After Midnight

Phil Grenville drove along in his car with the top down, listening to the original version of 'Baby, I'm Yours', a post-midnight dedication from Sandy. What a night. As he cruised along he looked around the town and saw to his amazement that everything was exactly the same as it had been before Lucinda's curse ran amok. He shuddered as he recalled everything he and Sandy had witnessed on their drive to the cemetery, the dead of the town tearing down statues, starting fires, tearing up fire hydrants, destroying every single thing in sight. Even at the cemetery, the lids had all been blown off the coffins, the gravestones had all been knocked down. The whole town had been in shambles, and now, it was like it had all been a bad dream. Everything and everyone was back to normal. He passed people as he drove by, no more the ghouls that they had been turned into by the dead who escaped the cemetery.

The song ended, and Phil realized his friends would never believe what happened tonight when he told them. Then a thought suddenly occurred to him. Logically he knew everything being back to normal meant his friends were all back to normal too, but that image of Mitch with that ghastly blue face and blood streaking down his cheeks, trying to reach through the door and kill him, still haunted him. He also remembered Melissa, and Vinnie, and Mary, the whole houseful. Ms. Jensen somehow had managed to appear normal until they got to the cemetery, he wondered how that was even possible. Maybe they were all capable of acting normal, just none of the rest had bothered. Ms. Jensen was an opportunist, get the only two people who could stop her alone, and then kill them so that they couldn't reverse the curse. The dead weren't just evil and scary, they could be downright intelligent.

Looking around to make sure there weren't any cops around just waiting to bust any Halloween troublemakers, Phil pressed harder on the gas and sped up. All of a sudden he was anxious to get back to Melissa's house and make sure everything there was back to normal too.

The big clock in the hall chimed the hour, and everybody looked around in puzzlement.

"What? Midnight already?" Mitch asked, "That can't be."

"Wow," Vinnie said, "Time sure does fly when you're having fun."

Mary and Melissa turned and looked at each other.

"I didn't know it was getting that late," Mary said, "I gotta get home, if my parents found out I got someone else to babysit my little brother, they're gonna kill me."

Melissa looked to the clock as if to make sure the time was right. "How could the whole night pass that quickly? We were just starting to have a good time."

Vicky came up with Death on her arm and told the kids, "Well I guess if the party's over, us chaperones will be leaving too."

"Goodnight, Ms. Jensen," the kids said.

"Goodnight, Marvin," Mitch said to the black cloaked figure.

"Hey," Mary looked around, "where's Phil?"

"Where are all the other people that came to the party?" Melissa asked.

"They must've pooped out early," Mitch said.

They saw a set of car headlights shine through the window, and a minute later Phil entered the house.

Even though all logic had told Phil that here too, everything would be back to normal, he still felt a tremendous relief to see that it was, and that his friends were themselves again, and he couldn't mask his surprise.

"You guys are alright!" he exclaimed.

"Where'd you go, Phil?" Vinnie asked.

"What do you mean alright?" Mitch asked.

"Was there an accident?" Melissa asked.

And suddenly, Phil couldn't stop himself from telling them everything that happened that night.

"When we took the costumes to the cemetery and read that scroll, the curse came true, all the dead busted out of the cemetery and came back to life, and Lucinda came back to life to seek vengeance on the town, and everybody got turned into werewolves and these horrible ghouls. I met this girl tonight, Sandy, and she knew everything that was going on, and she and I had to take the ring, and the scroll, and go back to the cemetery, and break into Nathaniel Grenville's grave and mix his bones in with candle wax to make a seal and use the ring to reseal the scroll to end the curse."

"Hey Phil," Mitch said, "Halloween's over, so why don't you save that gag until next year?"

Phil looked around at his friends and pleaded with them, "I am telling the truth! Mitch, I saw your dad tonight and he was one of the undead, he crashed his car into mine, he ran it up a curb, knocked down a street lamp, and sped away."

"That wouldn't surprise me as heavily as he's been drinking tonight," Mitch said.

"So show us the car," Vinnie said.

"I…can't," Phil confessed.

"Why not?"

"Because at midnight, the curse was broken, and everything went back to normal, just like it was before all the undead came crawling out of their graves."

"That figures," Mitch said, unconvinced.

"I can prove I'm not lying," Phil told them.

"How?" Melissa asked.

"Let's go to the cemetery," he said as he headed for the door, "we'll take my car."

"I talked to Sandy all night, and I knew something was off but I just wasn't putting it together," Phil told his friends as he drove to the cemetery, "talking about there being an ice cream shop in this town and doing these old fashioned 'rah rah' cheers. She couldn't figure out how the Cineplex worked without the sound from one movie leaking over into the next room. She knew all about Lucinda's curse, she knew how to break it."

"You guys gotta admit," Vinnie told the others, "If this is a gag, he sure went to a lot of trouble coming up with a story like that."

"Took a lot of time to do that presentation this morning too," Mitch replied, "he did it, didn't he?"

Phil approached the cemetery gate and drove on in, and parked where he had before when he and Sandy raced to his grandfather's tomb. "Come on," he said as he opened his door.

Everybody got out of the car and followed Phil.

"Right over there," he pointed, "go look."

They headed over to the gravestone in question, they saw the epitaph:

SANDRA MATTHEWS

1942-1959

She Walks Like an Angel

And there, in the upper right corner of the tombstone, written in pink lipstick was the message:

S.M.

P.G.

"Earlier tonight I gave her my jacket because she was cold," Phil told his friends, "then after all the dead disappeared, I found my jacket draped over this stone, that's when I saw the message. Do you believe me now?"

"Ghosts get cold?" Mitch asked.

Phil sighed and looked heavenward, shaking his head. Something else occurred to him and he told them, "Right after midnight, when everything was back to normal, the DJ came on the radio, a request came in, that just had to be put on right after 12, from Sandy to Phil…you can call the radio station, he'll tell you."

"Wait a minute," Melissa said. She looked at the others and said, as if she just remembered, "At the party tonight, there was a woman who asked me where I got this dress." She gestured to her great, great, great, great grandmother Lucinda's dress they'd stolen from the museum that afternoon. "She said…that she used to have one like it a long time ago."

"Whoa," was the general consensus from Mary and the guys.

"That's impossible," Mitch said.

"Nobody would remember a dress from 300 years ago," Vinnie said.

"Unless she was 300 years old," Phil said.

Melissa's eyes widened, "Lucinda? I was talking to my own grandmother and didn't even know it?"

"No way, that's impossible," Mitch said, addressing Phil he said, "You said you took this ring, right?" he held up his hand and showed off Nathaniel Grenville's ring.

"That's right," Phil said.

"So how come I've still got it on my…" Mitch looked at the ring again and made a confused face. "What's this stuff on it?"

Everybody got in close for a look at the ring. Melissa felt the discolored stuff covering it. "It feels like wax."

Mitch's eyes doubled in size.

"So it was real?" Mary asked, "The witch's ghost actually came back and tried to destroy the whole town?"

"And she very nearly succeeded," Phil said, "except for Sandy's ghost. Somehow she knew exactly what had to be done to stop the curse."

"How could she have known?" Melissa asked.

Phil shook his head. "I don't know, but if it hadn't been for her, none of us would've come out alive."

Everybody had a sudden feeling of chills and not just because of the late fall weather in the lateness of the hour.

"Melissa?" Mitch suddenly asked.

"Yeah?" she turned to him.

Mitch's face scrunched up in half a dozen different expressions as he thought about what he was going to say next. "Do you have something on under that dress?"

Melissa looked down at the brown and white dress with the black cloak that she'd worn all night. "Uh huh."

"Then take it off," Mitch said as he grabbed at the buttons on the black and white pilgrim style jacket he wore.

Mary helped Melissa out of Lucinda's dress, revealing she had a tank top and shorts on underneath. Mitch peeled off his costume and stood in the blue jeans and white T-shirt he wore it.

"Come on," Mitch said, "let's get everything back in that trunk."

Mitch sped his car back to his home, Phil followed right behind in his convertible. Up ahead they could see the lights were still on, and Judge Crandall was still stalking around in the front yard in his bathrobe with a drink in his hand. He saw the cars pull up and saw his son get out and come up the sidewalk.

"Aha! I knew it, I knew you'd be back," he told his son, "what's the matter, the cops bust you?"

Mitch raised his hands in surrender, "You were right, Dad, I was wrong, I'm sorry, I'm going to make this right, I'm taking the stuff back to the museum right now. Don't worry, I got it covered."

"You got it covered, do you?" the judge mocked him as the group of teenagers hurried past him and ran into the house. Judge Crandall stayed at the bottom of the porch steps and continued to holler up to the bedroom window. "You think you can just steal a bunch of artifacts, take them back and everything's back to normal? Let me tell you buddy boy it's going to take far more than that for things to ever be good between us again. DO YOU HEAR ME UP THERE?"

In Mitch's bedroom, he and his friends scurried around the room making sure that everything was put back in its place in the trunk; Nathaniel's clothes, Lucinda's dress, the ring, the scroll, everything back in its place.

"Maybe we should say a prayer over it," Mary said, "just to make sure."

"Let's go wake up a priest and borrow some holy water," Vinnie suggested.

"Let's just get it back to the museum where it belongs," Mitch told them, "and forget this night ever happened."

"Easy for you to say," Phil replied.

"Alright, be careful with it," Melissa said as they closed the trunk and picked it up.

"Everybody ready? Let's go," Mitch said.

Moving as one, they made a beeline for the stairs and the front door, and walked right back past Judge Crandall, who still hadn't shut up, and only turned to face the street as he continued to yell and berate his son. They got the trunk loaded in the back of Phil's car and everybody hopped in, but Mitch went back up the sidewalk to face his father.

"You forget something, boy?" the judge asked.

Mitch looked his father square in the eyes, and said nothing, did nothing for a minute, then out of nowhere, he hugged the inebriated judge and told him somberly, "I love you, Dad, I'll be back later."

For the first time that night, Judge Crandall was left completely and utterly speechless. He dropped his glass.

"He's got to be around here somewhere," Melissa said as they carried the trunk back to the museum.

"Let's just take it in ourselves," Vinnie said, "then we'll be sure to be rid of it."

"We can't break into the museum when it's locked up," Mary pointed out.

"Come on," Phil told them, "let's just find him."

"There he is!" Mitch said.

The five teens ran up, carrying the trunk, and about collided with the middle aged tobacco-spitting man hired to run security for the night.

"Lester!" Melissa said, "We found the costumes someone stole."

"Somebody ditched the trunk behind the school," Mitch said, "we found them about half an hour ago."

"We wanted to get them back as quickly as possibly," Phil added.

It took them a couple of times to actually get the makeshift security guard to figure out what they were saying, when it finally clicked in his head he agreed to open up the museum so they could return the trunk and its contents to their rightful place. They carried the trunk back to the exhibit, took the costumes out and redressed the wax figures of Lucinda and Nathanial, and left.

"Man, what a night," Vinnie said as they headed to their cars.

"Hey guys," Mitch said in an out of breath huff, "what do you say next year we just dress up like Miami Vice?"

"That's a good idea," Melissa said, "I can totally be Trudy."

"And I can totally be Gina," Mary added with a laugh.

"And I am totally Tubbs," Vinnie said as he smoothed his shirt.

"Get real, Vinnie," Melissa shot him down, "You're Noogie and you know it."

"Noogie?!" he replied in disbelief.

"At least nothing bad ought to come out of that," Mitch said.

"Yeah, I guess so," Phil said, "well, I'll see you guys."

"Phil, wait up," Mary chased after him to his car, "so this Sandy girl, you really liked her, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Phil replied, "I'd never known anyone like her before, I guess there's a reason for that."

"Was she a good kisser?" Mary asked.

Phil looked at her, dumbstruck for a second, then he asked, "What does that matter? Weren't you dancing with that Frankenstein guy?"

"He turned out to be a real loser," Mary said as they got into his car.

"So what am I, the runner up?" Phil asked.

"No," she replied, "we've always been good friends, Phil, I was hoping I could talk to you."

"Oh yeah?" he asked as he started his car, "About what?"

"What're you doing tomorrow night?" she asked.

He shrugged and answered, "I don't know, but I know what I'm doing tonight."

"What?" she asked.

"I'm gonna go home, I'm gonna kiss my sister, I'm gonna hug my parents, and be grateful that Halloween is over," Phil said as they drove down the empty street.

Mary thought about it and responded, "Yeah, I think I'm going to go home and hug my little brother. I just can't believe that everything happened tonight that you said happened…why don't we remember any of it?"

"Breaking Lucinda's spell set everything back," Phil said, "it's just like nothing happened."

"But how come you were the only one that wasn't affected by the spell?" Mary asked.

"I guess…" Phil said, "Sandy really was an angel…a guardian angel."