by Douglas Draa
Ray thought it all a bit weird. If tonight was a night when the veil was thin, well, as a scientist he figured he could take reasonable precautions.
He went through the day in a haze. Then it was dinner time. Robbie was beside himself with excitement. He was going to dress up like an astronaut. The sky had turned all ash-gray and orange when Ray looked outside. Ten minutes later and he knew the Pleiades had come up, though with Santa Monica’s light pollution and smog you could not see them yet.
Claudia got Lucas into the bee costume and Robbie dressed in his space suit. Ray grabbed a flashlight. They went to the Ridgeway’s first, where Maryann Ridgeway cooed over Lucas and told Robbie he looked like a real astronaut and gave him a full size Milky Way. Then they went to the Silverman’s. Mrs. Silverman told both boys they were darling and threw a handful of Tootsie Rolls into Robbie’s sack.
“Hey, Ray, look what I got for you.” Art came down the stairs with an old cardboard box. “After our conversation today, I went into my dad’s stuff and found this.”
He handed Ray an old faded photograph. It showed the front of Art’s house before the addition and the rose bushes in front. Standing on the porch was a stern-looking woman in a black dress holding the hand of a young boy. The boy was the same one he had seen twice now. Ray flipped it over. Written on the back in faded ink was “Mother and Wallace, ’38.”
“I guess my father found this after Mrs. Keinstern moved away. This is the boy that died in his sleep. So sad, to lose one at such an age.”
“Thanks, Art. We have to be going.”
Claudia looked at him. “No need to rush, Ray, we don’t have to be rude.”
“No, no, lots of houses to visit tonight. Happy Halloween, Art. Happy Halloween, Irma.”
Ray shuffled his family back to their house.
“Daddy, I want to trick or treat!”
“Not tonight, honey. I heard that trick or treating had been cancelled.”
“No it hasn’t! You’re lying!” Robbie pulled away from him.
Claudia grabbed his arm. “What are you doing, Ray?”
“We’re not going out and we’re not answering the door tonight, OK? We’re going to have family fun!”
“But I want to go trick or treating!” Robbie whined, pulling at his father’s arm away from the house, towards the street.
“Well you’re not! So get used to the idea! Now everyone inside!”
Robbie froze. Ray had never yelled at him like that before. Then he ran through the front door crying all the way to his room.
Claudia carried Lucas in. “I don’t know what has gotten into you but that was uncalled for.”
He grabbed her shoulder and turned her back to face him. “The boy in the photo, the one Art showed me? The one he said had died? That’s the kid I’ve been seeing.”
“Oh, I do not have time for this. I have two screaming children in the house right now, I do not need a third. Come on, Robbie. I’ll take you out. Daddy is just in a bad mood.” She glared at Ray. “I’m putting Daddy on time out and we’ll go get some candy.”
He glared back. Then whispered, “Fine. I will take the boy out. But only to the houses nearby. We will be back in half an hour. I don’t want you opening this door tonight and he is spending the night in our room.”
“Who are you?” she asked. “My husband would never allow himself to get this spooked over something stupid. Think about the example you are setting for your son! Now stop scaring him.”
Ignoring her, he went to Robbie’s room. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, sport. Sometimes Daddy gets a little weirded out. Come on, let’s go trick or treating.”
“Mean it?” Robbie asked through his tears.
“Of course. Now get your helmet and sack and let’s get some candy.”
After half an hour of trick or treating Ray had to admit he had overreacted. The night was a normal Halloween. Kids in costumes were running around having fun. He allowed himself to relax and enjoy Robbie enjoying the holiday. After going through the whole block they headed home.
Robbie was thrilled with all the candy and was not disappointed when Claudia told him he could only eat two pieces before bed. Ray had relaxed, but still insisted that Robbie and Lucas sleep in their room with them. Claudia knew not to fight him on this one. He pulled the crib into their bedroom and placed it between the bed and the bathroom.
They did not speak before bed. Robbie already passed out on the bed between them before they even got in, Lucas sleeping soundly in his crib.
“Thanks for humoring me,” Ray said. “I know this is all silly. But I’m freaking out that this dead boy is talking to our son and wants them to be friends forever. Tomorrow everything will be fine.”
“It better be,” Claudia warned.
He drifted off, feeling somewhat relieved, hearing his son’s measured breathing in the bed next to him. He did not know if a few minutes or a few hours had past when something woke him.
“It’s time,” said a voice.
His blood ran cold. He leapt from the bed and ran to the window. It was closed. He turned back to face the room. The bedroom door was open, but he heard nothing else. On the floor in the doorway sat Lucas’s blanket. The crib was empty.
Claudia’s scream broke through his thoughts. “Where’s the baby, Ray? Where’s Lucas? What have you done?”
Then he heard his older son, now his only son’s sleepy voice from the bed. “Wallace said he tried to warn you, Daddy. Now his mommy has Lucas.”
“What is he talking about, Ray?” Claudia screamed as he stared at his son.
“He says his mommy wanted a new boy to raise. She will be Lucas’s mommy now. Can Wallace come and live with us?”
Ray sank to the floor in horror as his wife clung to the crib and screamed. In the doorway, the Radiant Boy turned away sadly and wept silent tears.
▲
EX ARCA SEPULCRALI, by Wade German
A music comes across the tombs,
A supplication, weird and low;
Above, the blood moon brightly looms,
Casting a hellish, crimson glow
On sepulchres of amethyst
Engulfed by greenish, glowing mist.
Around the ancient monuments,
Unholy song has exorcised
The sleep of those in cerements—
Shadowy apparitions rise
And glide beneath the blood-red moon
To heed a witch’s eerie croon.
THE WHISPERER IN THE WOODS, by Peter Schranz
Emperor Lothair I died in the November of 835 at the age of forty from a knot that had grown in his body. His four sons fitted his bald, gray head with a garland of oak leaves, yielding to that archaic tradition whose meaning they had not been taught. His four daughters were sent to a convent; the emperor’s brothers had removed their noses so that they would not marry.
Ten thousand Franks attended the funeral of the emperor and they circled the catafalque for hours. His four sons divided his things and lands and the principle parts of Italy and the empire fell to Louis his eldest. Lothair II took a new place called after him Lotharingia, Charles took Provence, and Carloman the bastard of his father’s mistress Doda took an oaken case of beads.
Carloman’s brothers began immediately to quarrel with each other and Ermengarde the wife of his father came with ministers and gifts to his mother’s bower.
“My darling and esteemed young lord,” she greeted him hungrily as he paged through a fragile book in his room. He had no throne on which to greet her so he laid down his book and stood. “I did not realize you read, bright Carloman.”
“I am looking at the pictures.”
“Very well.” Ermengarde folded her hands together. “You are not beclouded I trust about your poor brothers’ plight.”
“I have no brothers,” Carlom
an said, leaning at the window recess.
The wavering fires of tallow candles lit Ermengarde’s face as she came nearer to him. She placed her hand on that part of her flaxy dress under which lay her heart. “I have a gift for you, little pea.”
“I don’t need another gift. The beads were quite enough.”
“But that was not a gift,” Ermengarde said. Carloman nearly believed that he had truly confused her, that she was not still weaving an insult. “It was your birthright.
“I have a terribly fine gift for you to have, if only you’ll do a thing for me and for my eldest and dearest son, who wears his spear to the shaft against Lothair and Charles.”
“What thing?”
“Would you first not prefer to know what I want to give you? Such a selfless young lord is this Carloman the Pious, and so fitting a friend to the Holy Roman Emperor.” He waited for her to continue, or to push him out the window. “Consider whether you would like to be the King of Burgundy.”
“I will not consider it. I am not eligible. Do you think bastards are fools like the head-knocked children?”
“But you have not rebelled against the Holy Emperor, who Sergius our Father in Rome himself crowned. You and Louis are the only good sons of your father.” Ermengarde drew closer, drew to the window recess, snaked her hand around Carloman’s waist. “But you must bring something to my son in the north of his country.
“My ministers carry with them a great and saintly treasure from Milan, and if you would carry it the rest of the way, the defeat of Louis by his confused and foolish brothers will be impossible.”
“This treasure will make it this way?”
“Come with me, Carloman the Pious.”
Ermengarde led Carloman to the chambers she had taken where two stout ministers laid across a table a long item concealed in linen. “Remove it,” she said, sitting where a boiled boar’s leg on a silver plate steamed.
Carloman swept aside the folds of linen like curtains from a window. A crosier of oak in the shape of a cross waited under them. “Is this what your son wants?”
“Yes, darling,” said Ermengarde, whose lips glistened. “The staff of Saint Ambrose which brigands took from Milan and Louis’s people found again in the lairs of Lothair. Return it to its city, watch Louis with the good will of the saint rout his poor brothers, and do what you wish with Burgundy.”
“And why won’t you bring it there?”
“Because the woods are not safe for a woman like me.”
Ermengarde had brought with her so many of her ministers that they outnumbered the few left to Carloman and his mother. He did not want to go and leave her alone with Ermengarde but she had not come to ask for but to demand his help, and she did not let him stay. He went to say goodbye to his mother but he was not allowed by Ermengarde’s ministers to see her and so he said goodbye to the cook instead, who had boiled meat for the monks of Turin for so much of his life that he’d learned to read.
Carloman took his beads and he took the crosier and he went south on a hinny. Nobody in the lands of his brothers knew his face and he was once confronted by a cutpurse in the woods, who he scared off with the staff. He thought he heard the staff rattling as he brandished it above the head of the cutpurse, and he thought the same when the hinny bucked over stony paths, but the beads rattled without pause and he did not think terribly hard on the subject.
He stopped at dusk one day at an inn to fodder his hinny. Quiet and darkness had entered the inn before he came, and a smell like that of dead, wet moths drifted from it as he approached. A terrible old man lurched from the entranceway and fell at the hinny’s hooves. Boils encrusted his nape.
* * * *
Carloman hurried from the inn and found nearby in the woods more who died of boils on their necks and mouths and beneath their hilly clothing.
He camped far from the bodies in the woods that night. He had never started a fire and could not do so then. He held the crosier tight to his chest as he wore out the darkness. In the direction of the inn he heard animals grunting and rooting and he heard things very close to him sliding through the underbrush. His hinny panicked and fled and Carloman never saw her again. In the morning he walked south and found another collection of little huts and little people with boils lying on the ground, chewed and bitten by hungry things no longer present.
On his knees, a second and ghastly-faced cutpurse on the road to Milan searched through the pockets and felt the breasts of a dead young woman. Carloman did not spy one boil on her flesh though the cutpurse had loosed much of her clothing, but a great long gash had opened her neck. The woods were lousy with fiends seeking to loot the dead and the alone. The cutpurse rose and flashed a long, used knife at Carloman who he mistook for a pilgrim. Carloman again conscripted the staff of Saint Ambrose this time for the purpose of striking down the ghoulish toad.
Carloman hit him in the head so cruelly that one of the arms of the cross broke off: it did not fall from the shaft altogether, but limped from it, jointed by some soft hinge.
This second cutpurse Carloman killed, his forehead flattened. He fell to his knees and from there to the dirt, unable to bear the many things he suddenly bore.
The strike had loosened not just the arm of the crosier. Two boards of oak had been joined together in the item, and they had become jostled from each other. Carloman took care not to further damage the crosier as he escaped from the dead young woman and her dead murderer.
By a hollow oak deeper in the woods he laid the crosier down and, unable to stop himself, separated the loose long boards as though opening a book. In an empty space in the intersection of the cross lay a curled and leathery hand, brown and sluggish its skin, long and thin its nails. Splayed, the thumb was in the cross’s left arm, the long fingers in the top, and the short fingers in the right. Carloman clapped shut the two halves of the crosier and stuffed them up into the hollow oak.
Though now weaponless Carloman was not waylaid again before he came to Milan. With difficulty he entered the city which Louis had barricaded to prepare for Lothair, who approached from the Alps. Ten bearded sentries stopped Carloman and one of them held him by his hair before he could dangle strings of beads before them. This inspired the sentries to offer him succor, and they led Carloman under the meurtrieres and hoardings and machicolations of the walls.
Louis and the archbishop Angilbert awaited Carloman at the Basilica of Saint Ambrose before the crypt where his bones were laid.
“My city belongs to you, sweet brother,” Louis said. Chain cowls held his and the archbishop’s heads in place and Louis had done without his circlet. He did not see the crosier with Carloman, but curiosity did not yet darken what hope and relief made bright. “You could not have come at a more urgent moment. Lothair approaches and will be here in only days, but you have come, and you have brought the crosier of Saint Ambrose back to him.”
“Emperor,” Carloman said, “Listen to my sorry tale. I was left to defend myself from a vulture-feeder with the treasure that you seek: it cracked open and within I found a withered hand, a devil’s tool.” Louis listened, breathing deeply. “While in your brother’s lands a dreadful demon must have impregnated this staff with the black heart I found inside of it. I hid it in an oak in the woods beyond your city.” Carloman waited to be congratulated, but Louis did not yet speak. “I saved this place from a great evil, brother.”
“Go with the archbishop now,” Louis said, “Go with the ten sentries and retrieve it. If he fails, your Grace, have his throat beaten for lies.”
Chain surrounded the archbishop and the sentries, but not Carloman, who at the point of spears followed him to the oak tree in which he’d hid the crosier.
“Don’t you believe me?” Carloman asked when they discovered that someone had emptied the oak again. “I left it in here—but only because of the witchcraft within.”
“You devil,” said the
archbishop Angilbert, “you left the crosier of Saint Ambrose for the brigands in these woods to take as weapons with which to waylay. Moreover you have separated the benedictory hand of Saint Ambrose forever from all Christendom. It is no surprise, Carloman, that you are a bastard.” The sentries surrounded him and knelt him on the ground. One, with a string of beads entwined in his armor, removed his scabbard from his belt, while the others craned Carloman’s head back by the hair.
The sentry struck him in the throat with his scabbard and Carloman shrieked. He did it again; Carloman’s second cry was weaker. The sentry beat Carloman until he could no longer made noise at all, but writhed on the ground where he could no longer smell the smell of rotten wood and boil skin.
He tried to sob but could not, nor could he speak, but he heard one of the sentries cry out and point at something on the ground.
“It’s the hand,” he said, “the cursed hand!”
“Were you not listening to me?” the archbishop said, “That is the hand of Saint Ambrose that you insult.”
“And here,” another said, squatting by the oak tree, “teeth. Back teeth.”
Carloman pretended to be dead; he could not be sure that they wanted him alive. The sentries found altogether fourteen teeth.
“You didn’t say anything about teeth,” one of the bright sentries said to the archbishop.
“They too were housed in the reliquary that now is lost. They are the molars of Saint Ambrose.”
“How many molars did he have?” the sentry asked. Several others pushed their cheeks back with their fingers to count their own.
“He had fourteen of them, one for each station of the cross. We have found them all, so we will return to the city with them.” The archbishop and the sentries left Carloman in the woods. He lay there on the ground, breathing hastily and trying to swallow. At each attempt his poor broken throat drafted every muscle in his neck to assist in the task, but even then he did not always succeed and his mouth filled with blood and drool that he had to drop through his lips. He feared death in Milan and in the outlying country where everyone had died by boils or murder and so he crept in the empty oak himself and wept silently and waited to die in peace.
