"Halloween Street" (1999) Steve Rasnic Tem
Halloween (2011) Edited by Paula Guran
Readers unfamiliar with "Halloween Street" (1999) Steve Rasnic Tem may prefer to read these notes only after reading the story.
Out-of-place people, places, and things used to be characterized in most US and UK horror fiction by their wrongness, the fact that they were unacceptable and must be banished or defeated. A more salutary–or at least different–treatment began with Freud and Lovecraft. The wrong and unacceptable were only uncanny outliers, mirrors, or natural anomalies.
"Halloween Street" (1999) Steve Rasnic Tem is a poetic story whose deep strangeness is amplified with concrete description and dialogue.
Eleven year old Laura, readers surmise, is a changeling: never at home in our world. Others know it, too.
Laura was not pretty. There was nothing really wrong about her face: it was just vague. A cruel aunt with a drinking problem used to say that “it lacked character.” Her mother once took her to a lady who cut silhouette portraits out of crisp black paper at a shopping mall. Her mother paid the lady five dollars to do one of Laura. The lady had finally given up in exasperation, exclaiming, “The child has no profile!”
Laura overheard her mother and father talking about it one time. “I see things in her face,” her mother had said.
“What do you mean?” Her father always sounded impatient with her mother.
“I don’t know what I mean! I see things in her face and I can never remember exactly what I saw! Shadows and . . . white, something so white I feel like she’s going to disappear into it. Like clouds . . . or a snowbank.”
Her father had laughed in astonishment. “You’re crazy!”
“You know what I mean!” her mother shouted back. “You don’t even look at her directly anymore because you know what I mean! It’s not exactly sadness in her face, not exactly. Just something born with her, something out of place. She was born out of place. My God! She’s eleven years old! She’s been like this since she was a baby!”
“She’s a pretty little girl.” Laura could tell her father didn’t really mean that.
“What about her eyes? Tell me about her eyes, Dick!”
“What about her eyes? She has nice eyes . . . ”
“Describe them for me, then! Can you describe them? What color are they? What shape?”
Her father didn’t say anything. Soon after the argument he’d stomped out of the house. Laura knew he couldn’t describe her eyes. Nobody could.
She spends her years, and her Halloweens, silently and at one remove from everyone else. Halloween Street, from her bedroom window, is a subject of daily observation and thought.
She had quiet thoughts while gazing at Halloween Street, the glowing white house, and all the things that happened there.
She had quiet thoughts pretending that she hadn’t been born out of place, that she hadn’t been born anyplace at all.
This stillness, this outward silence and lack of affect, ends abruptly one Halloween.
….after most of the other kids had returned to their homes, Laura came down the stairs wearing her best dress and the cheap mask her mother had bought for her.
Her father and mother were in the living room, her mother having retrieved the blue robe from the hall closet.
“She’s wearing her best dress, Ann. Besides, it’s damned late for her to be going out now.”
Her mother eyed her nervously. “I could drive you, honey.” Laura shook her head.
“Well okay, just let me cover your nice dress with the robe. Don’t want to get it dirty.”
“She’s just a kid, for chrissake! We can’t let her decide!” Her father had dropped his newspaper on the floor. He turned his back on Laura so she wouldn’t see his face, wouldn’t know how angry he was with both of them. But Laura knew. “And that mask! Looks like a whore’s face! Hell, how can she even see? Can’t even see her eyes under that.” But Laura could see his. All red and sad-looking.
“She’s doing something normal for a change,” her mother whispered harshly. “Can’t you see that? That’s more important.”
When Laura leaves for what her mother wants to think of as the normality of trick-or-treating, it is actually Laura's irrevocable homegoing.
The houses on Halloween Street looked their own way, sounded their own way, moved their own way. Lost in their own quiet thoughts. Born out of place.
Jay
