When the Dead People Brought a Dish-to-Pass
The car crash echoed all the way up Porcupine Hill. Alyssa Swain ran down to help. She found a man hanging upside down in the wreck, blood in his hair, eyes open and still. By the time she came back with the deputy, he was gone.
Hours later, he knocked on her door.
John Christopherson walks through locked doors and talks about the two-year-old daughter Alyssa lost four years ago as though he already knows the ending of a story she cannot bear to finish. He says he was sent to help her throw a Halloween dish-to-pass party for her dead relatives, who arrive on Sunday bearing food from their own centuries. And he has a deadline: midnight on Halloween.
She does not believe in ghosts. She stopped believing in most things four years ago, the day her daughter died. So why can she not make herself tell this man to leave?
Between now and Sunday, the dead keep arriving: a great-great grandmother down the chimney, an uncle who stole horses in 1771, relatives from across the centuries hauling in blood sausage and squirrel tails for the walls. Through all of it, John works beside her in the wreck of a house she has only just begun to call home.
But midnight is not a negotiation. When the in-between closes, the dead go back to wherever the dead go, and a man Alyssa has somehow come to need, without ever knowing whether he was real at all, may vanish from her world for good.
Unless she can reach him first.
A ghost, a deadline, and a houseful of dead relatives: Halloween in Moonstone, Wisconsin, is unlike anywhere else on earth.
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