Halloween and Other Seasons Read Free Page B

used the remaining light to rip the battery cover off the back of the radio and pull the batteries out.
    They were a different size, so he put the radio on and let it stay on, a droning buzz in the background.
    The flashlight went out, then flickered on again.
    “Quick!” Shep shouted. “Check to either side and see if there’s a way around!”
    Lem shuffled off to the left, and Monk stood unmoving where he was.
    Shep pushed impatiently past him, flicking the flash on and off to pull precious weak yellow beams out of it.
    “There’s no way around here,” Lem called out laconically from the left.
    Shep blinked the light on, off, punched desperately around the edge of the barrier, looking for a hole, a rift, a way through.
    “Nothing…” he huffed weakly.
    He turned with a last thought, flaring the flash into life so that the beam played across Monk.
    “Maybe there’s a crack! Maybe we can pull the wall down!”
    “There is no crack,” Monk said dully, “and we can’t pull it down.” His legs abruptly folded underneath him and he sat on the cave floor.
    Shep turned the light off, on again; the beam was dull, pumpkin colored but he played it all over the rock barrier.
    “Got to be—”
    “There is no ‘Hell’s Cave’,” Monk said dully. “It’s just a myth. My father told me about it when I was seven. This is just an old mine that played out and then caved in.”
    “But—”
    “ I made it all happen,” Monk said hoarsely, without energy. “The heat, the endless summer. It was me.”
    “What?” Shep said, moving closer. On the other side, Lem sank to the floor.
    “It was me…” Monk repeated.
    Lem began to cry, mewling like a hurt kitten, and the flashlight beam died again. In the dark, Shep flicked it on, off, on, off.
    “ Me ,” Monk said fiercely, an agonized hiss.
    Shep hit the button one more time on the flashlight, and it flared like a dying candle, haloing Monk’s haunted face, and then faded out again.
    “I didn’t want it to end.” In the darkness Monk spoke in a whispered, monotone. “I didn’t want it ever to end.”
    “Didn’t want what to end?” Shep asked, confused.
    “This summer,” Monk answered, sighing. “The three of us. I wanted it to last forever. I didn’t want us to…change. Which is what we were doing. Talking about girls instead of baseball cards, hairy legs instead of monster comics, body odor instead of swimming and telescopes. We used to do everything together and now that was going to change. When we went to Junior High Lem was going to try to date Angie Bernstein and you were going out for track. Then you would go out with Margaret O’Hearn, and the baseball cards and comics would go in the back of the closet, along with the marbles and the pup tent and the canteen and butterfly net. The chemistry set would collect dust in the corner of the basement. I could see it coming. It was all changing, and I didn’t want it to.”
    “But how…?” Shep asked.
    In the dark, he could almost hear Monk shrug and heard him hitch a sob. “I don’t know how I did it. I just wanted it, I fell asleep crying for it at night, I prayed for it every day. Every time you and Lem started talking about girls and body hair and growing up, I prayed for it louder. And then, suddenly, it happened. And then I couldn’t make it go away…”
    Lem cried out hoarsely, then settled into low rasping sobs.
    It had become even hotter, and then hotter still. The radio, still on, blurted out a stifled cry of static and then was silent.
    In the sweaty, close, unbearably hot cave, the flashlight went on with one final smudge of sick light, illuminating Monk’s crying face.
    “I’m so sorry…” he whispered.
    ~ * ~
     “Mabel?” George Meadows croaked. He could barely talk, his words fighting through the heat, which had intensified. His wife lay unmoving on the sofa, her desiccated arm hanging over the side, fingers brushing her dropped magazine. Her housedress was now