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“Okay, this year, they’ve added an edge to the race. We get to take ten full seconds off our time if we have someone inside the coffin,” Vince explained, causing my breath to catch.
“Shit, and you want it to be me?” I asked, already feeling the tension of the idea of it.
There have been many years when a coffin gets out of control from the handlers and ends up crashing into that damn willow tree on the Stoker property.
“That’s the plan,” Bram said.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Freddie said, trying to assure me. “You know we wouldn’t let anything happen to you.”
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean Carrie Ann won’t step in and take matters into her own hands.” A shiver ran down my spine just mentioning her name.
“She would never let anything happen to you,” Vince said. “Not after you’ve been keeping her secret all these years.”
That secret had to do with what we saw and swore never to talk about again, not even with each other.
“More like we’ve all been keeping her secret,” I told them, plopping down on the old wooden chair next to a power saw set up on the large square table where Freddie did a lot of his carpentry. “I need time to think about it.”
Freddie was our local craftsman who loved to work with wood and could build Noah’s Ark singlehandedly if he was asked to. The man was a genius with wood.
Still, even though I knew I’d be safe, I needed time to think this new development over.
The thing was, October in Cricket, California had always been my favorite month. Not only because of the crisp fall weather and the colorful trees, but the folks in Cricket dedicated the entire month to Halloween, which I loved.
And yes, the fine folks of Cricket had been actively turning this town around in the last few years, but back in the 1980s, this place had absolutely no flood control, which caused a lot of damage. Over the years, various mayors and organizations had put bandages on the problem, but only recently, after a major flood that nearly washed the entire town away, did our amazing mayor permanently fix the problem… for which the good people of Cricket, me included, would be forever grateful.
Our love affair with Halloween had started during one particularly rainy season back in 1984, when the local cemetery flooded up on the hilltop, and Carrie Ann Stoker’s coffin came crashing down onto Frog Street on Halloween night. The townsfolk decided that not only did they have to move our cemetery to Sweet Whiskey, the next town over, but the good folks also had to do something to honor poor Carrie Ann Stoker, a distant relative of Vince’s.
It seemed that when the coffin hit the pavement, the top flew off, and her fragile remains scattered all along Frog Street while her coffin zipped over bumps, in and out of deep potholes, and along rough pavement in the street, moving so fast that at first, no one knew what the hell it was.
For some unknown reason, the coffin had been equipped with six tiny wooden wheels. The wheels caused the coffin to race down the street, which caused everyone who saw it to panic. That panic gave the coffin full access to the wide-open street, which just happened to be on a slope. By the time the coffinstopped almost a full mile away from where it had first landed, everyone in town had run in the opposite direction.
Ironically, Carrie Ann’s coffin was headed straight for Stoker House, which just happened to be where Carrie Ann Stoker lived until her parents poisoned her when she turned twenty-one for being a witch.
Her poisoning happened in 1932, according to the local archives of newspapers.
But I digress.
What had my stomach in knots now was the ancient willow tree on the Stoker property. That tree finally stopped the coffin and caused it to explode along with whatever remained of Carrie Ann’s bones into a million tiny pieces.
Which explained the yearly coffin races down Frog Street on Halloween night and how almost every year one of the coffins ran right into that old tree and broke apart, no matter how hard the racers tried to keep it from happening. It was a random thing. No one knew which coffin would end up exploding into the tree, and I certainly didn’t want it to be ours.
We’d been participating in the race since we were kids. A race that had cemented our friendship from the very first time we entered as a team. I was ten, along with Freddie, Vince had just turned eleven, and Bram was twelve.
We had never lost a coffin… yet.
Would this be our first time? The whole idea of me getting inside that thing scared the shit out of me.
Sure, I trusted them, but not against the forces of a spirit so strong, she could do stuff that defied explanation.
I should know. I saw her do it.
I let out one of those potent, long sighs.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Vince said. “But it will give us such a great advantage.”
“I’m still thinking,” I told him. They knew not to bug me when I was thinking something over. It had been the way I’d dealt with anything they threw at me since we were kids. Yes, I could always keep up with them, but there were things they’d want me to do that I had to mentally prepare myself for first. And there were just too crazy for me, and I wouldn’t do them. Like when they all jumped into the rushing water down one of the back streets after it had rained all night. I didn’t want to do it, and while I was thinking about it, Bram got knocked out by a table that whizzed by him, and Freddie and Vince barely saved him. If it wasn’t for my dad jumping in the water, we may have lost him that day.
So, they never bothered me whenever I had to mull over their latest scheme, and this one was some crazy shit!
