Devil’s Night
This is a work of fiction. All events and characters are fictional or fictionalized.
The explosion lifted the boys off their feet, singed their scalps and rattled windows a quarter mile away. They lay there, semiconscious, in the darkness for some time before stirring. They stood, staggered around, disoriented, ears ringing, until they heard the sirens. Then they ran, stumbling across a plowed field in the moonlight. When they reached the car out of breath, they looked back over their shoulders and could see orange tongues lapping skyward where the abandoned house once stood.
“Hooo-ly shit,” Jack said.
“Start the car,” Punch said, “and don’t turn the lights on until we’re past the Witch’s place.”
“I told you not to use that much gasoline,” Hal said. “Half that woulda got the job done.”
“I had no fuckin’ idea a Molotov cocktail could go off like a bomb,” Jack said and doubled over in laughter.
“I think I broke my fuckin’ ankle,” Bobby said. He was crouching in the dirt alongside the car wincing in pain.
“We gotta go,” Punch said and they grabbed Bobby and shoved him into the back seat and they all started laughing.
“What a rush,” Hal said, barely containing himself.
“Drive,” Punch said, “and try not to put us in the ditch.”
Jack swung the Chevy out onto a gravel road and coasted quietly past the Witch’s house, a vine-covered heap that squatted behind a stand of birch trees. There was a vapor light in the yard near the barn where the lane curled toward the woods, but other than that, the place looked deserted.
“Stop the car,” Hal called out from the back seat.
Jack tapped the brakes. “What is it?”
“I want to peek in her windows.”
“Have you lost your fuckin’ mind?” Punch said.
“I’ll be quick,” Hal said and before they knew it, the back door flew open and he was out of the car, sprinting down the lane, hugging to the shadows.
“She’ll put a spell on him,” Bobby said. “That whole family is into black magic and Satanic rituals. It’s common knowledge.”
“Dumb sonofabitch,” Punch said.
But no sooner than he was gone, Hal was back, clutching a stitch in his side, panting heavily.
“Go,” he huffed.
“What happened,” Jack said, looking anxiously at Hal in the rearview mirror as he laid on the accelerator.
“I saw her.”
“The Witch?”
“Yeah, the Witch. She was outside when I rounded the corner of the house. Jesus, I ’bout shit my pants.”
“She see you?” Punch asked.
“I dunno. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?”
“She was preoccupied by the fire.”
Bobby said, “What did she look like?”
“Short. Crazy hair. Had on an old Army jacket.”
“You’re lucky that dog of hers was penned up or it’da ripped you to pieces,” Jack said.
“Fuck,” Hal exhaled, “I’m never doing that again.”
When they reached town, they drove past the firehall. The hall’s big barn doors were open and the stalls where the pumper and water tanker normally were parked sat empty. Lights were on inside and they could see people milling about.
Jack pulled the car over to the curb and Punch called out to two men standing in front of the hall.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Devil’s night,” the first man said. “Someone torched the old Patterson place west of town.”
“Saves them the trouble of knocking it down,” the other man said. “It’s been an eyesore for years. You boys wanna come in? They got hot cider and fry cakes.”
“Thanks just the same,” Punch said, “but it’s late. We got school in the morning.”
Jack drove his friends home, one at a time. When he reached Bobby’s house, he said, “You make it awright on one leg?”
“Yeah, think so. It ain’t broke. Just a bad sprain.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Where’s the gas can?”
“Fuck, the gas can. I dropped it when I fell in the plowed field,” Bobby said.
“Fuck is right,” Jack said and shifted into drive.
#
Jack was reluctant to return to the scene of the crime the next day but Punch insisted. He said they needed to see their handiwork for themselves.
“Besides,” he said, “we got to find that gas can before someone else does.”
The pair drove out after school in Punch’s pickup truck. Hal had a football game later that night and couldn’t make it and Bobby was nursing a swollen ankle.
Firefighters reported the blaze was so intense when they arrived that they were unable to get their equipment close enough to douse the flames and the building burned to the ground.
When Punch and Jack reached the site, a small crew was doing mop up work, hosing down hot spots in the pasture and orchard where cinders had settled. All that remained of the old home was its stone foundation and chimney, both blackened and soot covered.
“Place is off limits,” a Sheriff’s deputy told the boys and a knot of onlookers that had gathered at the bottom of the drive that led to the property. “No one’s allowed near the site until the Fire Marshal conducts an official investigation and that won’t be for a few days. He’s got his hands full. Appears the firebugs were out in full force last night.”
“Any suspects,” an old woman called out.
“None that I know of,” the deputy said, “but the Sheriff will be on point for the criminal inquiry if it’s determined it was arson. I’m just here to secure the premises.”
“Damn right it was arson,” the old lady said. “The explosion nearly knocked me off the pot. Sheriff needs to catch ’em and throw ’em in jail.”
“I’m sure he’ll do his best, ma’am,” the deputy said.
“Let’s go,” Jack said and the boys drifted away from the gathering and got in the pickup. “Drive around the section to where we parked last night. Let’s retrace our steps and look for the gas can why we still got daylight. It shouldn’t be that hard to find.“
They drove in an uneasy silence to the backside of the property, the deputy’s comment about a criminal investigation hanging heavily in the cab between them.
Setting fire to tumbledown barns, houses and outbuildings on Devil’s Night was a rite of passage in some quarters of northern Michigan. Growing up, they heard scores of stories of older boys, including their siblings, who had done the same thing over the years. No one ever got caught, let alone convicted. You kept your mouth shut and head down and eventually the investigations would peter out. Or so they told themselves.
After hunting for twenty minutes, they came across the spot where Bobby fell. They could see the indentation his body made in the plowed field when it hit the ground, but try as they might, they couldn’t find the gas can.
“It’s gotta be here somewhere,” Punch said.
“Maybe he’s mistaken and dropped it back at the house,” Jack said. “It was pretty chaotic.”
“I hope not, for our sake,” Punch said. “Let’s keep looking.”
Darkness fell and they were forced to abandoned the search. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Punch said as they climbed into the truck. “It’s gotta be there.”
When they rounded a bend in the gravel road on the drive home, the Witch’s place came into view. They saw her standing at the end of the lane, her wild hair windblown and in a tangle, a leash in one hand attached to a savage-looking German shepherd and in the other hand, down by her side, the missing gas can.
She watched the truck roll past and smiled grimly.
“Fuck me,” Punch said. “Did you see what she was holding?”
“Yeah, I did,” Jack said and spun around to look at her through the rear window but she was gone.
“What do we do now?”
“We need to get back to town and tell Hal and Bobby,” Jack said. “Beyond that, I ain’t sure.”
That night, while making a tackle on the final play of the football game, Hal shattered his shoulder. Jack, Punch and Bobby were in the stands and saw him get carted off the field.
“I told you the Witch would put a spell on him,” Bobby said. They visited Hal in the hospital the next day and ran into the football coach and Tony Boyle, the team’s captain, leaving Hal’s room.
“He’s awake,” the coach said, “but not making a whole lot of sense. They got him pretty well doped up.”
“Why, what did he say?” Punch asked.
“Gibberish, mostly. Babbling about a witch and a fire.”
The boys looked nervously at each other than toward Tony who shrugged.
“I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it,” he said.
“How’s he otherwise?” Jack asked.
“Unlucky. He’ll need a couple of surgeries to repair that shoulder, but he’s young. Given time, it’ll heal. You boys need to be quick in there and let ’im rest. Let’s go Tony,” the coach said and walked off.
When they were beyond earshot, Punch said, “We can’t leave Hal by himself. One of us needs to stay and make sure he doesn’t blurt out something that lands all of us in hot water.”
They both looked at Bobby.
“Alright, I’ll take the weekend shift,” he said. “It’s not like I’m going.anywhere on one leg.”
Hal was discharged from the hospital Monday morning at 8 a.m. Also that morning, the Fire Marshal’s Office opened its official investigation into the Patterson fire.
#
Jack saw the sweep of headlights on his bedroom wall, heard the crunch of tires on gravel and a car door slamming. He swung his legs over his bed where he was doing schoolwork and got up to see who it was. Just as he reached the window, there was a knock on the front door, voices and then his mother calling out from below. “Jack can you come down here.”
She met him at the bottom of the staircase. “The Sheriff would like to have a word with you,” she said, a strain in her voice and sadness in her eyes.
“The Sheriff?” Jack said and laid a hand on his mother’s arm. Jack was her youngest, and favorite, and as a single parent, she had been through similar experiences with his older brothers. It got so that anytime there was trouble in town, it was routine for the police to question her sons.
The Sheriff was standing in the doorway, his six-foot-four, 220-pound body filling the frame. He was dressed in full uniform, which Jack thought odd since it was long past normal office hours. It likely meant that he had been working late and had not yet been home.
“Sheriff,” Jack said and nodded, stepping around his mother.
“Is there a place we can talk, Jack?” the Sheriff said. “Betty, you’re welcome to join us.”
“I got dishes to do,” she said. “You two can talk in here. I can listen from the kitchen.”
They took seats in the living room – Jack on the couch, the Sheriff in a wingback chair facing Jack. He adjusted his holster so his revolver wasn’t poking him in the ribs. “I’m guessing you know about the fire at the old Patterson homestead?”
“Yeah,” Jack said, “I heard about it.”
“Well, Fire Marshall issued his findings today. It’s definitely arson.”
Jack just nodded.
“You can never be certain of these things until you get the official word. Gasoline was the accelerant, as expected. Now, Jack, the reason I’m bothering you and your mother is because we have a report that a vehicle matching your car’s description was seen in the vicinity around the time of fire. Care to explain that?”
Jack gnawed on his bottom lip for a moment.
“Sheriff, you can drive through the school parking lot any weekday and find three or four other cars that look like mine.”
The Sheriff smiled. “You know, Jack, I did just that, and you’re right. We’ll be following up with those owners, too. So, you weren’t out there then?”
“What night was that again?”
“Halloween eve, Devil’s Night.”
Jack shook his head. “Nope.”
“To be honest with you, Jack” the Sheriff said quietly, and scooted to the edge of the chair to crowd the boy, “I never did care much for that old house. I always hoped it’d get knocked down in a windstorm or struck by lightning.”
“Uh-huh,” Jack said and drew back to distance himself from the encroachment.
“And if I was just investigating a garden variety fire of an abandon structure, Jack, I wouldn’t be calling on you and your mother this time a night.”
“I see. What’s this all about then, Sheriff?”
“A homicide, Jack,” the Sheriff said, and stood, towering over the boy, glaring down at him, a hardness in his voice and anger in his eyes now. “They found a body in the ruins, or what was left of it. They’ve identified the remains through dental records. It’s Pony Malloy. He had been sleeping off a bender and was incinerated, the poor bastard. Pardon my French, Betty, but I’m hungry, tired and mad.”
A loud crash come from the kitchen as an armful of dishes hit the floor.
#
Jack knew Pony Malloy, as did nearly everyone in town. In fact, he and Malloy had worked together as farmhands the prior summer.
Malloy had been a deckmate on a Great Lake’s freighter until he was discharged for lewd behavior. He was more than twice Jack’s age and the pair had little in common but they worked well together – Malloy could repair nearly any piece of broken machinery.
What Jack remembered most about Malloy was that he rolled his own cigarettes, told dirty jokes, bragged insistently about all the women he bedded, or alternatively, launched into unprovoked and vicious tirades against them.
After collecting his wages on Friday afternoons, Malloy would disappear for the weekend and, invariably, show up for work Monday morning hungover, broke and in a foul mood, complaining bitterly about some woman who wronged him. By mid-week, he’d be back to boasting about sex and asking Jack for a loan until payday.
Malloy’s nickname came from the long, skinny ponytail that hung down between his shoulder blades and fell to his waist.
“Not many people in town cared for him and he won’t be mourned,” Hal said, his right shoulder encased in plaster of Paris, his arm in a sling, “but I don’t think that’s going to weigh in our favor if they find out we were the ones who –”
“Guy was a drunk and a pervert,” Bobby cut him off.
“I’m not sure that matters,” Hal said, “He’s dead and we’re to blame.”
“You fellin’ guilty?” Punch pipped up.
“Yeah, a little, who wouldn’t,” Hal said..
They were in Jack’s car and had been riding around for what seemed like hours, drinking beer, stopping occasionally to relieve themselves and dissecting the Sheriff’s interrogation of Jack.
“When he asked about your car, did he say anything about passengers?”
“No.”
“Did he say who reported seeing your car?”
“No.”
“Did he hint at any other witnesses?”
“No.”
“Did he ask if you set the fire?”
“No.”
“Did he ask if you knew who did?”
“Yes. I told him no.”
And on it went.
“They’re fishing,” Punch said finally. “They’ve got nothing.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Hal said. “What do you think, Jack?”
Jack thought for a moment. “I think I need to go see the Witch.”
#
Jack stood on the top step and rapped hesitently on the front door. He heard a dog’s deep growl, a woman’s sharp rebuke – “quiet” – and the click of a lock as the door handle was turned. The door swung open and there stood the Witch, hair askew, in overalls and work boots, holding a broom.
“I’m –”
“I know who you are,” she said, eyeing Jack warily.
Jack was staring at the broom. “And I know what they call me. I don’t fly around on this thing, if that’s what you were wondering. I was sweeping up. I broke a bottle. You might as well come in since you’re here,” she said.
“What about the dog?”
“Roscoe? You don’t need to worry about him. He looks mean. That’s to keep people away but he’s gentle as a puppy. Mind the broken glass,” she said and led him through a hallway and into the kitchen.
“Tea?” she asked.
“No thanks,” Jack said and pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table. Roscoe sauntered over, tail sashaying, and curled up at his feet.
Despite the rundown appearance of the house on the outside, the inside was neat as a barracks. There was a fire in a wood-burning stove and a transistor radio was tuned to a classical music station. The house smelled of cloves and fresh-baked bread. Framed photos of a young woman were displayed everywhere – on tabletops, walls and counters.
“That’s my baby sister, Nell,” she said when she saw Jack studying the photos. “She was born with Down syndrome. She’s institutionalized now down in the city. Poor thing, people around here mistreated her.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said.
“They’re the ones who ought to be sorry. You want to tell me what this is all about?”
“I’ve come to ask a favor of you,” Jack said haltingly.
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“Well, before you do, I’ve got something I’d like to ask you first,” she said.
Jack stared at the woman. “Okay.”
“When did young people go from toilet-papering homes on Devil’s Night to burning them down?”
Jack shook his head. “It was stupid.”
“Oh, yeah, it was that awright.”
“I would never have done it had I known then what I know now.”
“You mean about Pony?”
“Uh-huh.”
“We all do things we regret. Best to own up to it, is my experience.”
“That’s what I intend to do.”
“What about your friends, the ones that were with you that night? You know, I saw the whole thing from my back porch.”
“I want to leave them out of this. It was my idea, not theirs. That’s the favor I’ve come to ask. Could you see your way clear not to mention them to the authorities if it ever comes up?”
“You’ve thought this through, have you?”
“I have,” he said.
She sipped her tea and nodded.
“What do you plan to do with the gas can?” Jack said.
“Think I’ll hold onto it for a while.”
“Figured that,” Jack said, stood and walked toward the front door.
“Marty,” she said.
“What?”
“My name. It’s Marty.”
#
It was an overcast Wednesday afternoon when Jack entered the Sheriff’s Office on Main Street to give his statement to two detectives, a man and a woman. He had been in the interrogation room only a few minutes when he happened to look up and see the Sheriff and Marty walk past the window. She was carrying the gas can.
Jack stopped what he was saying in mid-sentence. Had she come to implicate his friends? Why else would she be there? Had she not given him her word?
He thought back to their conversation. He realized she hadn’t actually promised him anything.
“Jack,” the female detective snapped. “What is it?”
“I just thought of something,” Jack said. “Can we take a short break?”
The man said, “Jack, if it’s all the same to you, we’d like to continue. We just started and we have a lot of ground to cover.”
“I’ve changed my mind. I want a lawyer,” Jack said.
“Jack, do we need to remind you that you voluntarily came in to tell us what happened that night,” the woman said.
Jack didn’t respond.
“Sheriff’s gonna be mighty pissed off to hear that, Jack,” the man said. “He cut you a lot of slack.”
“Here he is now,” Jack said and pointed toward the window where the Sheriff stood. “I’ll tell him.”
The Sheriff tapped on the glass and motioned to the two detectives to join him.
“Has he said anything yet?” the Sheriff asked when the pair stepped out into the hallway and closed the door.
“No, he’s changed his mind. Says he wants a lawyer now,” the woman detective said.
The Sheriff nodded. “You two can go. I’ll take it from here.”
“But –” the detectives said in unison.
“I said you can go.”
The Sheriff entered the room and sat down with a heavy sigh. He folded his hands on the table in front of him and looked over at Jack. He didn’t say anything at first but just sat there quietly. Finally he spoke.
“Pony was already dead,” he said.
“What?”
“Before the fire started.”
“I’m not following you, Sheriff.”
“Marty killed him. She just confessed.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Jack said.
“The way she tells it, it was revenge. She said Pony had sexually abused her little sister Nell when she was just 12 years old. Marty knew Pony went to the Patterson place to sleep off his drunks. She saw him go in, waited and when he was passed out, bound and gagged him and injected him with strychnine, rat poison.”
“And the fire?”
“Claims she set it to cover up the killing. We got the gas can she used.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m not a lawyer, Jack, but my advice the less you say the better.”
“Marty, she say anything else?”
“She did. Said you owed her a favor.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, wants you to look after her dog.”
Mark Pawlosky © 2026