When I was growing up, my dad loved to read me unconventional bedtime stories—like Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” and Stephen King and Bernie Wrightson’s Cycle of the Werewolf—and passed his love of horror down to me as a result. One bedtime story I never forgot is 13 Horrors of Halloween (1983), an anthology of great short stories by the likes of Bradbury and Isaac Asimov. One of the best is “Halloween Girl” by Robert Grant.

“Halloween Girl” centers on Tommy and Marcie, two outcast kids who bond over a love of all things spooky. They especially anticipate Halloween, which is just around the corner. The pair first connect at school, where Tommy delivers an oral report on “The Premature Burial” and Marcie on “The Damned Thing.” Grant writes:

Tommy and Marcie looked forward to [Halloween] with a fever of longing, more than to Christmas even, because it linked them in a special way. It was the different holiday– not all sparkling lights and radiant smiles, but dark and secretive and strange, gleeful in a grisly way– and they were different, too. Different from all the other kids, not by choice but naturally and irrevocably, in the marrow of their dreams.

****

I met John Jennison on New Year’s Eve 2005, in Ogunquit, Maine. Ogunquit was, and is, a gay friendly town, and two big bars were throwing a joint New Year’s party. I was visiting from Boston, where I was in undergrad at Emerson College, while John was down from his hometown of Portland, Maine, with his friends/roommates in tow. John and I hit it off and he spent the night with me at the Dolphin Den, a not-officially-open bed & breakfast owned by a friend of a friend. John was offbeat and funny, whip smart and sardonic, but with a sweetness to him. It was an unforgettable weekend. The rooms had no working plumbing, so John and I had to pee in the snowy woods outside.

The next day I saw him again at the bars’ “Legs and Eggs Brunch,” where the wait staff donned drag to sling food. John invited me back to Portland, and I spent the rest of the weekend there. His roommates were a trip. They were a kooky gay family, with one so obsessed with Mariah Carey he’d named one of the cats “M.C.” and another quite fond of prescription drugs. I learned that John was an artist and a painter; like me, his favorite artist was Keith Haring. We stayed in contact, with him visiting me in Boston for my birthday, before he relocated to New York City. As it turned out, I moved there myself just a year later, and ran into him at a bar my first summer. We went in and out of each other’s lives. I had been somewhat disappointed we hadn’t kept in touch once he moved to New York. But one night—I don’t remember how it came to be—he hung out with my friend Jacob and I. John was clearly attracted to Jacob and flirted with him unabashedly. I later learned that he’d told Jacob, in private, that he hadn’t been so nice to me and regretted it. I was struck by that—I had been a little hurt by John, but I was touched that he realized it and felt bad for it.

Shortly after, John and I began meeting on a regular basis to collaborate on a project. A lifelong comics fan, John had begun writing and drawing his own comics, many but not all of them autobiographical. He had an idea for a weekly “comic book” in stage form. It would be called New Comic Book Day and be performed weekly on Wednesdays (which any comics fan will tell you is when new comics are released). He had an idea for a lead character, a superhero named Professor Punctuality. I don’t remember much else about it, and it never came to fruition, but I remember John coming to visit me at my apartment in East Harlem. It was fun. One afternoon he remarked on a Christmas gift my best friend had sent me, a puzzle of the Andy Warhol short film “Blow Job.” The present had taken weeks to arrive due to a series of shipping delays. John said it was cool and I commented, “yeah, but it took forever to come.”

Without missing a beat, John cracked, “I bet it did.”

****

Tommy and Marcie’s “surging need for the fantastic, the ghoulish, the shadows that lurked inside shadows” takes them everywhere two monster kids would want to go: the movie theater, where they enjoy horror films “in the candy-scented darkness”; “the fantasy-jammed wonderland of the comic book racks”; and the library, where “they fearlessly ventured into the dark regions of the grown-up section” for Dracula, Frankenstein, and other classics. The two meet regularly to plan and anticipate Halloween: Marcie is going to dress as a mummy, while Tommy will be a werewolf. Since Marcie hates licorice, she’ll give all of hers to Tommy. The pair construct their own decorations with materials from the local five and dime stores.

Marcie applied paints and crayons and scissors, conjuring forth superbly horrid creatures that soon glowered at their windows. Tommy gathered wood and cloth and cardboard, which became scarecrow phantoms and witches and demons, unblinking sentries for their front porches.

****

John’s work was varied and expansive. In addition to personal books that detailed his dating misadventures and his experiences battling cancer, he also drew everything from sexy dinosaurs to true life gay crime stories called Astonishing Queer Tales. He had what he described to me as a lifelong interest in “the occult.” He loved Tales from the Crypt, the HBO series based on the classic EC Comics, as well as The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. In 2019 he released his own anthology The Closet of Secrets, a queer-themed collection of horror yarns. He was profiled in a special “Queer Fear” issue of Rue Morgue Magazine.

“Queer people grow up knowing fear,” he told writer Pedro Cabezuelo. “It runs through them, it sometimes inhibits them, or it could be something they conquered. To this day, I sometimes have a hard time holding my partner’s hand in public for fear of being bashed or harassed. With horror, you root for the underdog. We as queer people are the underdog so we are rooting for our own survival and seeing a lot of our own struggles in facing the big bad.”

John also developed an interest in tarot and began designing his own decks. He made the Mystic Male Tarot Deck featuring alluring guys and This Deck Is Haunted, which was a loving tribute to his passion for ghost stories and lore. I bought the latter and was entranced by the images of a poltergeist, a headless horseman, a Ouija Board planchette, and an Annabelle-like Raggedy Anne doll.

Meanwhile, I transitioned from a horror themed Tumblr and YouTube channel (co-created with my friend David) to freelance writing for horror outlets such as Fangoria, Bloody Disgusting, and this website. I considered writing a piece on John and his horror themed work, or possibly collaborating with him on an analysis of witchcraft and supernatural themed movies.

****

One day Tommy doesn’t see Marcie at school. He stops by her house and is met by her distraught mother. She tells him that Marcie became sick in the night and apologetically excuses herself. Tommy heads home in a state of shock and sadness. A week passes by without her returning to school, and he isn’t allowed to see her.

All he knew, all that he could snatch from the half-overheard conversations of his parents and the maddeningly uninformative soothing was that she was not better.

****

Last summer I saw on social media that John’s beloved grandmother had passed away. I reached out to him and suggested that we meet up. John lived in Brooklyn Heights, where I worked, but we’d met up only a handful of times over the years.

We met outside Gregory’s Coffee, my daily stop on the way to work. John had told me that his cancer had returned, and that it was potentially serious. He was with his grandmother the moment she died, and told me through tears that he felt as though she wanted to hang on to take care of him. But he let her know that it was okay, that he would be joining her in the not too distant future. I gripped his hand and he squeezed it.

We continued to get together occasionally in the months that followed, usually outside the coffee shop. On another occasion he mentioned something he’d figured out for his funeral and remarked “I’ve been planning my funeral for the last ten years.” Clearly he’d made his peace with his own death. One day I found him outside the shop looking rail thin. I told him I was getting a drink inside and asked him if he wanted anything; as usual, he said no. I fought back tears as I headed inside. At home I told my partner, Daniel, “He’s going to die.” At our next meeting, John looked perhaps a little better. But he casually mentioned that he had someone coming over “to look at my comic book collection.” I knew what that meant.

****

As the days go on, Tommy struggles to hold his composure. He retreats behind the storage shed where he and Marcie would hang out.

He wasn’t sure from what he was hiding, but it was something beyond his control, something fearsome but perhaps more sad than mean.

He tried not to imagine.

****

Since John had first told me about his cancer, I’d given him a series of gifts: a handful of spooky items at the Brooklyn Pride Comics Fair John organized in the summer, some crystals I bought at a witch shop in Brooklyn. John told me the crystals had been a comfort to him as he endured his treatments. On New Year’s Eve, a package arrived in the mail. It was a Funko Pop model of the Michael Myers house from Halloween, and a Michael Myers figurine. Inside was a printed note: “Each stab you have sent me this year brought joy to my life.” I texted him to thank him, and remarked how appropriate it was that the gift arrived on the seventeenth anniversary of our meeting. “Wow that’s crazy!” he wrote. “I know right?” I replied.

****

Nine days after Marcie’s first absence Tommy came home from school, and his parents quietly asked him to come into the living room and sit down.

He went in ahead of them, a strange immense emptiness opening in him, an emptiness that had to be there because if you let anything come in, if you thought or felt, it would be dangerous. You’d let in something sharp and terrible and final.

But his parents' words, no matter how cushioned, would not be denied entrance. They came in, telling him what his heart already knew, and with them came a cold, rolling, growing blackness that was too big, too filling.

****

One Friday night in February I was coming home on the subway train and scrolling through Instagram. I came across a photo of John and his beloved dog, Parker. My first thought was that Parker had died. Then I read the caption: “Today we lost the heart of our community. John Jennison was at Anyone Comics from the moment we received the keys to the building. … He was in all our lives and he will be tremendously missed. Selfless, loving, and always ready with a well timed joke.”

I began to cry. It felt weird on a crowded subway, surrounded by strangers, but who cared? At home, I looked at the Myers house, which had been sitting on a shelf between my kitchen and living room since I received it. I imagined that the window would suddenly light up, like the model house at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, signifying a spiritual presence. I didn’t think of it as the Myers house anymore.

Now, it was John’s house.

I looked through the Haunted tarot deck. Images of the Ferryman who takes souls to the other side, a Grave, Go to the Light. Illustrations and ideas of death and the afterlife that had fascinated John throughout his life now took on a new meaning. I had meant to ask John if, after he died, he could send me a sign, let me know if there was life after death. But I’d never gotten the chance. I’d ordered him a button of the Universal Monsters mummy that I’d wanted to give him. Now I never would.

****

Tommy decides to go out on Halloween in honor of Marcie, despite the sadness he feels that they won’t be sharing the night as they had planned for so long. He goes alone, trick or treating and getting lost in a maze of houses and streets. Eventually he finds himself before “a stone wall that vanished into the night in both directions.” Entering the cemetery, he finds Marcie’s grave and sits by it. He begins speaking to his friend, describing the night: all the children, the treats he received.

Tommy grasped for more words, but all that came was an immense yearning. The emptiness, the vast incompleteness that he had held down for so long and so desperately rose up and seized him in its draining downward pull.

Tommy tells Marcie that it was a terrible night, because she wasn’t there with him; she was “here with the… with the…”

Like a lighted candle in a jack-’o-lantern, something dawned inside him, something that felt like understanding. He thought he’d gone out into the Halloween night for her, danced the witches’ dance for her, reaped the grisly October harvest because she couldn’t.

But now he knew that it was she who had gone into the night for him. She had led the way into the secret heart of midnight. She was a part of it now, she was Halloween in a way he couldn’t be with his plastic mask from the dime store.

Tommy cries, and whispers “Thanks, Marcie” to his beloved friend. He leaves his bag of treats at her grave and heads home. The next morning, he awakens to sunlight and to an odd mixture of smells: “a melancholy one of moist earth, and a happy one of dark, inviting sweetness.”

As the sleep left his eyes, he noticed with a dawning smile the three long black objects laid neatly beside his pillow.

“I forgot,” he murmured. “I forgot you didn’t like licorice.”

****

That Friday night I was laying in bed, not yet asleep. Suddenly I felt as though someone were gently touching my back and shoulders. I thought, Is that you, John? It was eerie; yet it was also comforting. I closed my eyes, and soon drifted off to sleep.