckoned to have done away with several people – with his
axe.”

“You don’t know that!” Penny was suddenly vehement. “No-one’s ever said anything about an axe. You’re trying to make it worse than it is.”

“See what I mean? She daren’t even think of it.”

“That’s just nonsense!”

Jeff continued to smile. “Well then, Penny, you go ahead and tell Sam what he was called.”

“He already knows.”

Jeff laughed. “How can he? He’s only just arrived in Oxrun.”

“Because there’s a photograph of him in the museum with his name underneath it – that’s why.” She spoke in a rush and added, “That’s true, isn’t
it, Sam?”

I nodded, because I knew she wanted me to agree, but I had to admit I could recall no name.

“That’s okay,” said Jeff. “Penny will remind you.”

“I will do no such thing.”

“Just what I said, she’s a squirrel.” He sat back, well pleased with himself. “You noticed that, Sam – she won’t say his name. And she won’t say it
because she’s afraid that if she does say it, that old spook lumberjack will answer to his name and come looking for her. He likes girls.” He tilted his head. “Now me,” he
said, “I can say it.”

“Don’t you dare.” Penny glowered at him.

“Well, as he used an axe, you could always call him Hugh . . .”

“Stop it!”

“I was only going to say that he isn’t human, but he did hew wood so you could call him the Hew Man.”

I was facing them across the table. Behind their backs, unseen by either of them, the waitress had come out from behind the counter and was approaching our booth. Jeff had at last coaxed a smile
from Penny, and I pushed out my cup for the waitress to refill it. The crisis was over and I was watching the black whirlpool of coffee as sh