Headlamps
by Philip J. Lees
The door opened, throwing a shaft of light across the wooden porch, and the children fell silent and pressed themselves further back into the darkness. A shadow loomed in the doorway and then old Mrs. Carstairs stepped out. She was carrying a large tray in front of her but the light was still at her back and it was impossible to see what the tray contained. She turned her back to set it down on the table that sat against the wall of the house.
“You’re hurting me!” Johnny Prescott, the youngest there, protested in a stage whisper. Cal Bailey, the oldest and most feared, thumped Johnny’s upper arm.
“Shut up!” he muttered under his breath. Johnny shut up. Nobody messed with Cal.
Mrs. Carstairs paused for a moment and turned her head so that the light from the house lit her profile—gray hair tied back in a tight bun, round forehead and cheeks with a snub nose, a glint of her steel-framed glasses. Her lips lifted in a small smile, then she turned and went back into the house.
When she came out again a minute later she was carrying a small stepladder, the kind that folds up into a kitchen stool. She placed it down at the far end of the porch and unfolded it. She took something from the tray and climbed the steps, pausing at each one to take a deep breath. The children could hear her saying something to herself, but they couldn’t make out the words.
Mrs. Carstairs balanced herself on the step below the top one and raised the object she was holding up above her head. She held the pose for a couple of seconds, then her hands came down empty. She took a box of matches from the big pocket in the front of her apron and there was a rasp and a flare as she struck one. Cupping it in her hands she reached up again and the flame grew bigger as a candle took it over and fed it with wax.
There were seven children squeezed into the small space between the fence and the shed where Mrs. Carstairs kept her gardening tools. Six of them gasped.
If Mrs. Carstairs could have seen her audience from where she stood—and who knows, maybe she could—she would have seen six small jaws drop when she lit the candle, six small mouths open in amazement, six pairs of wide eyes, and one smug smile. More of a sneer, really.
“I told you,” Cal Bailey gloated.
Hanging from a hook in the roof of the porch was something that looked just like a human skull. It was suspended by a thin wire that split into two half way down and was fixed to both sides of it, right above where the ears would have been. Inside it the candle flame flickered and the light showed through two gaping sockets so that as the skull swiveled back and forth it was as if those dead eyes were looking for something—or someone.
The children had stopped breathing. Penny Graham gave a low moan and she, too, was thumped into silence. Cal didn’t care who he hit—boys, girls, it was all the same.
By now old Mrs. Carstairs had lit a second skull and was moving the stepladder a little way along the porch. Now that there were two of them the children could see them more clearly, each in the light of the other. They were a dirty yellow color, stained with brown in places, and they seemed out of shape, as if they had been twisted into asymmetry by some great force. The jaws gaped slightly open and were missing several teeth.
Mrs. Carstairs had finished with the third skull and was reaching to hang a fourth. The first two had rotated to face each other and nodded on their supporting wires like two people having a conversation.
“Hey,” Cal called out in a normal voice, loud in the silence, “what’s a nice girl like you doin’ in a place like this?” He sniggered and in an instant the spell was broken. The children streamed out of their hiding place like roaches from under a cupboard and raced for the gate of the backyard, tripping over each other in their haste.
§
“There are twelve of them,” Cal boasted to the others next morning. “I stayed till she finished, till she put them all up. She never saw me. You lot are all wusses.”
“But they’re not real,” Penny protested. “Are they?”
“Sure they’re real,” Cal said. “Her husband was a sailor, like my Paw. He brought them back from Borneo.”
Everyone knew that Cal’s father was in prison, but nobody was going to say so. In general it was wiser to believe what Cal said—or at least, wiser to pretend you believed him.
“She always hangs them up the day before,” Ed Martinson said. He was an older boy—older than Cal even—but he wasn’t much of a talker and he hadn’t been on last night’s expedition. “That way she has time to bake more cookies for trick-or-treat. That’s what my Mom says.”
“I’m gonna get me one,” Cal said. “Tonight after midnight, after she’s gone to bed. Who’s coming?”
“Not me,” said Ed.
If it had been anyone else Cal would have scoffed, but he had pushed Ed too far one day and was missing one of his bottom front teeth as a result. Now Cal tended to ignore Ed, which suited Ed fine.
“I’ll go by myself if I have to,” Cal said.
Cal’s Mom had disappeared soon after the cops came for his Paw. Since then Cal had lived with his Aunt Betsy, who fed him, clothed him, and otherwise left him to his own devices. Making plans for after midnight wasn’t a problem for Cal.
The other children considered the problems involved in leaving their own households undetected at that time and added them to the prospect of being in Cal’s company on the proposed adventure. One by one they shook their heads.
“Wusses!” Cal said.
§
Cal wasn’t a wuss, though. Cal was a hero. Sure his heart was beating fast as he slunk in through old Mrs. Carstairs’ garden gate—but it wasn’t because he was scared, it was excitement. He was sweating, but that was natural ‘cause he’d run half the way here. And if the sweat felt cold, that was just the chill damp of the fall night.
The sky was dark. The moon had already been close to setting earlier in the evening when all the others had gone trick-or-treating. Cal hadn’t gone with them. That stuff was for kids and he was fourteen already. In another year he’d leave this shit-hole in the middle of nowhere, hitch rides on freight trains till he got somewhere he fancied, and then get himself a job. Yes sirree! Cal Bailey was goin’ places, that was for sure.
But tonight he had a mission. He had to liberate the treasure from the dragon’s lair, or the witch’s cave, or something like that. What the hell. He was a hero like Conan, like that big guy Arnold Swizzlebagger with his big chin and his big sword and all the chicks hanging off his arm like they wanted him to bang them there and then.
As he tiptoed up the steps to Mrs. Carstairs’ front porch Cal set his jaw and imagined his arm muscles rippling under his rolled-up shirtsleeves. He would complete his mission and then the chicks would be all over him. Not that there were any chicks in this place worth banging. Lizzie Darling was quite cute in a soppy kind of way, but she was always brushing her hair and she read poetry. Aloud. Sheesh!
He was there. By now his night vision was good enough to make out the stepladder where Mrs. Carstairs had left it. He picked it up and carried it along the porch stepping as softly as he could (like a cat, Cal thought to himself, a big cat, like a lion or a tiger). Taking care to make no noise, he placed the stepladder down again underneath the skull at the end of the row, where the darkness was deepest. Then he climbed the steps and reached up. He could see the tan outline of the skull above his head, swinging just a little in the faint night breeze, but it was well beyond his reach.
Darn! He’d forgotten to unfold the ladder. There were an extra couple of steps folded inside it and he needed them, of course he did.
Just a trial run, he told himself. Spying out the land, that’s what I was doing. What was that word? Reconstance, that was it. He’d been doing reconstance.
When he folded out the other two steps, working in the dark, and locked them into place one of the hinges trapped the flesh between his left thumb and forefinger and pinched it viciously. Cal hissed with the pain, but he didn’t cry out, not him, not Calan the Hero. He sucked the place until the sharpness went out of the pain and it was just a dull ache. He’d have a blood blister there tomorrow, but that was okay, it was an honorable wound.
He climbed the steps again. The first three were broad, but the last two—the ones he’d just folded out—were much narrower. On the top one there was barely room for both his feet, and still his fingertips only brushed the bottom of that skull. Funny, he’d never thought of Mrs. Carstairs as tall, but she’d stood on the step below the top one so she must be nearly a foot taller than he was. It was because she was old, he thought. It made her look smaller.
Anyway, he couldn’t just stand here looking at it. With his middle finger he could stroke the tip of the bottom jaw, that was all. It felt kind of creepy, touching it like that. Get on with it, he told himself.
Maybe if he stood on tiptoe. Struggling to keep his balance he raised himself on the balls of his feet, feeling his fingers slide up the skull’s jaw until his thumbs touched the base. Almost there. Cal stretched his body upwards, extending feet, legs, back, arms, fingers as far as he possibly could. He felt something crack in his neck with the effort.
Then he felt unsteady. He realized he was going to topple backwards and with the last bit of spring in his feet he launched himself just that bit further upwards so he could grab onto the skull with both hands. The ladder teetered and then fell over to one side.
For a second or two he swung there, suspended from the skull as his hands clutched at the smooth bone, finding purchase wherever they could. Then the wire gave way. It couldn’t support that weight for long. Cal came down.
His right leg went into the stepladder’s tubular steel frame and pushed him sideways. His left leg hit the floor off balance and over he went. He twisted himself around so that he could use his arms and hands, still holding the skull, to break his fall. He felt the skull smash as it hit the hard wooden porch floor and something in his right leg snapped as it was levered over the edge of the stepladder.
The noise, a two-part affair, the fall of the stepladder followed by the crash of Cal’s own impact, rang in his ears. After the silence before it seemed as loud as the double discharge of the shotgun Ed Martinson’s father used to shoot varmints.
Cal felt dizzy and nauseous, but he couldn’t stay there. He had to get away. He tried to turn over, but the movement sent an arrow of pain through his injured leg and he whimpered and fell still. Calan the Hero was in trouble.
The porch light came on, dazzling him, and he put his hand over his eyes. He heard the porch door open and then Mrs. Carstairs was standing over him, dressed in a moth-eaten, old-fashioned dressing gown. He looked up at her and she looked back, her pale eyes magnified through the lenses of her glasses. She didn’t seem angry as far as Cal could see. He struggled to think of something to say, but before he could, she spoke.
“I thought it might be you,” she said. She didn’t sound angry, either. Well, after all, he hadn’t done anything so bad, had he? In fact, he should be angry with her for having such a dangerous stepladder. Maybe he could sue.
She looked around, taking in the scene.
“Oh dear,” she said. “That looks like a nasty break.”
She was looking at his leg, still trapped in the stepladder, and for the first time he noticed that the bottom part was at an odd angle to the rest. In a way Cal felt proud—a broken leg: that was a real hero’s injury, not like the stupid nip that had also come from that stepladder, his worst enemy.
“We’d better get you up,” Mrs. Carstairs said. She bent down and put her hands under Cal’s armpits.
“Use your good leg,” she said. “I need you to help me.”
She lifted him up and he pushed as best he could with his left leg. He was surprised how strong she was, and after a few seconds of grunting and cursing he was upright. She had somehow maneuvered him so that his injured right leg had come out of the stepladder and was hanging free. He took his weight on his left leg and had his arm across Mrs. Carstairs’ shoulders for support. There was serious pain in his right leg now but at least he wasn’t lying on the ground any more.
Both of them were panting from the exertion. Mrs. Carstairs was staring at the skull on the porch floor. The domed part at the top had shattered and the jawbone was askew, as if the skull was laughing sarcastically.
“Can you call a doctor?” Cal managed to say.
“Not yet,” Mrs. Carstairs said. “We’d better get you inside first.”
She helped him hobble to the doorway, taking most of his weight on her shoulders. Each hop was a jerk that sent a shudder of pain through Cal’s broken leg and he had tears in his eyes before they got there. He blinked them away. Calan the Hero didn’t cry.
They stopped for a moment so that he could rest. There were no lights on in Mrs. Carstairs’ house and Cal couldn’t see inside. Well, he hadn’t got the skull, but this would still be a tale to tell the others: a tale of heroism and adventure, starring Calan the Hero!
“Don’t you worry,” Mrs. Carstairs said. “I’ll give you something for the pain, and then I’ll fix you up. I’ll fix you up just fine.”
§
Next year it was Penny Graham who led the younger kids to hide and watch Mrs. Carstairs hang out her skull candleholders the day before Halloween. Since Cal Bailey’s boast a year ago he hadn’t turned up at school and nobody had seen him. Aunt Betsy said Cal had gone to live with his mother. It was a long time since anybody had seen her looking so cheerful. It was as if ten years had dropped away from her.
Penny shushed the kids to silence and they waited in the shadowed space between the fence and the garden shed until Mrs. Carstairs came out and started to perform her annual ritual. One after another the skulls went up and the candles were lit. One, two, three, all the way up to twelve.
There was something different, though, Penny thought, as the younger kids gasped and gaped. Something about skull number twelve. It was a much lighter color than the others. Instead of a dirty yellow it was a polished white, bright and shiny.
What was more, while the other skulls looked battered and old, this one was almost complete. In fact, from where Penny watched she could see only one small imperfection: one of the bottom front teeth was missing.
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2005