Norman Partridge - Johnny Halloween: Tales of the Dark Season

JOHNNY HALLOWEEN:

Tales of the Dark Season

NORMAN PARTRIDGE

CEMETERY DANCE PUBLICATIONS

Baltimore

2010

Copyright 2010 by Norman Partridge

Johnny Halloween Copyright 1992 by Norman Partridge.

First appeared in Cemetery Dance #14.

Satans Army Copyright 2005 by Norman Partridge.

First appeared in the lettered edition of Mr. Fox and Other Feral Tales, Subterranean Press.

The Man Who Killed Halloween Copyright 2001 by Norman Partridge. First appeared in The Spook #4.

Black Leather Kites Copyright 1991 by Norman Partridge.

First appeared in Chills #5.

Treats Copyright 1990 by Norman Partridge.

First appeared in Blood Review #4.

Three Doors Copyright 2006 by Norman Partridge.

First appeared in At the Sign of the Snowmans Skull, Earthling Publications.

The Jack oLantern: A Dark Harvest Tale Copyright 2010 by Norman Partridge. Previously unpublished.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cemetery Dance Publications

132-B Industry Lane, Unit #7

Forest Hill, MD 21050

http://www.cemeterydance.com

First Digital Edition

ISBN-13: 978-1-58767-284-2

Cover Artwork Copyright 2010 by Alex McVey Digital Design by DH Digital Editions

This ones for Minh Nguyen.

May your treat bag always be full, pard!

INTRODUCTION: Dark Seasons Past

My first memories of Halloween are the monsters. Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Manyou can toss in the Mummy, too. Were talking early sixties here, when the Universal Studios creepers reigned over the popular culture landscapeone theyd dominated, at that point, for more than thirty years.

I cut my imaginative teeth on those movies, and then I went looking for more stuff that would provide the same kind of thrill. It was a good time to do that, because the late sixties and early seventies marked a golden age for young horror fans. Monster culture had trickled down into kid culture in a big way, and not just in film and television. Famous Monsters magazine was easily found at the local bottle shop (my moms polite parental euphemism for liquor store). Bill Warrens black & white horror comics, Creepy and Eerie , had taken the place of the EC Comics horror lineright down to their cackling horror host characters. Paperback anthologies featuring classic horror stories were plentiful and cheap in creaky turnstile racks.

If kids wanted more, they could even get up-close-and-personal with their favorite horrors. Head down to the local hobby shop and you could buy Aurora monster model kits for just under a buck, featuring the Universal standbys and a few others to boot. Grab one of those kits and some Testors paints, and you were in business. If it was the right time of year, you might even hear The Monster Mash blaring from the local Top 40 station while you turned your bedroom into a glow-in-the-dark Chamber of Horrors.

Needless to say, thats exactly what I did. I had all the Aurora monster models on my bookcasesat least until I got my Daisy BB gun and they turned into targets. The day after the grand shootout, I moped around like an impulsive dictator whod lined up his best friends against a brick wall and executed themwhich I admit is a metaphor that really pushes the envelope, but I hope youll indulge it because I really did feel that way. Add to that weekly viewings of Bob Wilkins Creature Features on television, and a couple of Super-8mm monster movies to my name, and I guess that made me a card-carrying monsterkid .

Thats the term du jour for monster lovers from the Boomer generation. Many years have passed since then, but I still love that stuff. Admittedly, theres more than a little nostalgia mixed in with that love, plus what I like to think of as the thrill of the original scare.

Let me explain that last part. Its my opinion that the strongest horror experiences are our first onesand thats why each generation of writers points to different touchstones with equal enthusiasm. So while writers younger than me might reference zombies in a variety of media, music videos like Michael Jacksons Thriller, and horror movie remakes of seventies grindhouse fare, my particular touchstones remain the Universal monsters, Rod Serlings Twilight Zone and Night Gallery , and the group of writers I like to think of as the California Sorcerers. Andsurprise, surpriseIve found that most writers my age mention exactly the same influences when asked.

Not to say movies like Night of the Living Dead and seventies drive-in horror movies didnt influence me, too, but those came later. Like I said, the work that bites first bites hardest. Pre NOTLD movies, TV, and comics were my very first horror experiences. It took me awhile to find the real-deal books. But when I did graduate from the ghost story anthologies and the Alfred Hitchcock compendiums I found in the kids section of the library, I couldnt have encountered a better group of teachers than the aforementioned sorcerers from California: Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont. As I grew older, several paperback crime writers joined them. They all left distinctive marks on my imagination.

So did Halloween, of course. The holiday had its own set of original scares for me. Even today, memories of my early Octobers seem stronger, more vibrant somehow. Like carving pumpkins with my dads jackknife (Ive still got a zigzag scar on my thumb to prove it). Or taking days to plan a costume, or weeks to build a horror display with my buddies.

One year we built a cemetery in my front yard. It certainly wasnt the kind of thing youd plop down money for at a Halloween Superstoremy dad made our half-buried coffin out of leftover fence boards, and our headstones were scrap wood cut-to-order on his table-saw and hand-painted by my friends and I. But we thought it was great, and so did most of the kids in the neighborhood. Hey, we even had a looted grave complete with unearthed corpse. I, of course, was the live-action ghoul digging the guy upwhich always seemed to me a particularly terrifying creature to be, and one of the creepiest endeavors I could imagine undertaking .

When it comes to the stories in this collection, Id have to say I havent changed much. Certain things still give me the chills. Like cemeteries. There are a lot of those in my stories, and some pretty disturbing monsters inhabit them. Some are supernatural, and some are humanand that leads to another Halloween experience that helped shape me as a writer.

Im talking about Halloween 1969, when I was eleven years old. That was the year I realized that the scariest monsters wore human skin, and the realization didnt have anything to do with the fictional creatures I read about or watched on television. The monster in question lived right in my blue-collar hometown, a San Francisco Bay Area suburb by the name of Vallejo.

Vallejo had two claims to fame in those days: 1) a naval shipyard that turned out nuclear submarines, and 2) the nations first modern-day serial killer: the Zodiac. I wont say too much about the Zodiac hereyoull get a much fuller picture in The Man Who Killed Halloween, an essay included in this bookbut I will say that the Zodiacs crimes had a strong impact on me. He taught me about a new kind of fear. One that didnt have anything to do with creatures that went bump in the night, or the roller-coaster rides they took me on in movies or comics or stories contained neatly between hard covers.

By then I understood those monsters. I knew their secrets, their strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, they were easy to recognize. But the Zodiac was different. There were no bolts in his neck requiring periodic recharging. He didnt sleep in a coffin by day, powerless, afraid of the sun. No pentagram marked his palm. No. Looking at that old police artists depiction of the killer today, I still recognize the thing I saw when I looked at the front page of The Vallejo Times-Herald and confronted that artists rendering for the first time. His was the face of a very human monsterwithout a doubt containing a cancerous growth of evil, and at the same time not evidencing a single cell of that particular disease on the surface.