"Now the light has gone away; Savior, listen while I pray. Asking Thee to watch and keep, please send me quietly to sleep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take; but if there's something else inside, Lord, cross my heart and leave me lie."

THE CLOCK ON MY wall watches me. Its mustache twitches left, right, left, right, left, right in a motion that Aunt Ada says is impossible and I should stop telling lies. But it's not a lie. The clock does watch me; a raised wart on the wallpaper, its pale face hashed—I, II, III, IIII—like the scratches on my arms. The clock face is always shiny. Pearlized, Aunt Ada says. But I think it is a fat man who sweats a lot, and right now he frowns at me, mustache steepled protectively around the VI of his sour mouth. I slip a peek over my shoulder again and again, because the one time I don't look, he'll jump off the wall to stop what I'm doing.

     The box springs peep when my knees shift, pushing the bed pillows into the gullet between the mattress and the headboard. Every now and again, the headboard rubs the wall, leaving a streak of varnish-crayon on the floral wallpaper, but that's not why the clock-man frowns at me. My fingers set him ticking wrong—forever stuck in a clink and a clonkkkkkkkkk. Twist, twist, pick, pick, pull, he watches me pinch at the nail in the wall. Then, I glare at him.

     His mustache tells the time: 5:35

      Sunset glows in the window, dowsing my room orange, warming the tip of the corner table to its right, coloring my writing desk beneath the clock-man. Shadows appear where the light won't reach and, suddenly, the tables grow four more legs apiece. The lampshade funnels buttery light onto the wall beside the window curtains. A picture hangs above, spotlighted; a little beachcomber in grandma-pants (bloomers Aunt Ada calls them) picking shells off the shore. I pick things too, and what I want is hammered above my bed.

     5:35.

     Night is coming.

     I pull harder. Give it to me. The edge of the flathead nail turns, rolling in the raw crease forming on the thumb pad. Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.

     My thoughts talk with the clock-man.

     Beyond the gingham curtains, the peaked roof of the house next door fills the only window my bedroom has. The peak is triangular, a Jack-O-Lantern's eye—one in a hundred that guard the neighborhood tonight behind bucktooth grins. We don't have a pumpkin, though. Uncle Fred refuses to waste money feeding squirrels for free.

     I think, maybe, squirrels deserve a party, too.

     Yellow cake and lacy frosting. Candles burn like tiny torches for tiny heroes.

      Plaster snow trickles from the hole in the wallpaper as I finally get the nail free. The wooden cross I'm after tilts and swings upside down, stuck on a second nail at its base. Seeing it the wrong way round creeps me out, and I want to apologize to God or something. I check the clock-man again, half expecting him to waddle up behind me to whack me with a Bible.

      But it's not the clock-man that puts the Fear into me—

      It's Aunt Ada who doesn't believe in knocking.

     My bedroom door opens, just then, like I've asked it too, and I jerk the cross from the wall, peeling paper with it. The last nail tumbles into the dark gap behind my bed, and I drop the other one after it, scrambling to bury almost every inch of me under the quilt, pressing the glossy, wood cross to my flat chest out of sight. My burrow into the bedlinen releases an odd, musky smell that tickles my nose. Salty sweat and faint pee and the dry stink of baking powder biscuits in the oven.

     Aunt Ada smells like Chanel N°5.

     "Is this how you treat BooBoo?" she chides, bending like a squat teapot to pluck a stuffed animal off the floor. She waves the bunny in my direction like I'm three and not thirteen—

     Almost thirteen.

     There's a reason I toss BooBoo where I can't see him when I sleep. His shoe-button eyes bulge like too-big grapes in his wilted face and his polished nose tics if I stare long enough through the shadows. Aunt Ada places him where he can see me, atop my desk opposite the foot of my bed. Her silver-threaded housecoat is a suit of armor that she dusts her palms on after she puts him down, like the things I own are dirty.

      BooBoo leans to look at me when her back turns. I tell myself he's just falling over.

      The lump glides up her throat, her hands chase it, frantic! Her bared teeth are stained carmine—too much food coloring in the "Happy Birthday, Plum!" frosting.

      Aunt Ada's knobby knuckles and bony fingers are decked in sparkly rings. Her perfectly carved fingernails bleed flawless red from the manicurist. Hands on bell-shaped hips, she surveys the wall above me and my chest tightens. Her one, true, love is her house and the things she puts in it. She'll know something is missing.

       "Where's it gone?"

        I tremble a little. Calm. Be calm. Like the nurse the day Mommy flopped face-first in the cake.

       I can't lose the cross. "Where's what gone?" I tip my head backward into my pillows. From this angle, the ceiling is a floor. A yellow-brown water stain fans across it, the same aged-yellow as the wallpaper. I see what she sees: the cross remains on the wall, a pale imprint, an unfaded scar. Are the spaces between the peonies supposed to be that white?

        "Grandma's cross."

        "Whaddya do?"

        "Don't sass, Plum Shelley."

       Aunt Ada's beside me trying to wedge her hand behind the headboard. Her many, tasteful, rings click hollowly on the wood. There's no use in looking underneath my bed. The weekend I moved in, I made her peek every night to be sure it was safe. Three evenings buffing the floor with her stocking knees and she ordered Uncle Fred to batten the bed rails.

       I throttle the cross. "Aunt Ada?" She continues to tug, wanting to separate the bed from the wall. The frame creaks, but won't budge. She's as strong as me from lifting HOUSE magazines and clipping gossip columns with her personal scissors.

      "Have you decided?"

      "Decided what?"

      "Can I go the Haunted House for my birthday?"

      She was cutting tomatoes when I first asked her, on a Friday, after school. Her knife flicked easily along the wood cutting board, slice, slice, slicing through gushy flesh. Seeds oozed, floating in a cloudy puddle as she prattled on about neighbors and dresses and cheap hair rollers. With each subject, the knife ticked, ticked, ticked closer to her thumb. And when I asked her, "Can I go to the Haunted House for my birthday?" she nearly took her red nail off. I don't know why it disturbed her. The abandoned house at the end of our street, Piper Row, a tangle of weeds and disheveled boards, was always decorated scary for Halloween by The Ladies Club.

       Or that's what Mary Ellen told me. I'd never been. Mommy kept me away from Aunt Ada and Uncle Fred. She kept me from almost everybody I can think of.

      My palm crushes the red and blue and green game pieces, crushing them until I'm sure they'll push through the top of my small hand.

     "I hate you!"

           Aunt Ada stops prying the furniture. My grip on the cross relaxes because I know she'll forget about where it is and where it isn't. She always forgets what she's doing the moment something new appears, front page, and in full color on the Sears and Roebuck catalog. But then she looks at me with that tight-lipped worry-face she always gives me. The face I got that Friday afternoon with her gold bracelet trailing in tomato juice. The face she wore the day she picked me up from the hospital, where I sat all by my lonesome on my birthday.

      "Plum."

      My fist closes again.

      "Uncle Fred and I don't want you to see such nasty things before you're ready."

      "But I'll be thirteen tomorrow. Mary Ellen is eleven, and she's going!"

      "Age has nothing to do with it," Aunt Ada smooths her coat. "You're a special girl...in special circumstances. And since tomorrow is—"

      "My birthday."

      "—the first anniversary of your mother's passing," she says it like she can't believe she needs to explain it to me. Like it's not forever in my head. "I—we think it'd be wiser to have a family dinner at home...I'll make pudding."

      Pudding. No cake.

     Her thick drool spatters the frosting...Is that blood?

      Aunt Ada's doesn't want to upset me, but her adultness makes me want to scratch her arms, legs, and eyes. I see long slashes open her cheeks and split her armor into rags. Invisible claws rake her stomach and loops of uncooked sausage links squiggle out onto the cream carpet. "That'll be fine, right Plum?" she asks me in her adult-voice with her guts hanging out in ribbons.

       I blink. Aunt Ada is fine again. Age-spotted skin intact. But now, the sun is gone.

      Shadows cluster on the walls and skitter behind curtains and march around the clock. The clock-man's mouth opens. The numeral six melts into an O, mustache standing alert like the cartoon of a surprised Frenchman. Only, it's not funny. Behind Aunt Ada's droning voice, I can hear the gears clench, prepping a high-pitched scream. BooBoo crouches on all fours ready to leap off the desk at the tiniest whisper. Outside, the peak next door has turned blue-black, bruising the view. I only have one lamp, the pot-bellied one, and its shade tips, pointing at Aunt Ada. My toes curl. The picture tilts too. The little beachcombing girl presses against the glass waving her arms at me, a warning.

     Oh no.

      Leaving the cross, I emerge from the quilt. At the foot of the bed, I can see what's wrong:

      A slight shadow inches from beneath the bed. An arrow, gliding on the carpet in a way that's not possible, and I wish I were lying. It aims for Aunt Ada's slipper—the satin one with the pompoms—ready to prick her exposed toes.

     "Goodnight," I kiss her gritty cheek, inhaling jasmine and orange and attic dust. Her makeup flakes. This close to her, I can see the wrinkles where the powder's gathered since this morning. Her eyelashes are spidery clumps and lipstick stains the skin above her real lip line. She huffs in my ear, defeated.

     "Goodnight."

      The floor squeaks as she steps away. I grab the footboard and watch the shadow strike empty carpet, then vanish like it never was. The lamp, the picture, and BooBoo sigh with me.

     "Can you leave the light on?" I ask, tucking into the covers.

     Aunt Ada's hand drops from the switch. She mutters something about me not sleeping with the light off but wanting to see demon houses and then says "Don't forget to pray for your father" real loud like that's the only part she wanted me to hear.

     Daddy died on the night I was born, during a storm and a blackout, and that's all I know about that.

     "And pray for your momma."

     I do.

     And then Aunt Ada's gone. But I don't feel alone.

     A floor below, Uncle Fred's got the TV on. But the mumbled voices aren't a comfort. The lamp turns my four walls a wonton yellow, like the Chinese soup we order on the Saturday's Aunt Ada doesn't want to cook. I fold one palm over the other, clutch the cross to my chest, and close my eyes the way Mommy taught me,

     "Now the light has gone away. Saviour, listen while I pray. Asking Thee to watch and keep—"

     My bed shifts an inch sideways, shuddering roughly on the carpet, and my last inhale hangs suspended in my chest. I can't hoist it up or down. It clings inside my lungs too scared to exhale.

     "And to send me,"

     Bump.

     "quietly,"

     Bump bump.

      "to sleep."

      The last bump nearly lifts the mattress and rolls me onto the floor. What lives under my bed is out now.

     My eyes open.

     The light is gone.

     I close my eyes.

     Blackness.

     I open them.

      Blackness.

      My room drowns in darkness, thicker than pudding. Even with the curtains open, I can't see my hand or my feet or the clock-man who's crying for me on the wall. There's nothing but a seething weight that makes the floorboards whimper and my ribs hurt. Mommy called them "my birthday shadows" and I know she meant my unhappy birth, but I think she said it enough and made them real.

      Each Halloween they appear.

      And bad things happen.

     First, it was small, pets that upset me getting hit by cars, and then when I was five, I fought with a girl at a sleepover. The next morning, she was dead in her sleeping bag, having swallowed a tin-box worth of bobby pins. Mommy took me out of school after that.

     She knew.

     Just like she knew the night we played the board game, and I asked for a party with people. She refused. And I cried in the darkest corner of my bedroom. The next day, she choked to death while cutting my cake, all four game pieces jammed in her throat.

      The shadows fold over me, heavy as blankets. They sniff around my mouth and nose like a dog searching for a hole in the fence. They can't get in, I hope, not with the cross. Mommy said I was special, that God would protect me, but the way her death repeats, over and over in my head, I don't think God will.

     I just wanted a party. I didn't want her to die.

     The shadows knead my skin the way a cat does, pinch, pinch, pinching my arms and legs under invisible paws. I'll have fresh scratches tomorrow, pin-prick blood spots and bruises to prove this was real. They came last night, nuzzling under my sheets, but they're stronger now on Halloween Eve.

     I think they love me.

     Soon, my eyes adjust enough, and I can see hints of umber. Burnt moonlight crawls between the shadows and I let the shadows crawl across me. I can't call out—

     No haunted house.

      I erase thoughts of Aunt Ada from my mind—or I try. Shreds of disappointment sift through, but I repeat what I want so my shadows can hear:

     "She lives."

     No party.

     "She lives."

    No friends.

     "She lives."

     No fun.

     "She lives."

     I'm not a baby.

     Hugging the cross to my heart, I shut my eyes, but I can't sleep.

❃ ❃ ❃

THE NEXT MORNING, AUNT Ada coughs up two, bloody nails into her eggs and ham.

     Uncle Fred calls the ambulance.

      They call a psychiatrist.

     And I go back upstairs to bed.

     She lives,

     just barely.

➤ This story was written for a Halloween anthology hosted by @The_Write_Place.