Lucian's First Trick

The witch threw back her head and laughed.  “Oh, oh ho, oh no,” she said, leaning over, one bony hand clutching a crowded wooden table as she rasped hard for breath.  “Don't go, Lucian, don't go. This is too much fun.”

Lucian was set to run, for real and for truly this time, but just as he felt his body respond to the sprinting impulse, his mind registered the contents of the thick glass jar upon which he'd banged his hand.  Hair.  Swollen lips. A lazy eye.

“Dad!” he screamed.  “Dad, Daddy, Dad!!!”  At first he couldn't move anything but his teeth and tongue, a web of paralysis hand-sewn and tailor made for him, trapping him to the spot in the dark hallway of this stranger's home as he shrieked.  

The laughter continued, the woman laboring through wheezing breaths to beg “Lucian, no--Lucian stay, please...” But Lucian wouldn't stay.  He tore out of the house and ran hard into his father's chest, who wasn't where he'd left him, but had found his way to the front porch to retrieve his only child.  “Where you been?  What's going on?  Did the old lady give you any candy?”

Lucian pulled his father down the steps to the sidewalk in fits and starts.  His father wasn't much bigger than he was, but his old man strength made moving him like dragging an anchor across the ocean floor.  

“Dad, I pissed myself, okay?” he finally blurted, Elmo or no Elmo. “I gotta change!”

The wall of laughter across the street told him there'd be Elmo to pay, indeed.

“Ah, damn it, Lucian,” his dad said.  “Good thing we're almost home...”

Lucian was already on the porch of the house next door, taking the key from the shoestring he wore around his neck, and putting it into the lock, eyeing the porch of the house next door.  

The old lady waved, laughing.  “See you soon, Lucian!” she called.  

And then Lucian slipped inside, panting, the door shut against his father's pounding.  “I didn't see what I thought I saw.  That didn't happen.  It couldn't have.”  In his mind's eye, he saw the witch waving again, transmuting into some amalgam from a Disney flick, or a Bette Midler movie.  Was she really that hunched over and warty?

“Lucian.  Let!  Me!  IN!” and now that his dad was kicking, Lucian's reverie was broken.

That night in bed, after his father had kissed him goodnight and left him to his comic books, Lucian stared at the ceiling, his copy of the latest Deadpool lying discarded on his lap among the candy wrappers.  He'd tried to read along—it was a new issue and he'd spent most of his allowance on it earlier in the day—but he just couldn't seem to focus.  He tried plying his woes with various treats purloined from the Halloween goodie bag stowed atop the fridge for rationing.  

Where do skulls come from?  The voice in his head refused to be still.  Those were heads in jars.  Were they real?  Pretend?  Every shop in town had been decorated for Halloween for weeks.  I'm hardly a baby, I'm eleven years old.  I know a fake skull when I see one.  A chill went through Lucian's body, bringing goose bumps to his flesh.  They were real. He rubbed the bumps down and buried his face beneath the covers.

Lucian flew through the air unsteadily beside Deadpool above a sea of oozing, wriggling things in the darkness.  Deadpool doesn't fly, he told himself from within the dream, he teleports.  And what is that scratching?

He smelled her breath before he opened his eyes and found his glasses on the nightstand.  He knew it was her, her bony hand clasped tightly around his wrist.  He pissed his pants.  Again.  Dad'll be mad.  Dad!