The Boy in the Pantry

The first time the ghost attacked him, Johnny assumed it was an accident.

The Halloween decoration was hanging near the front door when a gust of wind blew the dusty fabric around his head. He fought it off to get inside, only to be tackled by his little sister, Olivia, who squeezed him tight around the middle.

Johnny shrugged her off, then headed to the table for his after-school snack of carrot sticks and a tall glass of milk. What he wouldn’t give for a thick slice of chocolate cake to go with the milk ... But the closest thing to cake in his house was a leftover container of his mother’s sugar-free pecan bars that had nearly pulled everyone’s teeth out. No one dared to throw them away, though.

As Ollie prattled on about her day, Johnny wondered if he could sneak a piece of the sugar-free Halloween candy his parents had bought the week before. He doubted his tongue would know the difference. He scuttled to the pantry while his mother headed up the stairs with a basket of folded laundry, and as he rummaged, he saw it: a hole in the back wall of the pantry —and an eyeball peering back at him!

At first, Johnny thought there must have been a mirror there—the eye was just like his—but then the face around the eye backed up and turned its head. Johnny wouldn’t have been able to see the back of his own head in the mirror. He heard his mother on the stairs again and hurried to close the pantry door.

***

That night, Johnny snuck back to the kitchen with a flashlight. The eye was no longer in the pantry, so he poked the flashlight beam through the peephole, only to find his own kitchen, if it were backward. A light flipped on in the other kitchen, startling him.

“It’s you!” said a boy who looked just like Johnny.

“Who are you?” said Johnny.

“Jack,” said the boy. “I hoped you’d come again. I’m making a midnight snack."

“Won’t you wake your parents?”

“Nah, they’re out. I fell asleep watching TV and now I’m starved.”

Johnny’s mouth watered as the boy called “Jack” slathered marshmallow cream and peanut butter on two slices of white bread—the kind his parents would never allow—with nary a wheat grain in sight.

“Want one?” said Jack, noticing Johnny licking his lips.

“Sure, I’d love one.”

Jack considered the hole in the wall.“I’ll have to cut a bite out of mine, I think,” he said, and he did.

Johnny relished the morsel, then remembered the matter at hand. “Who are you, and why do you look like me?” he said.

“Well, as I said, I’m Jack, and I am you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever heard of parallel universes?”

“‘Course I have, in comic books.”

“Well, that has to be what this is. What was that?” said Jack, as something moved down the hall in Johnny’s home.

“My end,” said Johnny quickly. “See you later.”

He closed the door quietly, heart pounding. He crept toward the hallway and relaxed as he noticed a cardboard witch that had come unstuck from the wall and now lay in a heap on the ground. He sighed and kicked at it as he passed.

Then in the darkness, he heard a whisper: “It has begunnn.”

Johnny’s heart leapt into his throat and he answered the voice without thinking. “What has?!”

“The Sweeteninggg...” said the voice, but Johnny realized he was being stupid.

The boy in the pantry must have turned up some horror program on his TV. He might have to stuff a sock in that hole to keep things quiet.

***

The next morning, under the pretense of fetching raisins for his oatmeal, Johnny snuck a peek at Jack lounging at his kitchen table, enjoying a plump cinnamon roll with icing on his chin. Johnny felt a ripple of longing as he closed the pantry door to get on with his boring old oatmeal.

At school, Johnny daydreamed of trading places with Jack. Or, perhaps Jack would enjoy having a twin brother and together, they could stay up late, eating sweets and falling asleep in front of the TV, with no parents or little sisters to worry about because they were vaguely “out.”

After school, Johnny practically ran home, breathing hard as he wrestled the ghost decoration on the porch for a second time. He thought he heard a breathy voice again “-too late once it’s taken you...” before he noticed that a car going past had its windows down and the radio on.

It was a lovely day, after all—perfect weather to take his sister to the park to fly kites. But he couldn’t get the idea of Jack’s after-school snack out of his head ...

***

The morning of Halloween, Johnny sat unravelling at the kitchen table, knees bouncing and eyes darting every second or so to the closed pantry door. He tried to focus on his parents’ lecture—something about “hyperactivity” and “concerning behavior” reported by his teacher, who thought he might need something called “Riddlin’.”

He jolted a little when his mother threw some crinkled candy wrappers on the table.

“Have you been taking money from Ollie’s piggy bank?”

“Of course not!” said Johnny, appalled. He wasn’t a monster.

“So, you’re getting it from the kids at school,” said his mother.

Johnny said nothing. They would never believe the truth.

“Well, there’s only one thing for it,” said his father. “No trick-or-treating this year.”

“In a few years, you’ll be too old anyway,” said his mother.

Now, Johnny was seriously appalled. ‘No trick-or-treating?’ No way! He and Jack had already planned to split their loot and spend the evening getting thoroughly sick. Johnny clamped his teeth together to keep from shouting. This wouldn’t stand. It couldn’t.

As soon as the deadbolt latched in the front door, Johnny darted to the pantry and yanked open the door, sending a glass jar of red currant jam plummeting to the floor to shatter on the linoleum. Johnny tested out a few choice swear words as he dragged the wastebasket out from under the kitchen sink.

As he picked glass shards out of the mess, the viscous texture and deep crimson color brought to mind a grisly murder scene. He thought back to the television program Jack had been watching and “The Sweetening,” whatever that was. Johnny took a deep breath, feeling a bit lightheaded and clammy. Then again, he was always lightheaded and clammy lately.

He would clean the mess up later, he decided. Right now, he could use a stiff piece of candy. He stepped carefully over the mess and hunched into the pantry again, where Jack greeted him with a small corner of pre-dinner peanut butter, marshmallow cream sandwich pushed through the eyeball-sized hole in the wall.

“I’ll have to sneak out tonight,” Johnny told him. “My parents grounded me.”

He thought he noticed a flash in Jack’s eye, but it must have been the light playing tricks on him. And speaking of which ...

Johnny whipped his head around as he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He watched in horror as something invisible dragged through the mess of jam still splattered on the floor to spell a single word:

WINDOW

Johnny froze, then glanced at the windows around him and back at the message, below which had been added:

HIS

Jack was focused on his sandwich and didn’t seem to notice Johnny turning pale and even more clammy on the other side of the wall.

“Hey, Jack, do you ever get the feeling your house is haunted?”

Jack wiped his mouth with his hand. “Sure, but that’s what you get with these old Colonials.”

“Mm.” Johnny glanced furtively at the spill in case another message revealed itself. It didn’t. Window. His. What did that mean?

“You have to sneak out tonight,” Jack insisted.

“I know. I will.”

As Jack slouched over to the kitchen sink to wash his sticky hands, Johnny couldn’t help but notice a sour look on the boy’s face before he turned away.

His. Window.

Johnny felt his gaze dragged almost unwillingly to the window in front of Jack’s sink and felt his blood run cold. Where there should have been a reflection of Jack, a horrid creature stood instead, washing its great slimy claws. A putrid aroma he hadn’t noticed before assaulted Johnny’s nose as his eyes roved over oily, greenish skin and deep, purple bruises under bloodshot eyes. The beast’s terrible mouth gaped wide and saliva hung in ropes, adorning filthy, rotting teeth like buntings on a termite-infested old porch.

As soon as he could manage it, Johnny tore his eye away from the hole.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” he called through it, then slammed the pantry door behind him.

He glanced at the jam again and watched as it was magically smoothed, as if by a spatula. Then two new words appeared:

YOU SAW?

“Yes,” said Johnny, suppressing a shiver. “What was that thing?” Two more words appeared below the first two:

A MONSTROSITY

“Wait a minute,” said Johnny. “Have you been talking to me through the Halloween decorations?”

The jam was wiped smooth again before a single word appeared:

YES.

“Why?”

GRAVE DANGER

“Who, me? I’m in grave danger?”

YES

“What, from that thing? Was that Jack?”

The ‘YES’ remained in the jam.

“What did you say ...? ‘It has begun?’ And what’s with this ‘Sweetening’ business?”

THE HARVEST

“Harvest... what kind of harvest?”

CHILDREN

“You mean Jack- that thing eats kids?!” Johnny felt like his brain was being juiced. “The candy ... all that sugar ... he was sweetening ... me?”

YES

Johnny jumped as the front door opened and his mother and sister spilled back into the house, Olivia singing “Monster Mash” at the top of her lungs.

“The flu is going around. No class after all,” said his mother. She spotted the mess.

“I’m getting it, don’t worry,” said Johnny, and set to work cleaning it up.

***

An hour later, in his room, Johnny had no idea how to avoid “The Harvest.” His mother interrupted his frantic thinking.

“I have to run to the neighbor’s, then your sister’s going to perform her Halloween dance in the living room,” she said. “Please come down now.”

Johnny trudged into the hallway, past a candy wrapper wedged under Olivia’s door.

Odd...

When he came downstairs, he heard Ollie singing, but she was nowhere in sight. Another candy wrapper caught his eye on the way to the kitchen.

Fear squeezed his chest as he saw that the pantry door was closed. He heard Ollie inside, chattering with someone who sounded an awful lot like her, and did some very quick thinking.

He darted to the refrigerator and dove for the Tupperware of cement-like sugar-free pecan bars at the back. Then he wrenched open the pantry door, balking at the sight of a pewter doorknob glowing into existence as his sister reached for it.

“Nooo!” Johnny yelled.

He knocked her hand aside and jammed a pecan bar in the new, narrow gap at the bottom of the pantry wall. When he stood again, the peephole had dilated and the horrid beast snarled, its putrid breath stinging his nose.

Without further ado, Johnny slammed a mess of pecan bars into the monster’s face, and the teeth clamped down immediately. As the beast staggered backward, the peephole shrank marginally and Johnny shoved another bar in to plug it.

A second later, the pantry wall was no longer a door, the peephole was gone, and even the faint sound of choking and gagging had disappeared.

“Livvy was my friend,” Johnny’s sister sobbed in the kitchen.

“Ollie, she wasn’t. She wanted to hurt you.” Johnny shut the pantry door and pulled her into a tight hug. “But I’m your friend. Always.”

---

Author's Note: This short story was submitted to Writing Battle for its Autumn 2023 Short Story Battle. I drew "Halloween Horrors" as my genre prompt, as well as "losing control" for the subject and "harvesting" as the action. Stories were allowed to be up to 2,000 words.

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