04 Oct Halfmoon

Brett Barbour sees the package placed next to his front door as he pulls his Bronco up to the house. He feels the kind of tingling excitement that’s always felt when such packages arrive. It’s not quite the same feeling as receiving presents on Christmas morning, him knowing what’s inside on account of having made the purchases on eBay or Etsy, but it’s something close. And considering this is a very rare item he’s ordered, so rare that by all rights it should be in a museum, the tingle is more of a full-on vibration this time, his body humming like a massage chair.

Brett’s purchased other artifacts, of course. He has a near-mint-condition copy of the 1978 yearbook for Jeffrey Dahmer’s high school, which had cost almost a thousand bucks. There’s his earliest relic, a 1912 yearbook for the Medical College of Albany, containing (among other interesting things) photos of surgical amphitheaters where gruesome lectures were no doubt held. Then, of course, there’s Brett’s ongoing project: collecting fifty yearbooks from 1950 to 2000, one book for every individual state, plus the District of Columbia.

What started for Brett as a lockdown hobby has become… well, not an obsession, because he isn’t sinking an excessive amount of money into it, but it has become more than just a hobby by now. Five years later and all ten bookshelves in what passes for his study are packed with old yearbooks, ranging from K-12 schools to colleges, each showing a unique characteristic–or a unique history, like the Dahmer book–which had enticed Brett to enter his debit card number into the computer. Each yearbook isn’t just a piece of history, but comes attached with its own history–signatures and farewell messages and occasionally commencement programs or ticket stubs.

But none of them, not even the Dahmer book, quite has the history attached to the 1968 edition of Renwick Union High School Halfmoon from Renwick, Vermont.

Does Brett believe the stories? Of course not.

People probably don’t believe the “true stories” certain horror movies are based on, not in their heart of hearts. But that doesn’t stop them from lining up to gawk at the real-life Annabelle doll, or travel from miles around to drive past the Amityville house. True horror, for a given definition of “true,” triggers the same kind of morbid fascination as true crime. At least, it seems that way to Brett.

It’s not every day one gets an opportunity to see, let alone buy and own, a copy of a yearbook that supposedly killed people–an entire high school, if one believes the story.

A haunted yearbook, Brett thinks. People will make up spooky shit about anything.

It’s certainly the right time of year for such things. Dying leaves flutter off the trees as Brett disembarks from his truck and approaches his porch. It’s the middle of October, a time of year when the Blue Ridge Mountains stop being blue and begin changing to yellow, orange or red before inevitably settling on the dull, dead brown signalling winter. He imagines that the scenery isn’t all that different in Renwick, Vermont–or what was Renwick, Vermont.

Brett climbs his front steps and sets down the two bags of groceries he’d picked up back in Bainsboro. The house is so isolated, surrounded by mountains on three sides, that back in the days before digital TV the only station he could get was Channel 13, and even then the picture had more snow than fucking Scandinavia. Nowadays the gray dish installed on the roof of his two-story, log-and-mortar house is what keeps Brett in touch with the outside world. That and his phone line.

Picking up the package, Brett finds that no return address written on the plain yellow envelope, the kind his touch tells him has bubble-wrapped lining. He can’t say he’s surprised by such cloak-and-dagger stuff, considering the source. Finding this copy of the 1968 Halfmoon had meant following digital breadcrumbs across several obscure message boards and even more obscure online stores–not just obscure but sketchy, maybe even illegal. The price for the yearbook, to his surprise, had been paltry compared to the Dahmer book, despite the Halfmoon being far more rare, plus the subject of crackpot legend on par with the Mothman.

Brett looks up at the sky. The golden glow of sunset shines through the swirling purples of the clouds above, the colors making Brett think of a watercolor painting. The glow also shines through the redding trees surrounding the house, making the house look as if it’s on fire. A cold breeze causes the trees to rustle and whisper, and when the breeze touches Brett’s body he can’t help but shiver.

Whatever, he continues thinking. You better put away the groceries first, Brett good buddy, because you know for a fact you’re gonna be poring over this book for the rest of the evening. Just you and your little piece of history, along with the other pieces of history you’re preserving.

Brett tucks the package under his armpit, picks up his grocery bags, and unlocks his front door.

* * * * * *

“Jesus, that’s hideous,” Lizzie McQueen muttered.

“Language,” Mrs. Lettinger chided, though Lizzie could see from her widened eyes that her reaction was the same.

Lizzie was sitting behind her desk in Room 312 of Renwick Union High School, which was usually Mr. Duplessis’ homeroom but for extracurricular purposes was the meeting place for the staff overseeing this year’s edition of the Halfmoon yearbook. The desks had been arranged in a circle, Lizzie occupying the desk closest to the door, sifting through a stack of student-made art submissions. Picking which artwork would be included was nominally up to Liz, who’d been appointed art editor, though Mrs. Lettinger, the yearbook advisor, had final say.

Stuart Bates’ submission for the Halfmoon’s outer and inner covers wasn’t among the pieces littering Lizzie’s desk. He’d left it in Mrs. Lettinger’s cubby hole in the main office, and Mrs. Lettinger had brought it in for Lizzie to look over. Now, during the final week before winter vacation of 1967, the Halfmoon’s staff was working itself into a frenzy getting the final draft of the book together before it was to be sent off to the U.S. Yearbook Company in Philadelphia for printing.

Lizzie had been deeply devoted to art from a young age, and was planning on applying to prestigious schools like Parsons or Montserrat before she graduated. Since junior high school she’d devoted a lot of her time to practicing, practicing, practicing. But she was mature enough to concede that Stuart was an even better artist than she was, having shared classes with him as far back as first grade at Renwick Elementary. Even then he was a master draftsman, rarely redoing something he drew, drawing in such vivid detail that Lizzie thought he’d end up working in comic books like Spider-Man.

She wasn’t surprised that the staff asked Stuart to handle the outer and inner cover art for the yearbook, which would be his senior yearbook as well as hers. For years, classmates had frequently commissioned Stuart to draw pictures for them, comic characters initially, then naked women as the kids became older and the culture more adventurous. In exchange Stuart could receive as much as ten bucks per picture, more than paper boys were making. And in Lizzie’s opinion, he earned it. As an artist, Stuart Bates was brilliant.

But as a person, Stuart Bates was a weirdo.

Rumors about Stuart had been floating around town for as long as Lizzie could remember, some she could buy and some she couldn’t. The ones suggesting Stuart was involved in occult practices struck her as maybe being plausible, as one of the hornier images attributed to him that had been passed around school showed buxom women with red symbols either written or carved into their breasts and groin areas, throttling creatures that looked like a cross between goats and octopi.

Berwick, like the rest of Vermont, prided itself on open-mindedness. This particular imagery, however, went a bit too far, even for them. It was known that the administrators were keeping a close eye on Stuart, but since he didn’t sign the images nor was seen openly distributing them on school property, there wasn’t much that they could do. His homeroom teacher, Mr. Crabtree, called a PTA meeting with Stuart’s parents, and apparently walked away with the impression that they were just as loopy as Stuart, maybe more so.

The reasons she didn’t believe some of the crazier rumors were self-evident once you heard them. Ron Chessman and his younger brother Gary claimed to have seen green light shooting out of the basement windows of the Bates house on Schoolhouse Road, where Stuart was thought to keep a studio. Another rumor, who it came from she didn’t know, claimed that Stuart had been caught drawing bloody pentagrams on the walls of the abandoned mill outside town, holding the carcass of a dove with its head twisted off as if it were an artist’s palette. Yet another rumor held that Stuart and his parents were immortal vampires who fled to America after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Maybe the students were being mean by spreading these stories, and maybe Lizzie was being mean by giving at least some of them credence. But Stuart really didn’t help himself with his disheveled appearance and rude standoffishness, even towards Lizzie during the first and only time she tried to befriend him. And he certainly wouldn’t improve his reputation with this particular picture when it appeared on the yearbook, even without occult nudity.

It wasn’t hard for Lizzie to realize where he’d gotten his inspiration from. The comic-esque aesthetic was clearly meant to evoke Roy Lichtenstein, whose paintings she considered herself lucky to have seen in person during the senior field trip to New York, at the Leo Castelli Gallery. But it wasn’t the inspiration she took issue with, it was the execution. The execution had gone horrendously wrong.

Lizzie didn’t like how that word echoed inside her head–execution.

Stuart’s front cover mainly consisted of two figures–a young boy and a young girl, supposedly Renwick students. The boy had finely-combed black hair and wore a pinstriped dress shirt, a black necktie, and a cardigan sweater with a big letter R sewn on the front. The girl wore what could have been a dress or a blouse, with long black hair parted down the middle, carrying a book onto which was printed 1968. Both the dress and the sweater were peppered with Ben Day dots, definitely a Lichtenstein homage, while the upper-third of the image was dominated by a word bubble floating from the boy’s head, which read HALFMOON in big, bold, narrow-fonted letters.

It was the figures’ faces Lizzie couldn’t stand. The goddamned faces.

Both the boy and the girl seemed to be laughing, seemed being the operative word. Their mouths were hanging open, allowing the viewer to see both rows of perfect teeth that somehow made Lizzie think of beartraps poised to clamp down on unsuspecting limbs. The image had a limited color palette–only black, white, and blue–giving the figures pale white skin that clashed with the thickly black hair and outlines, an appearance akin to cannibalistic mimes.

The worst part, though, were the eyes. Both the boy and the girl had black eyes–no whites or pupils–which combined with the laughing mouths made the figures appear to be mocking the viewer.

Come to think of it, Lizzie remembered that the naked women in Stuart’s other pictures, the ones with the goat-slash-octopus monsters, also had black eyes. Black, with the same almond shapes.

No, these figures didn’t come across as mocking–they came across as malicious. It wasn’t just how the picture made one’s skin crawl the second they looked at it. Lizzie, an avid fan of the Beatles and especially John, had followed their path in the embracing of Eastern spirituality and became familiar with concepts like auras, and that’s what was wrong with this picture: it had an aura that was wrong, an aura that was suffocating, an aura that seemed to reach an invisible hand out of the page, clamp its claws around Lizzie’s body, and squeeze.

Lizzie set the outer-cover art aside to see the inner-cover art, which would be placed in the very front and back of the book. When she did, she almost felt her heart physically drop.

The image, spread out over two pages, showed figures seated in a room that Lizzie quickly recognized was supposed to be the auditorium at R.U.H.S. A large group of what she assumed were students, about forty or more, occupied the mezzanine in the foreground while up above, in the upper half of the picture, about twenty more students sat on the balcony. While their faces were drawn in various shapes, all were drawn in the same style as the boy and girl on the outer cover–chalk white skin and charcoal eyes. All of them stared back at Lizzie, all of their grinning mouths hanging open, as if the lot of them were heckling whoever was performing on the stage.

Lizzie looked up at Mrs. Lettinger: “Please tell me we’re not going to put these in the book.”

Mrs. Lettinger took the inner-cover pages from Lizzie’s hand and held them close to her face, as if she were an archeologist studying a papyrus manuscript.

“I agree these pictures are…” She paused, stroking her chin for what felt like a full minute before continuing: “These pictures are jarring at first glance, no denying that, but they are distinctive.”

Lizzie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “They’re creepy, not ‘distinctive.’ Can’t we make Stuart… I dunno… draw something that won’t make people think our school is in the Twilight Zone?”

“There’s nothing in the pictures that would justify that action,” Mrs. Lettinger replied. “He didn’t draw anything really objectionable, like something violent or political.”

And here, she lowered her voice: “Or anything pornographic.”

The issue of pornography had caused something of a hubbub to R.U.H.S. over the past year. Another boy, Jeffrey Schaefer, had gotten in trouble in Ms. Ellis’s art class for making an erotic painting in one of his assignments. Lizzie had never seen the painting in question (Jeffrey wasn’t as talented as Stuart, so she didn’t think she was missing anything special), but from the description she’d heard secondhand the work had been extremely vulgar compared to Stuart’s more racy pieces. The administrators confiscated the painting, but Jeffrey hired a First Amendment lawyer up in Burlington to sue the school district, which caused a huge stink. The school eventually surrendered the painting, and coughed up about a thousand dollars to shut Jeffrey up and put the whole episode behind them.

Lizzie immediately understood where Mrs. Lettinger came from. Mrs. Lettinger was eager to avoid a similar controversy with Stuart, especially given this artwork, while hard to look at, was at least theoretically more wholesome than the unabashed smut Jeffrey Schaefer had painted. And since Mrs. Lettinger was the faculty advisor, further argument was pointless.

The Halfmoon’s staff completed their yearbook on time, and the school district shipped it off to the U.S. Yearbook Company on December 18, 1967, the first Monday of winter break. Printing was completed four months later, and nine-hundred-and-thirty-copies were shipped back to Renwick Union High School on May 20, 1968.

Just two days after that, an incident took place at the U.S. Yearbook Company in which an employee named Leonard Minnick, who had complained to co-workers about apparent hallucinations over the previous month, purchased an M1 carbine from a surplus store; embarked on a shooting spree inside the publishing plant, killing six and injuring eleven; then took several cans of kerosene and set the building ablaze. A SWAT team cut Minnick down when he swung his carbine in their direction.

No motive for the killing spree could be determined, though a search of Minnick’s apartment uncovered a handwritten message, likely a manifesto, apparently alluding to his hallucinations–“pale people” visiting him in his dreams, then in his waking reality.

Given the social unrest occurring every day that particular month, plus a U.S. submarine that had gone missing that same day, few press outlets outside Philadelphia covered the rampage. News of the event never reached Renwick. Even if it had, it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. No one thought to link Leonard Minnick’s actions to those nine-hundred-and-thirty copies of the 1968 Halfmoon–except, maybe, Leonard Minnick, who was dead and in no position to warn anybody.

* * * * * *

Brett’s eyes are locked on those of the pale-faced girl.

From the description he’d read online, he expected the cover art to be strange. But this exceeds his expectations in a not-quite-bad-but-definitely-not-good kind of way. The image isn’t just strange, it’s downright bizarre, something that seems to darken the environment around Brett like a blot of paint spreading across wet paper. Seeing the boy and the girl, with those black eyes, doesn’t make Brett regret purchasing the Halfmoon, but it does make him reconsider any thought he had about displaying it in a place of prominence in his house, where visitors might notice and talk about it.

C’mon, Brett thinks to himself. Listen to yourself. It’s a fucking yearbook. The Hope Diamond is supposed to have killed a bunch of people too, but that doesn’t stop the Smithsonian from displaying it at the Museum of Natural History every day.

The difference, of course, is obvious. The Hope Diamond doesn’t have eyes, doesn’t have a face, and doesn’t emote or express itself. Because it’s a diamond. A diamond that sits inside a case composed of three-inch bulletproof glass, on a rotating pedestal that automatically retracts itself into the base of said case after closing time. A world-famous gem that will most likely never make contact with bare human hands between now and the end of the world.

The Halfmoon is a whole different animal. It does have a face–faces plural–and the fact that Brett can touch it causes his heart to grow heavy, heavy enough to seemingly weigh his body down like a boat anchor. Holding the yearbook, on an emotional, maybe spiritual level, makes him feel like he’s holding a live nuclear rod in his hands, waves of radiation pulsing through his body. A queasy feeling hits Brett, not overwhelming but strong enough that he feels compelled to set the yearbook down on the coffee table in front of him.

No wonder this thing’s got a ghost story attached to it, Brett thinks.

It’s the faces, especially the black eyes, that make it worse. Those eyes that feel, for some inexplicable reason, like portals leading to some damp cellar of the universe. Those gaping mouths that Brett can imagine cheering some unseen atrocity–laughing, mocking mouths that seem to say something like, You got a teensy bit more than you bargained for, did you, Brett? You thought you were going to get a weird knick-knack to show off to your friends, hmm? Maybe use us as some sort of morbid museum display or practical joke? Are we a joke to you? Have you considered that maybe the joke’s on you? Perhaps what you need is a good helping of Renwick Union High School cheer.

Yes, he can imagine the girl on the cover saying it. She would say it as she and her boyfriend or classmate or whatever crawl off the cover and sneak up behind him down a dark alleyway.

No way is Brett leaving this yearbook out in the open. He isn’t going to leave it on the coffee table, or put it on the shelf. Not with those black eyes examining him, monitoring him, performing reconnaissance on a human world that is not their own.

You’re starting to scare me, Brett ol’ buddy ol’ chum, he thought to himself. Is this really the impression you’re getting from a stupid yearbook?

Brett can’t explain why, but indeed it is. Looking at the Halfmoon is like looking at a one-way window in those cop show interrogation rooms–you know there’s someone behind the mirror looking back at you; you just don’t know who, or what, you just want those probing eyes to look at someone else. He doesn’t want that boy and girl looking at him, or the inside of his house, any more than he would want to open the front door to a burglar and say, “Help yourself!”

Brett rises from his sofa and takes the Halfmoon with him. He climbs up the stairs and makes his way to his home office on the second floor. There’s a closet there that he doesn’t open for most of the year, where he keeps his winter clothes and luggage. This is where he’s going to keep the yearbook now. He’ll keep the Halfmoon and the bragging rights attached to it, but in a place where he doesn’t have to see or think about it. Let those little ghouls stare at the ceiling with those fucking black eyes.

There’s a shelf in the closet when Brett opens the door, situated over the rack. He puts the yearbook up there next to some VHS tapes he hasn’t watched since his video player broke years ago. He’s settled on never watching them–or glimpsing the Halfmoon–again.

Closing the door, Brett discovers his hand covered in sweat as it unwraps itself from the knob. He brings the hand up to his hand and stares at it with wonder.

Really, Brett? You’re losing it over a yearbook? A yearbook you wanted in the first place? Have you ever heard of “no takesie-backsies,” Brett good buddy?

Indeed he is losing it, and he feels like kicking himself for letting a stupid yearbook (a yearbook, for Chrissakes!) make him lose it. Yet he also feels as if the fucking thing has gripped something deep in the pit of his soul, not unlike the way he gripped that doorknob just now, and is refusing to let go.

Brett decides he must distract himself with something, anything. He goes back downstairs and switches on the TV. He’s watching the Channel 13 news segueing into David Muir when he hears something. Outside.

Laughter.

Laughter not from one person, but from a whole bunch of people. Teenagers, he thinks.

Teens from Bainsboro and Lynchburg and Bedford like to congregate in the woods on weekends, getting up to God knows what. Brett’s the one who has to clean up the beer cans and condoms whenever they have wild hangouts down the hill, and he’s given an earful to the sheriff more times that he’d like. The only reason Brett hasn’t come up to them brandishing a gun is because he knows, in this part of an open-carry state, they are likely packing more than him.

He’d moved up here for the quiet. Not too much to ask, in his estimation. He really doesn’t appreciate the local hillbilly larvae basically rolling into what is essentially his backyard and treating it like a frat house.

Brett takes out his phone and steps out onto the rear patio. Night has fallen. From here, the sole gap in the mountains allows him to see the thin line of lights that is Bainsboro, glistening on the horizon. Perhaps he can record the teens via the video function on his phone, that way he can show the sheriff what a big problem this is. Or better yet, he can walk through the woods, sneak up on whatever encampment the teens have set up for themselves, and shoot any video where he can see their faces.

It’s cold out here. Cold enough that when the wind blows over the mountains it cuts through Brett’s clothes as though they don’t exist, his body hair pricking up like telephone poles. But it’s not the wind that puts a chill through Brett’s heart. It’s what he sees between the trees.

He’s not alone out here.

Brett sees dozens of faces in the darkness, skin white as chalk. They’re distant, but close enough to recognize the black eyes and laughing faces he saw on that fucking yearbook just a few minutes ago. Those cover pictures are now people, people in the woods, approaching his house. And they’re all laughing.

But then he blinks.

And they’re gone.

The faces have vanished, and the laughter with them. All he can see now are the outlines of the mountains around him, made visible from the light pollution of Bainsboro in the distance. The silence of those mountains assure him–supposedly assure him–that he is the only living soul for miles around. Just him and his house.

Then what did he see just now?

He had to have seen them. He fucking had to. He’d seen them and he’d heard them.

Brett takes one step toward the edge of the patio, then two. He cocks his head to the side and tunes his ear for anything detectable over the whoosh of the October wind. Dead leaves blow across his backyard like confetti at the world’s most depressing party, bits of brown and orange dancing over yellow grass. Until tonight it had been unseasonably warm, another example of summer’s increasing invasion of the other seasons, but now it’s colder than a witch’s tit, as Brett’s father would have said once upon a time.

You’ve let yourself get rattled too much, he thinks to himself. It’s just a fucking yearbook.

Maybe that is true. Maybe he has indeed let himself get rattled. But this badly–to the point of having hallucinations in both his vision and his hearing?

That stuff doesn’t happen just when you’re rattled. When you start seeing and hearing things, that’s usually a big, red, billowing flag that you’ve gone crazy.

An old yearbook can’t make you go crazy–can it?

Brett Barbour shivers (again), then goes back inside.

* * * * * *

Lizzie didn’t want to crash the car, but with so little sleep it was hard.

The ‘66 Valiant, a graduation gift from Lizzie’s grandparents in Plattsburgh, barrelled down State Route 12. Her eyelids felt like window blinds, but she was desperate not to close them–not just because she was driving, but because she knew what she would see if they closed. They were the same things everyone, certainly Debbie, had been seeing since graduation. The same things, she was certain, which killed Debbie and a dozen other people and would no doubt come for her next. Hence why she was here, driving as much like a banshee as the speed limit would allow, toward Stuart Bates’s house.

Liz needed to see Stuart–talk to him, threaten him, whatever it took. If there was anybody who had any idea how to make everything stop, it had to be Stuart.

He drew the goddamned pictures, after all.

The day the yearbooks arrived replayed itself in her mind as if it were yesterday. Copies of the Halfmoon had been stacked on the teacher’s desks in every senior class, and they became the talk of Renwick Union High School by the first lunch period. But they became talk for all the wrong reasons.

Throughout the day, Lizzie had overheard conversations about the yearbook, specifically the cover art, exclusively negative descriptions like “creepy,” “weird,” and “something a mental patient would draw.” The reception was so bad that, unlike previous years, she noticed few classmates approaching each other asking for autographs. It was as if everyone at R.U.H.S. had been asked to raise a baby with a horrific birth defect, and they all wanted to keep the baby as out-of-sight and out-of-mind as possible.

But out-of-sight, out-of-mind had turned out to be im-possible.

Jeffrey Schaefer, he who had done the smutty painting and blackmailed the school district into letting him get away with it, was the only person who seemed to have liked Stu’s contribution to the yearbook when it was passed out. Lizzie recalled him gushing about Stuart’s artwork to some stoner friends in the smoking area, talking about how they gave off a “dark energy” as if that was laudatory. At the time, Lizzie had thought Jeffrey was the kind of person who didn’t appreciate art as a way to convey a message, just an excuse to shock people.

Twenty-four hours later, Jeffrey was dead.

The teachers were, of course, mum on the details when the news dropped, but those details were easily found in the evening edition of the Renwick News. The official cause of death was severe blunt force trauma from the police car that hit Jeffrey when he ran out of his house in the wee hours that morning. Jeffrey’s mother told the paper that he’d woken up screaming from a nightmare and, in hysterics, tore apart his bedroom. His actions were speculated to have been due to some bad reefer, but the coroner reported Jefferey had nowhere near enough drugs in his system to trigger such behavior.

Lizzie knew why Jeffrey did what he did–why he ransacked his bedroom before fleeing his house. She knew because she was seeing the same things he had. As was every other senior who’d graduated that past spring. It’s just that not many of them were alive to talk about it.

Ruth Stensland, who Lizzie knew from algebra, dropped dead from a stroke near the end of June after reportedly depriving herself of sleep (to the point of reportedly forging Modafinil prescriptions) for three weeks straight after being handed her diploma. Bobby Malloy, a star quarterback on the R.U.H.S football team who’d earned an athletic scholarship at Boston University, suffered a nervous breakdown in August and was involuntarily committed to the state hospital in Montpelier; he hung himself with a bedsheet on his first night there. Ms. Lettinger, the yearbook advisor, killed herself by sitting in her Fleetwood with a hose attached to the exhaust. She left no note.

The night before Lizzie began her drive to Schoolhouse Road, while she’d sat in her room and combed her blonde hair, she heard a loud banging on her front door. Her mother opened it to discover her best friend, Debbie Smith, soaking wet from rain that had deluged town for most of the day. There was an uneasy tenor in her mother’s voice when she summoned Lizzie downstairs, and it was easy to see why: Debbie, one of the most exuberant people she had known her whole life, looked less like that person and more like a thin layer of rubber wrapped around a skeleton. Her eyes stared back at Lizzie’s from sunken sockets, and parts of her brunette hair were missing in large clumps.

“Christ Jesus,” Lizzie had said in astonishment, not caring if her Lutheran mother was around to lecture her for the blasphemy. “Debbie, what’s happened to you?”

“Lizzie,” Debbie greeted in a weak voice, with a weak smile to match. “How’re things?”

“Answer me!” Lizzie demanded, maybe a bit too forcefully. From the look of her, Debbie hadn’t been sleeping much. At least, that was the only way Lizzie could explain her rapid deterioration since they had last seen each other during the graduation ceremony. That had been one summer ago, before Lizzie had gotten her acceptance letters from Parsons and Montserrat (plus a few other art schools), but to look at Debbie now one would have assumed this girl of eighteen was close to fifty.

“You already know,” Debbie answered.

“No, I don’t,” Lizzie insisted–though of course, not that she wanted to say it out loud with her mother likely eavesdropping, she knew she did.

“Don’t you?” Debbie asked, “Everyone at school has been seeing them–even the teachers.”

“Who’s ‘them?’” asked Lizzie, already knowing the answer.

“Let’s cut the bullshit,” Debbie said, softly, not with anger but with something that to Lizzie’s ears sounded like resignation. “We’ll go out on your porch if you want this to be private, but please don’t lie.”

Lizzie turned around and glanced at the front parlor. Her mother was out of sight but, knowing her, probably not out of hearing. She reluctantly joined Debbie on the porch, where the hiss of the rain landing on the front lawn came close to drowning out Debbie’s enfeebled voice. Before her face had been about a foot from Lizzie’s, but on the porch only a few inches separated the two. Lizzie got a close-up look at the bags forming under Debbie’s eyes; and the discolored skin constituting her face; and the strong smell of coffee in her breath. Caffeinated, Lizzie guessed.

“You’ve seen them too, have you?” Debbie asked.

Lizzie paused before answering: “Yes.”

The dreams had begun close to the end of senior year–the night, she later realized, after that cursed yearbook had been delivered to the graduating students. There was no way the two weren’t connected, because the star attraction of those dreams were the subjects of Stuart Bates’ front cover for the Halfmoon: the smiling boy and the smiling girl. Archie and Veronica, Lizzie had come to call them.

Each time, the dream consisted of Lizzie walking alone down the main hall of R.U.H.S., which had the look of a cavern or tomb thanks to its cloistered ceiling. Except it couldn’t be R.U.H.S. The room was sapped of color, for one thing, making everything look like Lizzie had been transported inside an old black-and-white photograph. Also, all of the classroom doors were missing–as in gone, nothing but empty plaster where they had been. The only doors visible were at the far end of the hall, the sign above reading AUDITORIUM, and Lizzie was being corralled in its direction.

That was because, in each dream, Archie and Veronica were following her. Walking slowly towards her with those preppy clothes, those wide smiles, those charcoal eyes. They were guiding, really coercing, Lizzie toward the auditorium, with no plausible route of escape.

Where are you going? Veronica would say, in a sweet voice. You don’t want to miss the pep rally.

The pair would then pass by Lizzie–Archie to her right, Veronica her left–and wrap one hand each around the handles to the auditorium’s double-doors. The doors would be pulled open and–

Lizzie would wake up. She always woke up when it got to that part. One morning, after blinking awake at that precise moment, she had found her bedsheets drenched and assumed she had wet herself in her sleep, like she was five again. Then she realized the dampness she felt was not urine, but sweat.

The dreams had not stayed dreams, however. In the last few days, Lizzie had seen–physically seen–Archie and Veronica around town. Glimpses at first, then full-on sightings. Veronica peeking through an empty shelf at the Prose and Cons bookstore. Archie waving through one of the rear windows of an ice cream truck. The two of them, together, sitting at the very back of the theater when Lizzie went to see Funny Girl. Somehow she had gotten the sense that the dreams were not dreams but something else, had become something else, something that had begun to infect the real world.

“Yes,” Lizzie repeated. “I’ve seen them too.”

Tears welled up in Debbie’s eyes, and Lizzie instinctively knew why: it feels good, affirming, when someone else corroborates your delusions, proving you’re not crazy.

“What happened to your hair?” Lizzie asked.

“I do it in my sleep whenever I have the dreams,” Debbie answered. “Whenever I see them.”

Lizzie was silent for a good while after that. She didn’t want to ask her next question, because she was frightened of what the answers inevitably would be. But she needed to ask anyway.

“It’s the same dream, right?” she asked first.

“The main hall at school? Yeah.”

“Have you…” Lizzie hesitated, then finished: “Have you seen what’s in the auditorium?”

Debbie recoiled and clutched her arms around her waist, holding herself.

She didn’t need to answer the question. Her trembling body language was an answer in itself.

Lizzie wanted to end the conversation then and there, maybe try to persuade Debbie to go to a clinic or something. But then Debbie voiced the conclusion Lizzie had already reached, because what other conclusion could you reach when the creep’s seemingly fictional characters start killing people?

“Stuart Bates has something to do with this,” Debbie said. “Those… whatever you want to call them, those monsters… they came from that artwork of his. Whatever’s going on, Stuart’s behind it.”

“What do you think is going on?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t wanna find out. The only reason I came here was to say goodbye.”

Debbie then explained that her parents, alarmed by her condition, were moving her out of Renwick and having her stay with an aunt in California. They figured what was going on with their daughter and the other students was an attack of supernatural origin–that part Liz couldn’t argue with. They also figured the aunt’s New Age woo-woo beliefs would somehow repel this attack–that part she could. Whatever Archie and Veronica were couldn’t be wished away with meditation and alternative therapies.

In her heart of hearts, Debbie realized that too.

“I’m getting out of here, and so should you. But somehow, I think it’s already too late.”

And for Debbie, it was.

That was the last time Lizzie McQueen ever saw Debbie Smith, a girl she had known since first grade, the girl she stuck with through numerous extracurriculars and Girls Scout activities. Two days later the News carried a front page story about the rash of suicides and deaths involving the R.U.H.S. class of 1968, an article that had scared the crap out of Lizzie’s parents. Near the top of the item was a paragraph about Deborah Bonneville Smith, who had wandered onto the Renwick golf course and launched herself into the path of the groundskeeper’s riding mower.

That was when Lizzie decided that she needed to confront Stuart Bates.

Ten miles north of Renwick was the cutoff to Schoolhouse Road. In two minutes the Valiant was crawling up a gravel driveway and Stuart’s house loomed ahead, a wood-framed Second Empire relic that wouldn’t look out of place in an Edward Hopper painting. It clearly hadn’t been tended to in ages, the lawn overgrown and vines creeping over the handrails and posts of its porch. Climbing out of the Valiant, Lizzie noticed that all of the windows, even the circular one on the house’s front tower, had been illuminated by a flickering yellow light.

Then the front door opened, and Stuart Bates staggered backwards onto the porch.

Under his arm was a square metal box–a fire-engine-red can with the words GASOLINE and TWO U.S. GALLONS printed in yellow letters.

The house’s front door hung open. Lizzie looked past Stuart to see a golden blaze consuming the interior. At that same moment, the pungent smell of smoke and gasoline caused her to gag.

“S-S-Stuart?” she stammered.

Stuart wheeled around to look at Lizzie, and immediately she thought he looked the same as Debbie had looked, maybe worse. Stuart, covered head-to-toe in soot, was dressed in a wife-beater and pants hung up by suspenders. But he’d grown so thin he looked like something close to a Holocaust survivor. He looked at her dumbly for a moment, face blank, before recognition flickered in his eyes and his mouth stretched into this freakish facsimile of a smile that made Lizzie want to scream.

But she didn’t. Couldn’t. She tried, God or Vishnu or whatever dominant spiritual force in the universe knew she tried, but the only sound she could produce was an awkward, barely-audible squeal.

“From school, right?” Stuart asked, voice croaking. “The yearbook group?”

Lizzie wanted to respond, but still couldn’t say anything. Not to answer his question, not to ask what was going on, not even to tell him to stop when he lifted the gas can over his head like a religious offering and poured what remained of its contents over his head and shoulders, the smell of the gas overwhelming. She knew at once what he was going to do, but couldn’t plead, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even run away–her limbs felt locked in place.

“Wish you hadn’t come,” Stuart said now. “Don’t need to see this.”

Once the can was spent, he cast it aside onto the driveway with a metallic clink-clank-clunk, then took a Zippo lighter out of his pocket. One flick, two, then he held a small flame over his head while his eyes stared into Lizzie’s.

Lizzie’s lips puckered together, like she wanted to kiss him, though that was the last thing she wanted. She wanted to ask him why–why his pictures were causing this mayhem, why he had just set his house on fire, why he was about to set himself on fire right in front of her. But she could only go “wuuh… wuuh… wuuh” as if she had regressed to infancy.

Stuart must have read her mind, because next he asked: “Why? Want to ask why?”

Lizzie nodded feverishly. She only vaguely realized her teeth were painfully gritted together.

Stuart looked down at her, through her, his smile gone and a look of confusion taking its place. For a moment Lizzie wondered if he was going through some sort of dissociative episode, then saw he was genuinely contemplating his answer. He briefly lowered the Zippo to shoulder level.

“The world I drew–the world I’ve seen my whole life–thought it was only me looking in,” he finally said. “Didn’t know the door went both ways.”

Lizzie wanted to ask what Stuart meant, but still the words refused to come out. And they never would, because it was at that moment that he raised the Zippo again…

“And there’s only one way to close it.”

…and before she knew it, his glistening, gas-soaked body exploded into bright orange flames. She was forced to watch as the man-shaped pillar of fire that had been Stuart Bates staggered a few steps toward her, then a few steps back, before running around his decrepit lawn in circles. The figure still screamed Stuart Bates’s screams, but it became less recognizable as Stuart Bates–as a human being entirely–as its flesh blackened into what looked like leather and its eyes melted like egg yolks. The screams soon exhausted themselves as the figure collapsed onto the dead grass, igniting that as well. Lizzie realized at that moment that she’d been holding her breath, and when her nostrils opened she smelled the nauseating aroma of cooking flesh.

Stuart was no longer screaming. So Lizzie screamed for him.

It took almost an hour for the fire department from Chelsea to put out the house, and the bodies of Stuary and his parents with it. The questions posed to Lizzie by the firemen, then by the detectives, then by her parents, registered in her mind as muffled, incomprehensible noises. She did little more than stare ahead, at a fixed point of air, as she was driven by ambulance to Montpelier for overnight observation.

Lizzie was returned to the custody of her parents the next morning. The first thing she did upon returning home was finding and defacing her copy of the 1968 Halfmoon, blackening out the smiling faces of Archie and Veronica with permanent marker, before throwing the book into the trash.

Lizzie McQueen never enrolled at Parsons or Montserrat. Like most of the Renwick Union High School’s class of 1968 (the ones that had so far survived) she and her family moved far from the diseased town of Renwick–far from Vermont altogther–and landed in the farthest city they could find. That city turned out to be Tulsa, where Lizzie found herself cleaning motel rooms, a far cry from the thrilling life she had imagined for herself making art in SoHo or Ludlow Street.

It was in one of those motel rooms where Lizzie filled a bathtub, climbed inside fully clothed, and drowned herself in 1972.

Her suicide note, left on the dresser, consisted of a single sentence:

This way they will stop visiting me.

* * * * * *

Brett Barbour is alone.

He is standing in the middle of what looks like a public school corridor, rows of lockers to his left and right. But it’s not a school he’s ever attended, and it doesn’t look like a normal school at all.

The color, or lack of it, is the most obvious thing. It’s as if Brett has stepped into an old chronochrome film, complete with graininess. He’s specifically reminded of a B-movie he saw as a kid called Cat People, which has a scene where a woman is being pursued through Central Park at night. Like the park, the corridor is only sporadically lit from light fixtures hanging from what looks like a cathedral-like ceiling, with large spaces both in front of and behind Brett dimmed or darkened. Spaces where anything can jump at him if he isn’t careful.

Not as obvious–something that requires Brett to do a double take to really notice–is that all of the classroom doors are missing. The lockers are here, and so are the transoms the doors would be attached to, but where there should be doors are instead blank walls where nothing can pass through.

Brett doesn’t think he’s what one would call a lucid dreamer, but he does know he’s dreaming. That’s the only way he can explain this place, this creepy, surreal funhouse that only looks like a school.

It’s now that he hears a young girl’s voice.

“You got a teensy bit more than you bargained for, did you, Brett?”

Brett turns around to see two figures standing next to each other, about ten feet away. They stand below and in front of one of the overhead light fixtures, appearing to him as dark silhouettes with no facial features to be seen. From the look of them they appear to be teenagers, a girl and a boy, dressed as if they’d just walked off the set of Happy Days. They stand perfectly still, legs pressed together and arms straight down, like soldiers up for an official inspection.

“H-hello?” Brett calls to them.

Silence and stillness. Then the boy speaks:

“You thought you were going to get a weird knick-knack to show off to your friends, hmm?”

Something is wrong with the boy’s voice–and the girl’s for that matter. Brett didn’t notice it at first, but now that he’s really listening he can detect their voices having a slight buzzing characteristic, like they’re speaking through voice synthesizers or spinning electric fans. But they still sound lifelike enough to not come across as robotic. They sound human, but not quite human enough.

Brett knows this is a dream, and that dreams aren’t real, but that doesn’t change the twist of fear he feels in his chest. He addresses the teens again, playing himself off as not as scared shitless as he really is, but listening to his own stuttering voice he already knows it isn’t working.

“C-c-could y-you tell me where we are?” he asks them. “W-w-which school is t-t-this?”

Another pause of silence and stillness before the girl continues with the pair’s dual monologue, as if she hasn’t heard him: “Maybe use us as some sort of morbid museum display or practical joke?”

Then the boy: “Are we a joke to you?”

The girl again: “Have you considered that maybe the joke’s on you?”

“W-w-what’s going on with y-you two?” Brett asks.

The teens start walking toward him–the boy putting his right foot forward, the girl her left, like some sort of synchronized performance, a deliberately slow pace. As they walk, the light from the next ceiling fixture brings them out of the darkness from their feet upwards, and the details of their clothing can be seen. The boy is wearing penny loafers, dark slacks, a pinstriped shirt with a tie, and a cardigan sweater with a huge letter R sewn onto the front. The girl is wearing dress shoes with white socks hitched up to the knees, a dark skirt, and a white blouse tricked out with blue polka dots.

Brett recognizes these kids even without seeing their faces. He’s seen them before.

They’re the kids from the yearbook cover–the 1968 Halfmoon.

The light makes its way up to their waists, then their chests, then Brett can finally see their faces. They looked freakish enough on the cover, but here, in three dimensions instead of two, they look fucking monstrous. Their jet black hair is combed to perfection for their time period. Their white skin has a waxy pallor that makes Brett think of the makeup applied to corpses at open-casket funerals. Their black eyes don’t seem to reflect any light, similar to black holes in deep space, and perhaps that’s exactly what they are. Their smiles stretch ear-to-ear to an obscene length, unnatural wrinkles appearing at the edges of their mouths to make them look less like smiles and more like sneers.

“Perhaps what you need is a good helping of Renwick Union High School cheer,” says the boy.

Brett backs away, turns around, and runs down the hallway. Up ahead he sees a set of double doors, above which is a sign reading AUDITORIUM. He’s initially relieved–there would have to be an exit, multiple exits, in an auditorium–but then wonders why these are literally the only doors in sight at this school.

If all the classroom doors are missing, why are these doors here?

Brett skids to a stop at the double door and glances behind him, only to discover that the boy and girl are there, right there, only inches away despite having never picked up their own pace. Looking them straight in those black eyes was the worst part of this dream, like gazing into the abyss of a bottomless cave that hasn’t been touched by sunlight in eons. The shock of their proximity causes Brett to fall on his ass, pain shooting up from his tailbone.

“W-who the fuck are you people?!” he demands. While he’s still scared shitless, he finds his anger has begun to somewhat overtake his fear, causing his stutter to diminish.

The boy and the girl stare down at Brett, like he’s an insect under a microscope in their science class, assuming he’s anything to them at all. The pair continue staring at him, continue to smile, as they split up and walk around him in a circle–the girl to his left side, the boy to his right–like predatory animals circling prey. They meet again at the double doors to the auditorium, each of them wrapping a hand around the handles, their gaze never breaking from Brett.

“Welcome to Renwick, Brett,” the girl says. “Stuart… Lizzie… Debbie… Jeffrey… Ron… Everyone is waiting for you.”

The two of them pull open the doors, and–

–Brett wakes up.

He’s laying in his own bed, staring wide-eyed at his own ceiling, where thin lines of moonlight filtered through Venusian blinds are projected on the plaster. Wiping sleep from his eyes with this thumb and index finger, Brett sits himself up and looks at his nightstand, where a digital clock reads 3:22. Normally that clock wakes him up at six in order to start his morning shift at the Super Deal at seven, but evidently that bad dream had other ideas.

That yearbook’s fucked me up worse than I thought, he thinks.

Brett suddenly feels the need to pee, and so stretches his body and rises from the bed. His body aching, he walks across the bedroom toward the door that will lead him to the upstairs hallway.

Except it doesn’t open to the upstairs hallway.

Instead the door opens to the back of a large auditorium–its maximum occupancy he can’t tell as his panic-stricken mind races to understand where his house and its reassuring familiarity went. There are easily a hundred seats, maybe more. The theater drapes at the front of the auditorium are drawn open, the stage empty save for a lone microphone stand at the center, the kind of setup Brett saw when he watched (or participated in) talent shows when he was in elementary school.

Each seat is occupied–it’s a packed house. At first the audience are facing away from Brett, staring at the stage, but soon they all begin turning their heads toward him in perfect unison. As they begin to show their faces, he discovers that they all have faces similar to the boy and the girl from his dream–porcelain-white skin, smiles going from ear to ear, and (oh God) hundreds of those fucking black eyes burrowing through his sanity like power drills.

Brett feels the unmistakably feminine touch of the girl’s hand pressing down on his shoulder. Next he feels his bladder coming loose and his piss soaking his pajamas.

“Where are you going?” the girl’s soft, sweet voice asks softly into his ear. “You don’t want to miss the pep rally.”