Tony Barbosa
In the woods behind Tony Barbosa’s house, the autumn leaves screened out so much daylight it seemed like dusk had already arrived. The paths through these woods had been his happy place for all the years he and his wife, Alice, had owned their house, and never more so than in October and November, when neighbors set fire to raked leaves during the day and the scent of their wood-burning stoves lingered on the chilly air at night. Alice had never been fond of autumn, had no real love of Halloween, and felt uneasy anytime he cajoled her into walking the trails that meandered through their woods. Too creepy, she said. He should have realized the first time she’d said it that their marriage would run into trouble.
He wiped a sheen of sweat off his brow and let out a breath.
Tony and Alice had enjoyed about two years of smooth sailing before they hit their first rough seas. The births of their two children had kept them afloat for a long time, but circumstances had become so difficult that he worried they were sinking now.
“Sinking,” he said quietly to himself. “Or sunk?”
“Dad?”
He turned to see Chloe headed toward him down the path, a big cardboard box that looked even bigger in the arms of a girl so short. Chloe had inherited big brown eyes and thick hair from her dad, but the diminutive stature she got from her mom.
“You talking to yourself back here?” she asked.
“First sign of madness,” he admitted. “But you’re not really crazy until you start answering yourself back.”
“You’re only half-crazy, then. Good to know.”
Tony felt the twinge of melancholy he always got when he looked at his now-seventeen-year-old daughter. She was a good kid—smart and confident and ambitious. Her mother’s daughter, really. Tony wished he could take credit. He and Chloe had been close until she turned twelve and decided her parents were idiots. The teenage animosity had lasted for years but had finally dissipated over the summer. Now she was just trying to navigate the sometimes whiplash-inducing back-and-forth of her parents’ relationship.
She set the box down. “What’ve we got here?”
“Open it. Let’s find out.”
Chloe tore into the box like it was Christmas morning instead of Halloween, but in the Barbosa house, October 31 was just as important as December 25. Sometimes even more so. During what Alice lovingly referred to as their daughter’s “hormonal years,” prepping the Haunted Woods every October was the one thing that had brought Tony and Chloe together. Barbosa’s Haunted Woods had taken on legendary status in town, enough so that the neighbors tended to get a little miffed about the traffic it brought to Parmenter Road.
When it had drawn mostly people from their own neighborhood, they’d all loved it. But now that the Haunted Woods brought people from all over town, dozens of cars clogging the street just as trick-or-treat was wrapping up for the night, some of the Barbosas’ neighbors weren’t as thrilled as they once had been.
Now it didn’t matter anymore. Tonight would be their swan song.
Chloe pulled a bunch of Bubble Wrap out of the box, digging deeper. “Hey! This is cool.”
She revealed a thin, almost skeletal hand and what appeared to be some kind of face mask, and at first, Tony didn’t recall having ordered them. With all the haunted attraction props they had accumulated over the eleven years they’d been doing this, he had plenty of skeletons and scary masks. Then Chloe stood and walked to the nearest oak tree, and it clicked for him. The rough pattern on the arm and the mask were imitation bark, the gray-brown hue meant to match the trees. When Chloe held the demonic tree face in place and the skeletal evil-tree arm up to the side of the oak’s trunk, Tony grinned like a little kid.
“That is going to freak people out,” he said. His most glowing review. After all, that was their great ambition.
They’d been putting the whole display together as a team since Chloe was six. She had loved it even then, never scared of the terrifying props. Her little brother, Rick, was thirteen years old and in the eighth grade, and he still refused to even walk through the Haunted Woods. Once it had been fear that drove the kid, but Tony thought now it was simple disinterest. Either that, or Rick thought of the Haunted Woods as “Dad and Chloe’s thing,” with himself and his mom on the outside.
And maybe that was okay. Tony and his daughter had Halloween and scary movies and the Haunted Woods, but Chloe had zero interest in going fishing with her father and brother. As a first-generation Portuguese American kid growing up in Quincy, on Boston’s south shore, Tony had gone fishing with his father, Silverio, almost every Saturday morning from the time he could hold a fishing pole until the day he got married. When Ricky had been born, Tony’s dad had been first to the hospital, beaming with pride. A machinist, he’d worked his body to ruin to support his family and always seemed exhausted to Tony, but that afternoon, holding his grandson in his arms and crowing about the day he would be able to take both his son and grandson fishing, Silverio Barbosa had never seemed more vividly alive.
Less than a year later, cancer had taken him. He had never taken his grandson fishing.
But even now, with Ricky a teenager, old enough to demand they call him Rick, Tony took the boy fishing on Saturday mornings. Sometimes they settled into silence, enjoying the solitude, and sometimes Tony reminisced about his dad and his childhood and tried to share what little wisdom he felt he’d acquired in his life till now.
So if Rick didn’t want anything to do with the Haunted Woods, wanted to leave that to his sister, that was more than okay. It was nice for Tony and Chloe to have something just for themselves, especially since Chloe was older, and while her grandfather had shown up at the hospital after her birth and pronounced her the most beautiful child he had ever seen, Silverio Barbosa had never declared any intention to one day take her fishing. Born in another time and another culture, he viewed that as entirely something the men did. Tony sometimes wondered if he had done the wrong thing, excluding Chloe from his fishing excursions with her little brother, but when it started, he had viewed it as time to bond with Rick and time for Alice to bond with Chloe.
He didn’t know what was right. He just tried to do his best by the people he loved.
This year had been a little different. It would be the last time, the end of the Haunted Woods, so he and Chloe had tried everything short of physical violence to get Rick involved and excited. He had made excuses, his disinterest clear. In the end, Tony didn’t mind—this thing had always been his and Chloe’s, and it seemed right that it would end that way. He hadn’t explicitly told her this would be the last one, but she lived in the same house, had eyes and ears and a little intuition. She knew how long he had been out of work before he’d finally found a new job in August, knew not to answer the phone to avoid the bill collectors. Tony and Alice casually mentioned to neighbors that they were “considering downsizing,” so maybe people wouldn’t realize they hadn’t had a choice. Chloe could see the writing on the wall.
“How many of those did we order?” Tony asked, admiring the tree demon again.
“There are three sets,” Chloe replied, studying the contents of the box. “The eyes glow—there’s a switch. If we get some soft blue lights angled just right and put them on those trees at the third bend in the path—”
“With one of the fog machines—”
“It’ll be perfect.”
Chloe had a smile full of mischief. Her eyes gleamed with delight that matched his own. People came to Barbosa’s Haunted Woods, donated money to whatever charity Tony and Chloe had chosen that year, and took a walk along the path that would scare the crap out of them.
“Happy Halloween, kid,” Tony said.
“Happy Halloween, Pops.”
He hoped she wouldn’t look up at him right then. She knew him too well. His little girl might not be his little girl anymore, but she’d see his pain. The pain of the kind of failure it took to raise your kids in a home like this one and then lose it.
“I’m still trying to get this banshee moving properly,” he said, turning to go back to his current task. As visitors rounded the second turn in the path, the banshee should have come shrieking along a thin wire, pale green funeral rags fluttering around its wraithlike body, but something had gummed up the wire and the banshee kept hitting a snag. There were two of them—the second one, near the exit from the Haunted Woods, was working perfectly, which made this even more frustrating.
“The scream is scary all by itself,” Chloe replied.
“Yeah. But I didn’t buy them for the scream. I bought them for the shock.”
The same could have been said for most of the props and animated mechanisms he’d accumulated over the years. Growing up, his love for Halloween had always been more about the experience than the candy. Running across neighbors’ front yards with a little bucket or pillowcase, he’d felt a delicious thrill no movie could provide. In those days, just like now, some neighbors would do nothing at all and some would way overdo it, but there had been a few who got it just right—a fog machine and creepy music, a little fake cemetery, an animatronic figure that would move or unleash an evil laugh at just the right moment.
On the street where he’d grown up, there’d been a family called the Shipkas, and Mr. Shipka had a scarecrow he would tie to the lamppost at the end of their driveway that he had hooked up to a speaker system. He hid inside with a microphone and peeked out the window, waiting for kids of just the right age and the perfect combination of innocence and fear. As they passed the scarecrow … it would talk to them. And the voice he would use …
A kid named Ed Korski had literally pissed himself. Tony had been there—both of them ten years old at the time—and once his own initial fear had passed, he had first laughed and then felt awful for Ed, who’d run home with his head down and skipped the following Halloween. Tony’s guilt for laughing had eventually subsided, but his fascination with the power of that moment—the rush of feeling so afraid and the relief when he had realized it was all just meant for fun—had stayed with him.
At sixteen, he’d begun working at the Haunted Farm over in Amesbury every autumn. It had been a glorious mix of scary attractions, a spooky hayride, a walk through “demon woods,” and an old barn converted to a “horror circus,” complete with clowns so scary that every night, people screamed. After the screaming would come laughter, and both the terrified patrons and the workers responsible would go home buzzing from the experience. When Tony was twenty-one, the farmer who leased the land to them every year passed away, and his kids wanted to sell the farm. The Haunted Farm lost its home, and the organizers discovered it was simply too much trouble to find a new one. They allowed it to die, but not before auctioning off every last plastic spider, bloody chain saw, demon mask, and fake gravestone. Tony had bought as much of that stuff as he could afford and stored it in his parents’ basement until he and Alice moved to Coventry. The house on Parmenter Road had the perfect backyard; the woods already had trails worn through them by decades of local kids.
Barbosa’s Haunted Woods was born.
Now it would die.
But Tony would make its last Halloween glorious.
“Coming through!” Chloe said.
Tony stepped off the path and let her by. She hurried past with the big shipping box in her arms.
“You want help with those?”
Chloe glanced over her shoulder, purple hair a veil across the left side of her face. “You think it’s my first day on the job? I got it. You get that banshee flying.”
Then she was gone, around the next bend. The trail snaked through the half acre of woods behind the house, up and down the incline amid the trees. Fall had arrived, but there were still enough leaves on the branches to screen out the view from one part of the trail to the next. Where the trees weren’t thick enough to keep people from seeing through to another part of the path, he’d curtained off the areas with black cloth. Where even that wasn’t enough, fog machines pumped dry ice mist into the air. In the dark, you could hear the screams, of course, but with the leaves and curtains and mist, and the way they staggered admissions, you could rarely see anyone else in the woods. Much creepier that way.
Tony loved his props and took great care of them. The most unsettling one was the glowing-eyed creepy doll with the cracked porcelain face who rocked back and forth on an antique carousel horse. There were zombies in cages, hooded witches, and hideous scarecrows with jack-o’-lantern heads. But what made Barbosa’s Haunted Woods so great were the volunteers. Many of them were local actors, but even the amateurs took the night very seriously. Props were one thing, but people made up like zombies and demons and whiteface clowns were what really got the screams going. The best were the spots where hissing zombies lunged up out of graves to claw at the feet of passersby.
His grandfather had drummed it into his skull that nothing could ever be perfect, but Tony had disagreed. Nothing could stay perfect, but if you were lucky and diligent, you could steal a few perfect moments in your life. This afternoon was one of them. Whatever else might be wrong, he had made the Haunted Woods as perfect as it could be, and he and Chloe would always have this memory.
With a huff that cleared his head, he turned his focus back to the guide wire for the banshee. He ran his fingers carefully over the wire. The spot where the prop kept snagging didn’t seem to be tree sap, so he guessed it must be bird shit. Disgusted, he wiped his fingers on the rag hanging from his belt. Bird shit might be zero fun, but it was a hell of a lot easier to clean off than sap would have been.
Tony turned and scanned the path for his toolbox. He kept a little bottle of industrial cleaner in the box. It wasn’t environmentally friendly, so he used it sparingly, but one little squirt and a scrub with the rag ought to do the trick.
Somewhere over his left shoulder, a branch snapped, Chloe coming back.
“That was quick,” Tony said, crouching to dig around the toolbox. He snagged the squirt bottle and when he straightened up, his knee cracked louder than the broken branch. “Jesus. I’m getting old.”
Chloe didn’t argue with him, and that sort of stung. He was only forty-five, after all.
Tony turned, ready to feign insult, but his daughter was nowhere in sight. He glanced into the woods, toward the spot where the snapping sound had originated. Black cloth curtains rippled, blocking his view, but behind that cloth, dry leaves rustled and crunched as someone scuttled away.
“Funny girl.” Tony grinned. Occasionally, he and Chloe would try to spook each other back here in the woods while they were setting up their scares.
A whisper came from behind the black cloth.
It wouldn’t be dark for hours yet, but the shadows were deep back here, and the curtains made them deeper. Tony chose his steps carefully, creeping toward the edge of the path. He would have loved to scare the crap out of Chloe, but the leaves were crunchy. If he tried to grab her, he’d end up pulling down the curtain, and there was no time to rehang it.
That whispering came again, almost like the hiss of a snake.
“Okay, let’s save the fooling around for when the job is done,” he said. It was one of his reliable bits of wisdom. His kids called them dad-isms.
Still Chloe didn’t respond. He wanted to keep things light so as not to spoil the fun, but they had work to do if they were going to be ready in time. Tony stepped off the path, not bothering to try to soften the crunch of leaves underfoot. He reached for the curtain.
“Are you talking to me?” Chloe asked.
Blinking in surprise, he turned to find her twenty feet away, coming around a bend in the trail. She had the cardboard box in her arms, but he could tell it was empty by the way she carried it.
Copyright © 2022 by Christopher Golden
