Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season by Norman Partridge (2010)

Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season by Norman Partridge (2010)

Introduction

....When it comes to the stories in this collection, I'd have to say I haven't changed much. Certain things still give me the chills. Like cemeteries. There are a lot of those in my stories, and some pretty disturbing monsters inhabit them. Some are supernatural, and some are human—and that leads to another Halloween experience that helped shape me as a writer. 

    I'm talking about Halloween 1969, when I was eleven years old. That was the year I realized that the scariest monsters wore human skin, and the realization didn't have anything to do with the fictional creatures I read about or watched on television. The monster in question lived right in my blue-collar hometown, a San Francisco Bay Area suburb by the name of Vallejo. 

    Vallejo had two claims to fame in those days: 1) a naval shipyard that turned out nuclear submarines, and 2) the nation's first modern-day serial killer: the Zodiac. I won't say too much about the Zodiac here—you'll get a much fuller picture in "The Man Who Killed Halloween," an essay included in this book—but I will say that the Zodiac's crimes had a strong impact on me. He taught me about a new kind of fear. One that didn't have anything to do with creatures that went bump in the night, or the roller-coaster rides they took me on in movies or comics or stories contained neatly between hard covers. 

    By then I understood those monsters. I knew their secrets, their strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, they were easy to recognize. But the Zodiac was different. There were no bolts in his neck requiring periodic recharging. He didn't sleep in a coffin by day, powerless, afraid of the sun. No pentagram marked his palm. No. Looking at that old police artist's depiction of the killer today, I still recognize the thing I saw when I looked at the front page of The Vallejo Times-Herald and confronted that artist's rendering for the first time. His was the face of a very human monster—without a doubt containing a cancerous growth of evil, and at the same time not evidencing a single cell of that particular disease on the surface. 

    I couldn't have articulated that perception then, but that's exactly the way the Zodiac's picture struck me. It strikes me the same way today. He didn't look at all like a monster, though that's exactly what he was. His face was like the faces of a half-dozen fathers who lived in my very own neighborhood, right down to the horn-rim glasses. He could have been sitting at a breakfast table down the block, eating Corn Flakes while I stared at his picture on the front page. And that sudden realization broke down something very simple for me: the Zodiac could walk among us, and no one would know they needed to fear him until it was MUCH TOO LATE. 

    That was one of the most terrifying revelations of my youth, and I remember it to this day. It changed the way I saw people. It changed the way I thought. If you've read my Halloween novel, Dark Harvest , you know it made a mark on my fiction, too…and a pretty big one. It influenced several of the stories you're about to read, as well. 

    Of course, the other stuff did, too—those original scares from movies and comics and television. I still love them, and I still love Halloween, too. These days, my bride and I stretch it into a month-long celebration. For us, the holiday is mostly about the fun stuff. We uncrate the old-fashioned Halloween kitsch and decorate the living room. We get an early jump watching those classic Universal creepers. We eat lots of home-popped popcorn. And when the big day comes I always carve a couple of pumpkins, which may seem a dangerous tradition given my past history. But, hey—the good news is that I haven't sliced open my thumb in years. 

    But it doesn't take much to stir those deeper fears, even today. The ones first planted by a serial killer who blended in so well he was never caught. Once the celebration is over and the quiet of another fall night settles in, it's the simple things that creep me out. Like the kid in the mask who's too old to be knocking on our door—the one who comes late and stands there just a little too long, staring, after I've dropped candy into his bag. Or the car that lingers in front of the house when I step outside to blow out the flickering candles in those Jack o' Lanterns. Or the sound in the backyard in the shank of the night—the one I can't identify, the one I shouldn't have heard at all. 

    Yeah. That's the stuff that really gives me the creeps. 

    And that's why I always keep one eye on the shadows. 

    Fact is, I found these stories there. 

    I hope they scare you…and good.

*   *   *

Johnny Halloween

     This is one of those slick first person stories that turns on a dime at about the 1/3rd point and starts working on its own town. 

     Oruborosian.

     The narrator, a cop, demonstrates that crime doesn't pay. 

 

*   *   *

Satan's Army

     "Satan's Army" is a 2005 retread of an old petty-bourgeois liberal chestnut: Christian bigots (i.e. Republicans) who claim to be fighting Satan are the real evil-doers. It's subtle as a slap, a cliché that keeps on giving. Anyone sick of it? If so, you're part of the vast rightwing conspiracy.

     Normally this kind of abc plotting never sees the light of day because lectures disguised as art aren't welcomed by most editors or readers. I hope Partridge doesn't not think writing such a story well excuses him.

     If you want to send a message, use Western Union.

*   *   *

The Man Who Killed Halloween

A solid personal essay about growing up in Vallejo, California during the Zodiac killer's reign of terror. 

....A flip of the calendar page, and October came. But it wasn't the kind of October I'd enjoyed before, because Vallejo had become a different town. 

    People were extremely cautious. My dad insisted that my mom stop working her once-a-week night shift at the remote railroad depot on Highway 29, the road taken by anyone traveling between Vallejo and Lake Berryessa. Business slacked off at both of Vallejo's drive-in movie theaters. The burger joints on Springs Road were deserted after dark. And no one was cruising the strip. 

    With the whole town seemingly on alert, the Zodiac surprised everyone by taking his next victim in the heart of San Francisco. He killed a cab driver, Paul Lee Stine, and followed up the crime with another taunting letter to the San Francisco Chronicle that contained a piece of Stine's blood-stained shirt and a new threat: 

    

School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.[2]     

    The threat was taken seriously. Armed police shadowed school buses in Napa. My friends and I were in the habit of walking to school or riding our bikes, but many parents thought that was too risky. Some started driving their kids to school, dropping them off, waiting and watching until they were safely in the classroom. Every day that passed increased the tension just a little bit, because everyone expected that there were more horrors to come. 

    The Zodiac's murders were coming closer together now. 

    So were his letters. 

    It seemed the killer was gearing up for something big. 

    On Wednesday, October 22nd, I got up early and started to get ready for school. The television was on downstairs, tuned to a call-in show featuring an affable host named Jim Dunbar. His guest was Melvin Belli, a San Francisco lawyer who had a reputation as a publicity hound.[3] Belli had been summoned to the show by a caller who'd phoned the Oakland police the night before. The caller identified himself as the Zodiac killer and promised to phone the show if Belli or fellow barrister F. Lee Bailey appeared. 

    Belli and Dunbar talked. And then the phone started to ring. The brief conversations with the caller on the other end were urgent, intense—the stranger speaking of his fear of the gas chamber and the headaches that tortured him, Belli urging the man to turn himself in. The caller hung up repeatedly, and then called back just as fast. 

    Remember, this was 1969, a long time before tabloid television. No one had ever seen anything like this. By the time the show was over, Belli had arranged to meet the caller that afternoon. Of course, the meeting never occurred, but that didn't matter. The seeds had been sown. When people arrived at work or school that day, they found that everyone was talking about the Dunbar show and the caller who claimed to be the Zodiac killer. 

    Later, the calls were traced to a psychiatric patient from Napa State Hospital, but no one knew that on October 22nd. The caller's identity really didn't matter, anyway. What mattered was that anyone who heard the calls was rattled. The end result was the same—the fear meter had increased another notch....

     ....Some things in town haven't changed, though. Lake Herman Road is one of them. It was a lonely stretch of notmuch when the Faraday/Jensen murders were committed, and it was no different by the time I hit high school in the mid-seventies, when my friends and I would pack ourselves into a car on summer nights and drive out to the spot where two teenagers died in 1969, telling stories about the Zodiac, sharing the rumors we'd heard over the years, driving down that dark lonely stretch of blacktop…going slower…and slower…until we hit that one curve in the road and the tires crunched over gravel, and the guy behind the wheel stopped the car cold and killed the headlights, and we sat there in the dark until someone finally freaked out and begged the driver to hit the gas and get the hell out of there. 

    That's Lake Herman Road. It's a lonely place. Always has been, and it's no different now....

*   *   *

Black Leather Kites

     A horror story apparently constructed via a game of exquisite corpse. Artistically opaque.

*   *   *

Treats

    ....Maddie raised her hand, as if she could wave off the boy's mother before she made the same mistake Maddie had made a year earlier. She saw lipstick smears on her fingers and imagined what her face must look like. It had been so long since they'd allowed her to wear cosmetics that she'd made a mess of herself without realizing it. The boy's mother would see that, and she wouldn't listen. She'd rush away with her son before Maddie could warn her. 

*   *   *

Three Doors

Clever, sometimes poignant riff on W. W. Jacobs.

....I'm just here to tell you a story. 

    So when Johnny got up out of his chair, he knew exactly what that mojo hand could do for him. He'd been thinking about it all week long—listening to dry leaves churn out there in the black October night…eyeing those fat pumpkins waiting for knives on all those neatly swept porches over in town…watching spookshows on his little excuse for a TV when sleep wouldn't come. 

    What Johnny was thinking about was the power that painted hand would hold tonight, on Halloween, when witches and broomsticks and all that other crap that goes bump in the night holds sway. And what Johnny's brain told him was this: his mojo hand would give him three magic knocks on three ordinary doors. And it didn't matter who waited behind those doors—every one of them would open for Johnny Meyers, and whoever waited on the other side would be his to command. 

*   *   *

Jay

17 October 2020